Lots of commentary on the Stephanie Winters debacle in today's Daily Pennsylvanian: Dan Fishback's editorial argues that it's good to have "crazies" like Winters around because they remind us that there are always crazies in our midst. Fishback is also thankful to Winters for outing herself as a "nut," because now it's easier to keep an eye on her. Oliver Benn writes that hate speech is not worthy of First Amendment protection. "Genuine political protest should always be protected as it is the safeguard of this country's freedom," Benn writes. "But racist speech -- advocating a group's subordination or extinction based on race, ethnicity, religion or any other arbitrary determination -- is the expression of only ignorance. It is an ignorance, though, with such horrific potency that it should be proscribed." Jonathan Margulies expresses his disappointment at how many of those who weighed in online--at the DP or on newsgroups--did so without using their real names. There are two letters to the editor. One suggests that for $35,000 a year, Penn students should be guaranteed the right not to have to deal with people like Winters, and urges the University to "exercise its rights and remove her from contact with undergraduate students." The other issues a series of questions to Winters, the Penn administration, the DP editors, the Penn student body, and the Linguistics department. The authors want to know what the administration is going to do to "educate teachers who are in positions of power of their ignorance and the impact of their words," why the DP jumped "to the defense of free speech instead of choosing to defend the community that was attacked," and "what kind of sensitivity training and/or screening [the Linguistics department does] with teaching assistants to insure that each one can teach effectively in a widely diverse community." Brad Olson argues that since free speech does not necessarily extend to the private sector, Penn has a right and responsibility to fire Winters. A number of readers have also written in to respond to these pieces; their posts are below the articles.

These responses are worth reading not only for what they reveal about the general campus feeling regarding Winters' anti-Palestinian rant, but also for what they reveal about the widespread lack of understanding within the Penn community about such essential issues as why free speech matters, what academic freedom is, and how a university differs from a corporation. Some seem to think that it is an easy business to define "hate speech" and then to proscribe it--as if those definitions are not eminently abusable, and as if they were not absolutely subjective and contingent on context (one man's hate speech is another man's truth). Some seem to think they--or their parents--have bought the right not to be offended; that tuition guarantees personal comfort. Some seem not to have heard of academic freedom, or to understand why universities must be bound by it if they are to do the difficult, fractious work of educating.

Many seem to think that branding is a good way to manage people who express unwelcome or distasteful thoughts--they do not quite seem to grasp that calling Winters a nut or a crazy or a bigot or a racist or a terrorist or, as one creative libelist suggested, a transsexual, simply replicates the logic of dismissive, damaging labelling that they dislike about her own expression. They seem to believe that it is okay to think this way as long as one has the moral high ground; they do not seem to realize that the moral high ground shifts over time, that who is on it has everything to do with who is in power and what ideas are popular in a given moment, and that the moral high ground is frequently no more stable than quicksand. They also don't seem to see how profoundly anti-intellectual it is to respond to what we don't like by demanding that it be squashed, silenced, removed from our purview; how deeply narcissistic it is to imagine that the world around us should conform to our own ideas about what is acceptable and possible and appropriate, and that, when it inevitably fails to do so, it should be forced to conform to our own, invariably narrow and self-serving, expectations.

Few see how very, very cynical the calls for punishment and proscription are. The argument that there is no harm and only good in prohibiting and punishing hate speech is one that rests on a number of very diminished and diminishing ideas about what people are, and what they are capable of. The argument assumes people can't decide for themselves what speech is hateful and what is not, that they are too dumb to know bad ideas when they hear them and too gullible to resist outrageous or hateful exhortation to act. It is also an argument that believes people are too weak, fragile, and vulnerable to cope with anything that challenges their worldview; that they are more likely to be destroyed by abhorrent words than to be galvanized by them into social awareness and a sense of their own responsibility as citizens. It is an argument that assumes people cannot think on their own or learn from adversity or develop and maintain their own moral consciences. Arguments attempting to regulate or forbid or punish speech such as Winters' are ultimately arguments that rest on assumptions about human nature that are every bit as hateful as those expressed in her newsgroup post.

Taken as a whole, the responses to the Winters situation show a campus community that does not have the tools to think responsibly or well about what a university is, why a university matters, what the role of dissent and debate are in education, what academic freedom is and why it matters, and how universities can best train their students to meet the challenges, and the day-to-day offenses and slights, of the world beyond it. Instead of demanding that Winters be fired and that Linguistics subject its grad students to sensitivity training, perhaps the Penn community should be humbly asking the administration to help it become knowledgeable about what it means to champion free speech, and what it means to suggest that there are some instances when we can all agree that speech should be punished. Lucky for Penn, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is right here in Philadelphia, and its President and co-founder, Alan Kors, is a Penn professor. FIRE is the national authority, and the national watchdog, for individual rights on campus. I'm sure the people at FIRE would be delighted to come to campus and do a workshop or two if they were asked.

One last point: I think that there is every possibility that Winters was not engaging in hate speech, but in a parody of hate speech. She knows very well what buttons she is pushing, and she has made it clear in her subsequent newsgroup postings and DP responses that she is having a lot of fun pushing those buttons. She has herself said that in real life, she is nice, smart, and very liberal, and that the post that has gotten such a reaction from the Penn community does not embody her so much as her "wacky online personality." Whether Winters believes what she posted or not, my hunch is that her main agenda was not to drum up support for genocide but to see how many knees would jerk in how many ways if she said she thought Palestinians should die. That alone should be enough to make us stop for a moment to examine what we are really doing when we respond as lengthily and seriously to her as we have done. Are we interested in banning parody as a form of hate? And in reacting as we have--whether we are for free speech or for speech codes--are we finally just parodying ourselves? Only Winters knows for sure, and she ain't telling.