As long as we are on the subject of how speech codes create the problems they are ostensibly designed to resolve, don't miss the current issue of the Bucknell Conservatives Club's publication, The Counterweight. On page twelve, you will find a telling little piece on how Bucknell's annual production of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues"--which this year was promoted with vagina-shaped candy and t-shirts that read, "Eat it. Sleep it. Love it. Live it. Bucknell vagina"--amounts to a staged, institutionally endorsed violation of the school's very own speech code. The piece is a fair-minded and effective one; its point is not that Ensler's play, or the in-your-face chocolates and clothing that advertised it, should be banned, but that Bucknell's speech code should be repealed.

The Bucknell Conservatives Club has been campaigning against the school's speech code all year, and has been doing so from a resolutely non-partisan standpoint. Last fall, BCC president Charles Mitchell sent a letter to all incoming Bucknell freshmen advising them of the existence of the code, explaining how that code restricts their free speech rights and chills their educations in advance, and urging all students, of all political persuasions, to take seriously the fact that their school is openly in the business of using censorship to quell debate and to inhibit free inquiry.

I admire the BCC's free speech campaign. And I humbly suggest that their next salvo in defense of free speech on campus include tongue-shaped chocolates and t-shirts that read something like, "Read it. Write it. Say it out loud. Bucknell free speech." You go, you guys.

That's truly clever of the BCC to use the Vagina Monologues as an occasion to promote free speech.

What happened when Mitchell sent the letter to incoming students?

Very interesting piece. I think the article supports my long-held view that the implicit, if not explicit, agenda behind most campus speech codes is not to restrict offensive speech but to restrict offensive speakers. The control over the definition of offensive speaker is held of course by the Self-Appointed Paragons of political purity (hereinafter "SAPS" although Chekist would be just as appropriate) that have a monopoly on determining whose speech (not what speech) is or is not offensive.

Under this construct the langauage used to promote the Vagina Monologues is not offensive by virtue of the fact that the speakers pass the SAPS political/ideological/cultural litmus test. The same language, , "Eat it. Sleep it. Love it. Live it. Bucknell vagina"-- if used on campus flyers to promote a Bucknell frat party [not all that far fetched really] - - - would have caused an uproar because the frat boys wouldn't pass the litmus test.
As a free-speech observing leftist (to the extent the term is not yet an oyxmoron) the tendency of the campus thought police to focus on the speaker and not the speech (and I would argue that even looking at the content alone is suspect) is ill-conceived and anti-democractic.

Erin - nice to have an opportunity to post again after all these months. Question for you - I like Pink Floyd as much as the next guy, and happen to love Another Brick in the Wall - but isn't the line preceding "we don't need no thought control" - "we don't need no education?"
I do like the irony of it.

The Vagina Monologues performed on a campus with male faculty/students/staff arguably constitutes perpetration of hostile environment sexual harassement of males. The Republican org on campus should not be merely protesting--it should be filing a sexual harassment complaint with the university administration, complete with threat to file same complaint with OCR of the DOE, + a complaint of outright sexual discrimination if the administration does not jump through the hoop instantly if not sooner.

This requirement of instant response, BTW, is one of the regs in the OCR's present sexual harassment guidance, put in place (and still in place!) by the Clintons' appointed head of OCR, Norma Cantu, whose tenure--including the language of the Guidance itself--was overtly feminist and anti-male in both word and tone.

However, even Cantu never quite got to the point of denying males equality under the law, although the Guidance in effect demands it. Never mind: make the administrators sweat for offending some males for a change.