Frederick Schauer's talk here on Feb. 24 was a real disappointment.
Dr. Steinberg introduced him as someone who could help the two ``poles'' in this debate find some common ground. But he spent most of his time reviewing the history of First Amendment decisions, the legal definition of ``obscene'', and the origin of the Miller test. This was well-presented and uncontroversial, but not particularly novel or helpful to this audience.
Then he stated that as a practical matter, prosecutions for obscenity have become very rare because the Miller test is so stringent. And the chances of CMU risking an obscenity prosecution over the contents of its bboards were, in his words, ``infinitesimal'', ``minute'', and ``very very very small''.
If he had ended his presentation there, I would have no objection. The bboard committee was charged with investigating the University's legal status regarding carrying these bboards, and Professor Schauer addressed the question. But unfortunately, he had a few more remarks.
He pointed out that as a private institution, CMU was not under the same First Amendment restrictions as a public university, and could censor many kinds of speech if it chose to. His example was a professor calling the president of the university a ``jerk''. This could technically get one fired at Harvard but not at Michigan; at CMU but not at Pitt. So far this was still okay; we knew this already.
But in the last three minutes or so of his talk, he suggested that there might be other reasons to decide not to carry certain bboards. He gave some bogus examples of bboards that didn't allow any posting by blacks, or by women, and asked if CMU would permit such bboards to be operated here. And he raised an example of a professor who covered his office walls with violent sexual images and met with students there. (He even mentioned Dr. Steinberg's very favorite image: ``a woman being raped by a ski pole.'') Then he cited some statistics about how women were so rare on the Internet, and even rarer on the Web -- much rarer than the percentage of female programmers and computer engineers. He suggested that this might be a result of the presence of certain types of materials on the Internet. He was slinking his way toward the old ``hostile environment'' gambit, but rather than trying to make a cogent, explicit argument, he simply raised these ``questions'' and ended his talk, leaving the hostile environment charge unspoken but hovering in the air.
Now if this had been purely an academic exercise, I wouldn't be so angry. But Schauer is quite aware of the controversy on this campus, and the fact that he has been brought in to help advise the bboard committee about a policy recommendation that it is planning to make very soon now. While Schauer shot down Dr. Steinberg's claims of legal liability (and publicly congratulated himself for doing so, and Steinberg for inviting him, knowing that they disagreed on this point), he concluded his talk by handing the Administration another greasy hammer with which to pound down freedom of speech on this campus: the old ``hostile environment'' cliche.
Of course Dr. Steinberg was already a proponent of this line of reasoning. If Schauer had wanted to spend an hour outlining the argument and discussing the pros and cons, that would have been fine. What he's done instead is to lend the idea a modicum of respectability without providing any opportunity for critical examination. Although this was billed as a lecture/discussion session, it was almost all lecture, with very little time for discussion. This examination *might* take place in the bboard committee meetings, but those are still closed to the public.
Here is my view of what our reaction to Schauer should be: the charge of the bboard committee is to make judgements about legal liability. It has no mandate to make decisions about what sorts of censorship are justified by ``hostile environment'' arguments. The Faculty Senate explicitly said that it would not approve of any censorship beyond what is necessary to avoid breaking the law. Schauer has told us that no censorship is legally required; the fact that it is permissible is irrelevant. Unless Dr. Steinberg wants to produce counter-evidence that the university is legally at risk for carrying these bboards, that should end the matter as far as CMU is concerned.
-- Dave Touretzky, Senior Research Scientist, CMU Computer Science Department