Pride and prejudice
Traveler Editorial Board
Issue date: 1/24/07 Section: Opinion
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We'll be the first to confess, we were a bit upset about an article that came out in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette Sunday. According to the article, "Rights Group: UA limits speech," the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit organization out of Philadelphia, gave the UA a "red light" ranking in its survey of 328 schools - public and private - across the nation.
"Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation's Campuses" found that most of the universities surveyed, about 70 percent including the UA, "explicitly prohibit speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." The main beef with the UA was that its policies regarding what qualifies as threatening and sexual harassment were too broad and ambiguous at best.
There were several reasons we were upset, the main one being the Traveler hadn't had the pleasure of breaking the story. We're a terribly proud group, always ready to thrust our flaming pens of truth into the air and cry "injustice!" and this sort of First Amendment story would have been perfect fodder.
What we weren't upset about were the findings. It barely provoked an apathetic shrug from several members of the editorial board. Over the years, the Traveler staff has become inured to the occasional attacks from the administration and student groups, demanding the paper's speech be ... restricted. Indeed, the reaction by the administration to the reporter's questions met our exact expectations of skirting the issue and offering complete fallacies.
William Kincaid, the UA associate general counsel who addressed all questions, was quoted as saying, "The university is strongly committed to freedom of speech for all members of the university community ... Those values are deeply ingrained in higher education in general and in the University of Arkansas in particular."
We had a two-second brainstorming session before recalling that Gary "Moses" Bowman had to go to court in order to speak freely to students at an unlimited and designated public forum (The Union Mall), not to mention the bullying tactics used by the university administration to stop the distribution of T-shirts that parodied football head coach Houston Nutt in October 2006. This quick sample might not be students expressing free speech but you always lead by example.
"Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation's Campuses" found that most of the universities surveyed, about 70 percent including the UA, "explicitly prohibit speech that, outside the borders of campus, is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution." The main beef with the UA was that its policies regarding what qualifies as threatening and sexual harassment were too broad and ambiguous at best.
There were several reasons we were upset, the main one being the Traveler hadn't had the pleasure of breaking the story. We're a terribly proud group, always ready to thrust our flaming pens of truth into the air and cry "injustice!" and this sort of First Amendment story would have been perfect fodder.
What we weren't upset about were the findings. It barely provoked an apathetic shrug from several members of the editorial board. Over the years, the Traveler staff has become inured to the occasional attacks from the administration and student groups, demanding the paper's speech be ... restricted. Indeed, the reaction by the administration to the reporter's questions met our exact expectations of skirting the issue and offering complete fallacies.
William Kincaid, the UA associate general counsel who addressed all questions, was quoted as saying, "The university is strongly committed to freedom of speech for all members of the university community ... Those values are deeply ingrained in higher education in general and in the University of Arkansas in particular."
We had a two-second brainstorming session before recalling that Gary "Moses" Bowman had to go to court in order to speak freely to students at an unlimited and designated public forum (The Union Mall), not to mention the bullying tactics used by the university administration to stop the distribution of T-shirts that parodied football head coach Houston Nutt in October 2006. This quick sample might not be students expressing free speech but you always lead by example.
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