You may find the newest trend in conservative campus activism--anti-affirmative action bake sales--distasteful and ineffectual. You may even believe that campus administrators are right to shut such bake sales down. But regardless of your opinions about race-based affirmative action, conservative student parodies of same, and whether campuses should be bastions of free expression or "safe" spaces where speech codes aim to protect the sensibilities of non-white, non-male, non-straight students and faculty, we should all be able to agree that it is the absolute obligation of college and university administrators to behave decorously and decently when their actions are publicly questioned and criticized. Administrators are, after all, the public face of their institution; their work is never not, on some level, the work of public relations. This is particularly true of college and university presidents. Much of the work they do these days revolves around fund raising, and they command the salaries they do because they work day and night to enhance the reputations and endowments of their schools.

Timothy Sullivan, president of William & Mary, apparently sees things differently. William & Mary administrators shut down an anti-affirmative action bake sale held by a libertarian student organization, Sons of Liberty, last fall. Those same administrators subsequently threatened the organizers of the sale with disciplinary action, stating that the group had violated school policy but refusing, when asked multiple times to clarify their charge, to name the policy the group had violated. "Referring to the Student Handbook at this point in time is counterproductive," the vice president for student affairs wrote to one of the organizers. The situation at William & Mary went public after FIRE became involved; the case there was mentioned in The Washington Times, and on Fox News. FIRE also featured the case on its own web site. Predictably, the public exposure of William & Mary's indefensible actions drew criticism. Less predictably, and quite disturbingly, the college's president has responded to that criticism not with an apology, or a reasoned defense of the school's actions, or even with a polite canned noncommittal response, but with open contempt for his critics.

Sullivan's remarkable display of arrogance is recounted in an open letter written by FIRE to William & Mary's trustees:

This particular case of censorship took a very bizarre twist, however, when W&M's president, Timothy J. Sullivan, personally answered e-mails from people critical of W&M's handling of this case. FIRE has received what we fear are representative examples of his intemperate responses to individuals who wrote to express their displeasure with W&M's censorship. On Saturday, December 13, Curtis Crawford, a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote President Sullivan an e-mail that, while polite, was critical of W&M's actions (you will find this e-mail exchange attached). President Sullivan responded:

Dear Mr. Crawford, Some fool has sent me an e-mail and signed your name to it. You should do what you can to discover the identity of the person. He or she is doing real harm to your reputation. I will help you if I can. Tim Sullivan

According to Mr. Crawford, he wrote back to President Sullivan asking if he stood by this comment, to which Sullivan responded, "You can quote me." Two days later, Sullivan sent a very similar e-mail to another person who had expressed criticism of W&M's handling of the protest; this time he asserted that, "Some damned fool is sending e-mail messages and signing your name. I will try to help you if I can." It is bewildering and deeply disappointing that any college administrator, let alone the president of one of America's oldest and most respected institutions, would be so dismissive of reasoned debate, discussion, and criticism on issues as important as affirmative action and student censorship. Apparently, President Sullivan believes that he may both silence students and show outright contempt for citizens who believe in constitutional rights.

President Sullivan's e-mails, along with those of Mark Constantine and W. Samuel Sadler, fail to provide any logic or reasoning behind W&M's decision to censor the Sons of Liberty's political message. It is telling that, when asked directly about what policy the college could have used to justify its censorship, administrators invariably change the subject rather than simply answer the question. Free communities work when citizens invite and engage in debate and discussion; if President Sullivan sees no point in either debate or discussion, than we can see little reason why he would wish to be involved with the process of education at all.

FIRE will continue to pursue this matter until President Sullivan and the administration of the College of William & Mary decide to address the issue of censorship and to reaffirm constitutional rights on this great public campus. If the college has determined that it will silence certain political views, it should declare this openly and be willing to defend its position in the court of public opinion and, indeed, in the courts of law. We fervently hope that the College of William & Mary will soon determine that to censor the political beliefs of its students flies in the face of both the Bill of Rights and of America's traditional dedication to political libertyóa tradition of which the college has been a proud part since 1693.

UPDATE: A reader who is presently applying for an academic position at William & Mary writes:

Your posting of December 30 is indeed very troubling, not least because one must wonder how the faculty of that august institution must feel about their nominal leader's intemperate words. I have an outstanding application to a job search that their [...] department is running. Reading this post and the FIRE material, I find myself conflicted now. Part of me wants to withdraw with honor from the search if the entire place is like that. Part of me wants to stick it out, for the chance at a good career there, and not embarrass the hiring committee or me if the president's views are not representative of the entire place. Regardless of one's political views, the danger is always this: What if they decide _my_ views are those of "some damn fool"?

I wonder if some of your readers have ever yanked their application for a job after finding out a place was the way W&M seems to be.

UPDATE UPDATE: John Rosenberg has more.