As the Penn community continues to reel over the hostile anti-Palestinian rant posted on a Penn newsgroup last month by Linguistics graduate student Stephanie Winters, some thoughts come to mind. The first is that it's important for anyone who is concerned about either Winters' free speech or the impact of Winters' words on Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim students to go read what she wrote. The DP has been understandably reluctant to reprint Winters' diatribe, choosing instead to give readers a feel for what she wrote by citing some choice inflammatory extracts from the whole. All well and good; papers have to compress when they report. But when the issue is what someone said, and what ought to be done about what someone said, it's not responsible to comment or act unless you are fully informed. Winters made her original post on March 29; you can read it, along with the voluminous response it provoked, on upenn.talk.

The second thought that comes to mind as I watch the folks on upenn.talk and the respondents to the DP article flame one another is that Winters' post may not be the real problem here. As egregious as some of her sentiments may be, the reason they are causing such uproar and confusion is that too many Penn students don't seem to understand either the meaning of free speech or the importance--to personal dignity and to the maintenance of democracy--of countering hateful speech not with censorship or punishment or more hateful speech, but with reasoned, conscientious debate. In the civic vacuum of a campus where students seriously believe that the proper thing to do when they are offended is to run to the administration demanding that the offender be punished, people like Winters ironically have the upper hand. Winters had a fine time baiting the people on upenn.talk yesterday, and has ridden the outrage she has created with something resembling the joyous defiance of a surfer riding a really big wave. She is playing with the paranoia of her colleagues, and they, to their detriment, are letting her.

Judith Rodin isn't about to let Water Buffalo II happen here, and she has responded to student requests to relieve Winters of her TA appointment with a statement that is at once absolutely right and utterly incomprehensible to those who most need to grasp it: "imposing limits on free speech is not an appropriate vehicle to combat racism .... Penn is an inclusive community fiercely committed to free speech and open expression. These principles have been held to encourage open dialogue on very difficult issues. I firmly believe that this remains our best educational response to controversy and conflict." I applaud President Rodin for upholding the principle of open expression at such a tough moment. But I also grieve that student leaders were so unable to hear her. Political science grad student and member of PASS (Penn Arab Student Society) Amel Ahmed responded to Rodin by talking out of both sides of her mouth in the classic manner of the self-righteous censor: "We are not challenging the law," Ahmed said. "We only express our concerns over the presence of a discriminatory, threatening, prejudiced atmosphere." In other words, I don't oppose free speech, but free speech doesn't apply to this situation because I don't want it to. More doublespeak from Ahmed: "We don't want to destroy this person's life, but she does not have the maturity to handle a teaching position at Penn." In other words, I want Stephanie Winters to pay for what she said, but I don't want to look punitive, so I will suggest that she is a danger to undergraduates in the hope that I can get the administration to remove her from the classroom, even though teaching has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand. Really, I am concerned about the safety of others; I am not at all motivated by my desire for revenge.

When PASS met last night to discuss the Winters situation, security personnel stood guard at the door. Earlier, on upenn.talk, Winters had expressed her contempt for the idea of the meeting by posting the following: "How about we have Osama crash an airliner into Houston Hall at 6:30 tonight? sure would take care of a lot of terrorists who will be in attendance." A respondent lost no time in taking the bait: "Wow. That sounds like direct violence to me. That even sounds like you are threatening our right to assemble with violent speech ... hmm." As if Winters had a direct line to bin Laden, and as if there were no difference between obvious hyperbole and serious threat, guards were stationed at the entrance to the PASS meeting, and PASS members read the fact that they had to call twice to get the guards to come as proof of the administration's apathy toward prejudice. Apparently it did not cross their minds that campus security may have more pressing things to do than to protect Houston Hall from a rhetorical hijacked airliner. Nor did it seem to occur to anyone that if a hijacked airliner were aiming to take out the PASS meeting, a couple of campus cops wouldn't be able to stop it.

I point to the absurdity of yesterday's events not to mock the pain of students who are the targets of hate speech nor to make light of events in the Middle East or September 11, but because I want to emphasize that there are crucial differences between words and acts, between hyperbole and threat, and between real political engagement and the punitive paranoia that passes for political engagement all too often on today's campuses. Winters' outrageous post calls for the death of Palestinians as a solution to the ongoing problems in the Middle East. In its crazy extremism, in its overwrought genocidal excess, it reminded me of Jonathan Swift's 1729 essay, "A Modest Proposal", which recommended that the Irish solve their overpopulation problem by eating their children. Winters is no Swift, but she seems to have a similar sense of humor, or at least a similar sense of how outrageous rhetoric may be used to force people to think harder about serious social problems. She is not an artist, nor is she a skilled social critic. But her inflammatory style is nonetheless a potentially useful stimulus -- or it would be if her interlocutors were more interested in debate than in silencing dissent, more interested in resolving conflict than in trying to repress it, less invested in seeing themselves as victims, less interested in equating the hotheaded sputterings of one local crank with widespread campus bigotry. After all, no one has jumped in to second Winters' sentiments. And everyone, even those who defend her right to say hateful things, acknowledges that what she said was indeed hateful.

I re-read Swift's essay this morning trying to imagine what would happen if he were somehow transported in time to a modern campus. I imagined him publishing "A Modest Proposal" in the student paper. And then I imagined the witch hunts that would follow. Women's groups and pro-life groups and pro-choice groups and Catholic groups and anti-Catholic groups and animal rights groups would storm the administration, demanding that Swift be relieved of his job at the paper, demanding that the paper be punished, demanding that Swift be compelled to go through sensitivity training, and bemoaning their pain, their terrible pain, at the wounding words of their local columnist. They would loudly declare how threatened they felt. Pregnant women students and women students with small children would all require armed escorts when on campus--because you never know when someone might try to eat your baby. Good thing Swift wrote in the comparatively enlightened era of the early eighteenth century, when satire was satire and paranoia was not the academic art form it is today. In his excellent novel Straight Man, Richard Russo puts it best: academics, he writes, "indulge paranoid fantasies for the same reason dogs lick their testicles" (204). In other words, because they can.