Anger and outrage at Indiana University business professor Eric Rasmusen is reaching new heights now that his webpage has been restored to its original home on an IU server. Rasmusen's recent posts on how he believes homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children, and are therefore less likely to make responsible teachers, doctors, and elected officials, drew enough complaints from offended faculty and students that the business school dean asked him to take his site down. Rasmusen did so, moving his site to Geocities while university lawyers determined whether his postings fell within the parameters of IU's policy on free and open expression. They determined that the postings did (a good move, considering IU's obligation to uphold the First Amendment), at which point Rasmusen moved his site back onto IU's servers, where it ought to have remained all along.

Rasmusen describes the whole affair as an exercise in free expression whose outcome he knew in advance: "I wanted to give people time to read the policy and understand it," he told the Indiana Daily Student. "I wouldn't really call this a victory, but I'm glad to help stimulate discussion on campus." He also points out how one thing his website did is flush out the censorious mindset of the faculty and students who were offended by what he posted. "Rather than e-mailing me with counterarguments to my position, various people seem to have tried to get IU to shut me down," Rasmusen told the school paper. "The result? My Web log still exists and has over 10 times the number of readers it used to have. The lesson: intimidation can backfire."

Now Rasmusen's would-be censors are coming creepily close to demanding a speech code at their federally funded state school. It's the punitive wish of people whose self-righteousness is such that they can never imagine being on the wrong end of such a code themselves, and thus cannot imagine just how damaging--to the private self and to the public sphere--such attempts to regulate expressions of belief inevitably are.

Here's what one Indiana student has to say about the school's determination that Rasmusen has the right to post his beliefs on his university site:

Senior Jada Barbry said she believes the decision to let the site back on the server is hypocritical to IU's diversity mission, and she plans to take action with others who share her view.

"It's in direct conflict with IU's promise that this is a fair playing ground for everyone," Barbry said. "You can't protect students from harm when you make it OK for a professor to outwardly express his hatred."

Joe Boes, an academic adviser in the business school, disagrees with the University's decision and said he wonders if the outcome would have been the same if the outrage against homosexuality concerned a different group of people.

"This is so unfortunate and it's like someone punches you in the stomach and the wind is knocked out of you," Boes said. "Would this be the same if you replace homosexual with black, Jewish or Hispanic? I don't think the legal council [sic] would still allow this on a public IU server in those cases."

Boes, Barbry, and those who are thinking--or just vaguely longing--along the same lines may find recent events at Shippensburg University instructive. Shippensburg has a policy forbidding racist, sexist, and homophobic speech. And it is getting sued for it. And it is losing. According to the UPI report,

A federal court has ordered the president of a state university not to enforce provisions of what the court termed the school's "speech code" on the grounds that its provisions inhibit free expression in ways that do not withstand First Amendment scrutiny.

On Thursday Judge John E. Jones III, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, enjoined Shippensburg University President Anthony F. Ceddia from enforcing the code's "overbroad" prohibitions against "acts of intolerance," "subordination," speech that "provokes" or "intimidates," and the requirement that everyone on campus must "mirror" the administration's views on "social justice" and "cultural diversity."

Jones let stand two sentences the court found to be "aspirational" rather than operational, and thus not binding on the students. He also denied the university's motion to dismiss the case, allowing it to proceed to trial.