While Aliza Shvarts was dominating shock art news a couple of weeks ago, University of Maine at Farmington art student also made waves when she fulfilled an assignment by placing American flags on the floor of a campus building.

Plenty of people were outraged by the installation--local vets turned up to protest, and the College Republicans even made a YouTube video showing the flags, the protesters, the police, and the administrators standing by to keep the peace and explain that the student had procured all necessary permissions to place the flags in a highly trafficked hallway.

Check out the video above. Most of what you see is students instinctively walking around the flags on their way to and from class--but toward the end, one enterprising individual decides to stand on one of the flags to make a point. In doing so, he seems to have blurred a line that until that point passers by were automatically observing. You begin to see others step on the flag rather than walk around it, cutting mental corners as well as physical ones.

This might strike you as standard campus fare--someone tries to shock and awe everybody by publicly violating deep-seated norms of propriety. It may strike you as the unpatriotic analogue of Shvarts' inhumane handling of her body and the embryos it may or may not have held within it. But consider this: the student artist was forty-year-old education major Susan Crane, daughter of a twenty-five year military veteran, and a self-proclaimed conservative.

"I really had a hard time putting the flags on the floor. I'm a conservative Republican, and I come from a military family," she said. "I do believe in the flag as a symbol of freedom and what our country stands for. I first thought I could put paper under the flags but it was a safety hazard. I still really have not come to terms that the flags are on the floor. So that bothered me. I understand veterans fought in the war, and they died for our freedom. Other people have the choice to feel how they would interpret it."

And choose they did. Some called for censorship because the display offended them. But it sounds like more people thought better of that line of argument:

For the third day in a row, a student art project centered around the American flag sparked emotions in this college community, drawing town and university residents into another day of peaceful but intense contention.

About 100 people attended a rally called by Vietnam veteran Charles Bennett of Farmington, an American Legion commander. On Tuesday, he had challenged the University of Maine at Farmington administration's decision to allow an art project that used flags made of duct tape and plastic to be placed on the corridor of the student center.

Ultimately, the project generated debate about the flag and what it means.

"I think there is a renewed sense of patriotism on campus and appreciation of the flag," said student Austin Cookson, 20, of Kittery, who was holding up a large American flag with two friends.

"We're not saying the administration is un-American, but they are saying it is just a piece of cloth. It is a lot more than that. It represents freedom," he said.

A professor at Farmington writes to tell me that "The CRs and a few faculty members (from outside arts and humanities) now charge that the students' forced participation in the project, by having to make the choice to step on the flags or walk around, makes them human subjects. This group is arguing that in future all public art projects with the potential to offend to be submitted to the Human Subjects Research Board for review."

I argued that Shvarts should have had to go through Yale's IRB because she was undertaking a project that involved putting herself at risk. But to suggest that Crane's flag installation ought to have been reviewed--and implicitly nixed--by the IRB sounds like an absurd stretch, one that quite transparently seeks to hijack such review boards in the service of suppressing offensive views.

The College Republicans and the faculty backing them ought to know better--and they ought to be able to recognize when they are regurgitating in the most uncritical manner the nasty and unconstitutional logic that creates campus speech codes. If you want free speech for yourself, you have to defend it for others--especially when their expression shocks, appalls, or offends.