VIO | Blog Row

An Italian comedienne faces prosecution for insulting the Pope, an offence that carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

Sabina Guzzanti, noted for her sharp satirical wit and lampoons of the powerful, is accused of “offending the honour of the sacred and inviolable person” of Pope Benedict XVI at a rally in Rome in July at which opposition leaders accused Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister and media tycoon, of passing ad personam laws to protect his own interests and avoid prosecution for alleged corruption.

This comes not from a reading in a history book on medieval or Facist Italy, nor an article in today’s Onion, but an article from The Times Online, a respected British online newspaper. Just goes to show how even in countries as developed as Italy, fundamental rights are a joke. Tellingly, the law that Guzzanti is accused of violating was first implemented during the reign of none other than Mr. Benito Mussolini.

On occasion, I have to give credit where credit is due — even to administrators! If you read Valerie Hopkins’ (’09) latest e-mail to the student body, it contained as an attachment a information packet that will be going to any student facing an Honor Council or Judicial Council proceeding. Within this packet is a section on relevant student rights information that I and the SA’s policy department crafted. Some of this information is very, very important. For example, any testimony that a student gives in a college disciplinary hearing can be used against them in a criminal case. Pretty heavy stuff. I have to commend Dean Gilbert for working with the department in ensuring that the information become readily available to any student facing possible sanctions. Dean Gilbert certainly did not have to include the student rights information, and I applaud him on his decision to do so willingly. This packet should be up on the web in the very near future, and I’ll be sure to link to it when it gets up.

Yesterday, I had my big meeting with Vice President for Student Affairs Ginger Ambler on the state of current proposed revisions to the Student Handbook. It was a very productive meeting, and worthy of a better synopsis than I can give at 3:00 am after having reading boatloads of Renaissance-era court documents. Good stuff, truly.

Also, most exciting news of the day: I finally got my hands on the bylaws of the Publications Council (albeit, un-updated since the mid 90s, during the Sullivan presidency), compliments of Mark Constantine. It seems like no one in SA was able get ahold of them, but I have them now! Very exciting. We should have some fun with this.

When you pay your tuition, a certain portion of your money goes to mandatory student fees. The purpose of this money is to provide the student body with a resource to fund projects that will encourage cultural and intellectual enrichment. I am personally an avid fan of mandatory student fees, as it adds tremendously to the intellectual culture of the university. Without student fees, it is unlikely that student groups could ever muster the funds necessary to bring outside speakers to campus. Whether or not having mandatory student fees is good college policy is a debate in itself, but suffice it to say that as long as the College collects student fees, this money is the sole possession of the students. When the administration collects money for student activities, they are acting as something of a checking account. The administration holds on to the money, but it is the students who are solely entitled to the cash.

Mandatory student fees present something of a problem in a public university. As a public institute, our College cannot legally give preference to one viewpoint over another. What I mean by this is that the administration cannot refuse funding to a group simply because they disagree with the views of that organization. For example, as much as the Office of Student Affairs may love red meat and hate vegetables, they could not refuse funding a campus PETA chapter on the basis of PETA’s vegetarian agenda. Since students are required to pay the fees, and since these fees belong to the entire student body, the College cannot deny a group funding on the basis of their beliefs. Whether you agree with this or not, this is how the Supreme Court has interpreted the first amendment in cases such as Rosenberger v. University of Virginia and Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin v. Southworth.

To quote briefly from Southworth:

The First Amendment permits a public university to charge its students an activity fee used to fund a program to facilitate extracurricular student speech, provided that the program is viewpoint neutral. [Emphasis added.]

Simply put, neither administrators nor student governing bodies themselves are legally permitted to deny an organization funding due to disagreements about the mission or ideology of that group. This is the bargain we make when we mandate student activities fee.

Several years ago, our Student Assembly had the foresight to create a student council to ensure that the funding of publications, an extremely important medium of student discourse, was done in a viewpoint neutral manner and away from the politics of student government and administrative meddling. As The Virginia Informer has recently reported, the council created for this purpose, the Publication Council, has utterly failed in making funding decisions in a non-political and non-viewpoint discriminatory manner. Most alarmingly, the Publication Council seems to still be under the de facto control of university officials. Just this past spring, the Publications Council denied group of students funding to start a feminist magazine. In what appears to be a mix of rent-seeking behavior on the part of some current student publications and administration meddling, Lips was told they would receive no funding. As The Informer reports, some from within the Publications Council have claimed that this may have had something to do with the controversial content of Lips. If not for the last minute intervention of the SA Senate, Lips would never have been printed, and the student body would have been deprived of an important contribution to campus discourse on gender and sexuality. Although I cannot pass judgment on this quiet yet, this entire incident stinks of viewpoint discrimination to me. Of course, I could be completely wrong; in fact, I would be delighted if I were.

In the next couple of weeks, I will be undertaking an investigation as to what exactly happened in the fall, and will be making attempts to remedy the situation. If anything develops, I assure you that you will be the first to know.

PS — For a great summary of the history of mandatory student fees, I recommend, as per usual, FIRE’s fantastic overview of the topic.

For anyone concerned with human rights and civil liberties, the developments in Georgia are extremely disconcerting. I find myself personally puzzled by the silence of many on this egregious demonstration of Russian strong-armed aggression. Although Georgia is certainly not without political skeletons, especially with regards to freedom of press — although I may add that Georgia has made some tremendous strides for a former Eastern Bloc country — the actions of Russia should horrify anyone who values liberty and popular democracy. It would be disingenuous to claim that Georgia has not made some grave miscalculations in their attempts to reincorporate South Ossetia, but this is almost besides the point. The invasion of a sovereign and democratic nation is a throw back to the days of authoritarianism. The West’s attempts to stand up for a fledging Eastern European nation have been feeble at best. John Bolton — not my favorite by any means, I may add — may have taken a bit of poetic license when he asserted that “the United States fiddled while Georgia burned,” but he was certainly on to something.

I highly recommend this article by Canadian columnist Andrew Coyne — one of the best commentators in Canada, according to my trusty Canadian matey Dan K. The column is a very effective rebuttal of the popular claim that the United States has no moral upper hand in this diplomatic crisis, having just invaded Iraq.

For anyone with an interest in constitutional case law or student rights issues, I highly recommend the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Guide’s on student rights. There are five titles in all: Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus; Guide to Student Fees, Funding, and Legal Equality on Campus; Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus; Guide to Free Speech on Campus; and Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus. Each one of these are well worth reading. The books are small, concise, entertaining, and extremely informative. Nothing empowers students more than a legal understanding of their rights as Americans.

The guides are free. All you need to do is fill out the form here.

I’m in transit all day tomorrow, but I hope to get up some good content sometime this weekend. There have been some really exciting student rights updates in the news recently, and they deserve full commentary. In the meantime, I direct you to this fantastic staff editorial in the Washington Times (not typically my favorite paper). Should quench your thirst for student rights commentary for a day or two.

After months of silence, I now break my extended pause from blogging. This week marks the end of my summer commitments, and now I can more thoughtfully turn my attention issues of student rights and the law. My post for today may veer outside my normal discourse on student rights issues, but it does relate to legal philosophy, a topic I hope to address frequently on this blog.

Yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association, Attorney General Michael Mukasey articulated his judicial philosophy justifying his recent decision not to persecute the two lawyers involved in the nasty Department of Justice firing scandal. Without getting into the politics of this highly charged topic, I’d like to take a moment to examine Mukasey’s comment and try to tease from it some sort of meaning:

“Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

To the extent any person can, I typically make a real effort evaluate arguments as intellectually sympathetic as possible. In the instance of Mukasey’s comments at ABA’s annual meeting, I am having a hard time discerning any sort of coherent philosophical justification of these comments and now believe that Mukasey merely misspoke. Granted, you’d be hard pressed to find someone more sympathetic to the charge that not every wrong is or even ought to be a crime than yours truly. However despite my best efforts, I can think of no grounds for the idea that not every violation of the law is a crime. One would think that a violation of the law is a crime, prima facie. Is this some sort of etymological gaffe, or nuanced judicial philosophy? If anyone can give me a sympathetic explanation of this quote, I am genuinely interested in hearing your interpretation.

With the UC now renamed the Sadler Center, one wonders whether or not, in due time, the UC Terrace will become known as the Sadler Terrace. I would certainly hope that it does. I respect and admire Mr. Sadler, and believe him to be a true friend of student liberty. Just as the terrace is the central hub of campus, Sam Sadler has acted as the administrative heart that has kept campus running smoothly for years. What a dishonor to Mr. Sadler’s long and admirable legacy of defending and promoting campus free speech it would be if the administration maintained the current College policy of disallowing students to distribute literature on the terrace.

As readers of The Informer may already know, the College administration prohibits the distribution of any literature, political or otherwise, on the UC Terrace. In no way is a blanket prohibition of distribution a reasonable time, place, or manner restriction. I am aghast at the thought of a place named after such an ardent defender of student rights being subjected to excessive rules that stifle student speech. The Sadler Terrace a place of censorship? Unthinkable.

I implore the administration to pay homage to Mr. Sadler’s legacy and revise the rules accordingly.

Sometime in March of this past year, after the Board of Visitors had braved a hostile student body and an utterly vitriolic faculty, after TribeUnited and Wrengateblog ceased to be, and William and Mary took a long overdue siesta — spring break had come and gone, and somewhere on the beaches of Cancun or the restful hammocks of Northern Virginia, students departed with the woes of the Nichol resignation, the Wren Cross and the sex workers. Our ancient and pristine university had been thrown into the midst a raging culture war, but the battle appeared to be winding down. Although the scars of this particular episode in our College’s history are certainly real and raw, they have already begun to heal, and to heal quickly. The lasting legacy of Nicholgate, I believe, will not bring about division, but consensus. For a fleeting moment in January, students from all ends of the political spectrum became aware of the staggering implications of the first amendment. The concept of “student rights” ceased to be a simple abstraction and took on a tangible and highly visible form. In a moment of profound consensus during a time of marked division, the student body seemingly agreed collectively that unrestricted free speech ought to be foundational at the College of William and Mary.

Make No Law (MNL) is devoted to continuing the conversation on the status and future of student rights at the College. My writings are all based on the assumption that the College and student body is truly healthiest when permitted to engage in a free and open debate of ideas. No greater authority than the Supreme Court of the United States has recognized the role of universities as the intellectual nexus of our society when they affirmed that “given the important purpose of public education and the expansive freedoms of speech and thought associated with the university environment, universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition.”

As deeply rooted as our university is in the American republican tradition, we have a significant amount of work to do to ensure that we live up to the ideals of the Constitution. We currently have provisions in our student code of conduct that are so repressive to student speech that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has rated our school a “red light school,” the lowest of all ratings, in regards to our free speech policy. In the coming months, I will blogging about the most egregious College policies regarding student speech, concealed carry on campus, religious freedom, freedom of press, due process, and any other student rights issues under the sun.

My hope for this blog is that it will engage you not only in a discussion on the legal implications of student rights, but also the moral imperatives that such freedom and liberty entails. In this day and age, “freedom” and “liberty” are perhaps the most tortured buzzword in the English language. Let’s see if in the next couple of months you and I, through discussion and debate, can get a better grip of what exactly these concepts entail, and the ways we can ensure that they thrive at the alma mater of Jefferson and Marshall.