Censorship is bad. I don’t think that anyone will disagree. When your ideas and words are asphyxiated by the powers-that-be, you have to fight back. That’s what we saw this summer. We’re winning. The National Coalition Against Censorship issued a report entitled “While You Were Out: Censorship Over Summer Vacation,” outlining eight cases which took place this summer, and surprisingly enough, free speech held its ground for once.
June 17th : Student Kelly Winn wrote an article about abstinence-only education for the Denver Post, claiming that those practices censored the scientific studies on the topic.
*Yay! Someone standing up for safe-sex education! This is nothing new.
Score: Tie
June 19th: The University of Virginia and Virginia Tech’s student newspapers won a case which ruled that alcoholic beverage advertisements can’t be banned from university student newspapers.
*Alcoholic beverage advertisements? Yes, this is technically a win, but it seems pretty silly. Most of us still can’t drink it legally.
Score: Win
June 25th: Professor Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg was denied a visa. Professor Habib had been detained and deported in 2006 while scheduled to do several speeches. *It’s unfortunate that Professor Habib was detained, but the report gives us no information as to why. As sophomore Lee Cornett said “I feel like there’s not enough information.”
Score: Loss
August 4th: The speech code at Temple University was declared unconstitutional because it violated the free speech rights of all students. *This is a huge step; it establishes a precedent for speech code cases we might see in the future. Personally, I’m stoked.
Score: Win
August 7th: Three ex-Texas Southern University students won a case against college president Priscilla Slade after she expelled them for reporting her misappropriation of funds.
*The students won out in a frightening situation. Hopefully President Slade will get to feel the cruel edge of authority for her misdeeds now.
Score: Win
August 18th: Florida Gulf Coast University instituted a system to monitor the Facebook and Myspace profiles of athletes. Similar changes were introduced at seven other colleges.
*It seems like the athletes are pretty consistently playing the role of “canary in a coal mine” these days. If it’s being done to the athletes now, watch out for more of the same.
Score: Loss
August 19th: Three MIT students got a gag order lifted that prevented them from presenting a paper about problems with the Boston transit payment system at the Defcon security conference.
*Unfortunately, the gag order was lifted nine days after the convention ended, but it was lifted. It’s kind of a hollow victory, like a bully getting a time out after he broke your toy. The toy’s still broken.
Score: Tie
August 26th: An advertisement for artwork by a graduate student at Southern Illinois University was taken down and put back up with one modification: a woman depicted in one of the shown paintings had her buttocks covered. The student took it down and modified it herself after seeing this because she still wanted her art displayed.
*I’ve heard a couple people say that this one isn’t a case of serious censorship, but I have to disagree on that point. “What? But the student did it voluntarily,” you say. Yes, but that’s like saying “You chose not to kick that big bully in the shins voluntarily.” There wasn’t much of a choice there in the first place. Score: Loss Overall Score: Win: 3 Tie: 2 Loss: 3 Overall: Win Free speech may not technically have “won” the summer, but it held its own, which I’ll take any day.
This summer we actually won as many as we lost, which means that we’re not sliding backwards.
Usually when we hear about this kind of thing people protest, they yell, they take up a spot somewhere in the vast chimera of the media for a day and then everyone forgets and nothing changes. With Defcon, with alcohol, and especially with TSU we saw precedents set that have a lot of potential to make good things happen.