VIO | Blog Row

I must first begin by saying this post breaks a three-month silence from blogging, an activity which I thoroughly enjoy. Now that the academic year has once again started — and not uneventfully, either — it is time to begin anew this activity I have missed for so long.

So, first of all — former Student Assembly Vice President Zach Pilchen (’09). The details of his recent resignation can be read here on The Virginia Informer Online. As far as I’m concerned, I think I might have preferred a long, dramatic Senate impeachment process rather than the quick — and for him, seemingly painless — pseudo-sincere apology speech and resignaton. The only downside of going the Senate route, of course, is that Mr. Pilchen — like Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton before him — might have been able to convince enough SA senators to let him keep his job. Why he thought that his continued theft was acceptable is beyond me. A few of The Informer’s top editors composed this piece on Tuesday, the day the information was revealed, and had this to say:

The actions of former SA President and current Vice President Zachary Pilchen (’09) revealed today amount to little more than petty theft. The revelation that Mr. Pilchen misappropriated SA funds for the purchase of frivolous luxury items such as movie tickets, cigarettes and sandwiches evidence a complete lack of respect for his office and the responsibilities thereto.

Moreover, Mr. Pilchen’s vacuous demeanor and cavalier attitude in response to the recent disclosure of his actions reflects an individual who is neither contrite nor appropriately apologetic. His actions are, simply put, juvenile, and to excuse them by simply saying “I was running low on money” is both astounding and appalling.

It is believable — and even excusable — that Mr. Pilchen used the SA debit card in place of his own, once. But the repeated pattern of more than a dozen other illegitimate uses of the card — coupled with Mr. Pilchen’s inane excuse that he would simply “loan [him]self some money for these sandwiches” — is wholly indefensible.

It is quite possible that the Honor Council will choose to intervene in this matter as well. This is an extremely serious issue that has cost the Student Assembly whatever credibility it once had with the student body. If comments on The Flat Hat’s Web site are any indication, many students seem to think that Mr. Pilchen should get the axe for his actions. Expulsion is a serious consequence for lying, cheating and stealing — the three overarching actions against which the Honor Code protects — but we at William and Mary, in our community of trust, should understand and respect this reality.

Credit must be given to The Flat Hat’s editorial board, the members of which composed a brilliant piece in response to Mr. Pilchen’s actions:

Pilchen’s actions cast doubt not just upon himself, but the entire SA. Why, for instance, was he allowed to retain a debit card tied to an account holding in excess of $23,000 even after his term had ended? Where was the oversight as his spending spree continued into May? Even as the improper custodian of the account, Pilchen should have realized that personal purchases — if not explicitly forbidden by SA law — were ethically out of bounds. That he failed to notify anyone of the mounting expenditures calls into question the innocence of his intentions. The affair displays a sheer disregard for the standards of ethical conduct and raises serious concerns about his integrity. …

Moreover, Pilchen’s position in the SA necessitates interaction with officials both at the College and in the community. If those officials find any reason to distrust him, it would destroy his ability to act as a student ambassador and would effectively render him useless in that capacity. This misdeed could give them just such a reason.

In using SA funds to buy personal items, Zach Pilchen abused his power. In our view, he has compromised his credibility and integrity as a campus leader. At a minimum, that requires an apology. At most, it requires sincere reflection on the value of his continued service to our school.

It appears our editorial boards came to very similar conclusions, which speaks to the seriousness of the matter at hand. This is not a matter of being pro- or anti-SA — or even pro- or anti-Pilchen, for whom, by the way, I voted twice. It is simply a matter of common sense.

The impending investigation into the finances of the Student Assembly — a desperately needed cleaning of house for which the only impetus was an embezzlement scandal — could unfortunately result in the revelation of even more misappropriation and malfeasance. I sincerely hope this is not the case.

[NCF]

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.

This past Thursday, my sister graduated from high school. It was certainly a momentous occasion. Those 487 graduating senior — dressed in their caps and gowns, lined up rank and file in the gymnasium to receive their diplomas — reminded me, not so subtly, of my own departure some three years ago.

The graduation speaker, whose daughter happened to be in my sister’s graduating class, was a United States ambassador appointed by President Bush. I didn’t agree with everything he had to say in his speech — the “indisputable” crisis of global climate change and Senator Barack Obama’s apparently Messianic statesmanship were two in particular — but at the core of his words were something that I think all Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, could rally behind.

He spoke passionately about the importance of appreciating America for what it was — appreciating what we, as Americans, have. Our system of government. Our rights. Our greatness. The onus of responsibility we carry as a result of that greatness. Our obligation to our country and our community, and especially to those least among us. The fact that a black man and a woman can run successful and serious bids for president of the United States. That we live in a country whose founding principle is that Nature’s God has created all men and women equally. Finally, he acknowledged and embraced the fact that all of the graduates — with their differing backgrounds, identities, personalities and character traits, of all of which they could be proud — would go on to accomplish different things in different ways.

By all accounts, a fine graduation speech. Surprisingly liberal overtones for a Bush appointee, but I wasn’t complaining. I was there for my sister, not for the speech, anyway.

It is not the ambassador’s words, though, that are the focus of this post — rather, the ironic juxtaposition of what came before and after them.

Directly prior to the speech, the James Madison Madrigals sang the National Anthem. Then the student body president asked everyone in the gymnasium to rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance — “one Nation, under God.” The James Madison band played “America the Beautiful” as an interlude between parts of the graduation ceremony.

Then the speech.

And then, the Madrigals performed one more musical piece for the evening — John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Lyrics follow below:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace [...]

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

Graduates of the World, Unite!

In all seriousness, I can think of few poorer song selections for a graduation ceremony — atheistic, socialist bilge isn’t what one normally expects at these programs. And ironically, the song came on the heels of words and music whose main focus is in direct opposition to the very views Mr. Lennon was trying to espouse and engender. It seems to me that, after the Pledge, the National Anthem, etc., we then are encouraging our new young adults to laud, with thoughtful, self-righteous conviction, the glories of a Godless, communistic existence. All predicated, of course, on the fallacy that religion, a hard-working, capitalistic society and a cause worth fighting and dying for — eg, America, democracy, religious freedom, equality — are clearly the reason for all the world’s problems. Oh, and I’m sure they caused global warming, too.

Mr. Lennon’s admittedly melodic utterances calls for an existence impossible to actually achieve. And I am left wondering — no, imagining — why my sister and her 486 peers were given a horrifically depressing, but, thankfully, erroneous outlook on life at their ceremony. I find it hard to believe that, given the Beatles’ and Mr. Lennon’s otherwise first-rate musical output, no better song — or at least one less politically charged — could be chosen.

So, then, why was “Imagine” chosen? Whatever the reason, I hope that the graduates walked off the stage with their diploma and into the beginnings of the real world more focused on the hopeful, positive message of the ambassador than on the positively frightening prospect of the world Mr. Lennon Imagined.

[NCF]

Welcome to blog row on The Virginia Informer Online.

Currently we have three blogs lined up: The Burg Also Rises (TBAR), Make No Law (MNL, authored by Braum Katz (’10)), and Political Aurora (PA, authored by Informer Executive Editor Alex Mayer (’09)). We hope to be adding an SA blog — to rival, of course, Not David Husband — as well as a law school blog in the near future.

For those of you who were familiar, TBAR was my personal blog that I started, incidentally, just before the Nichol controversy last semester. As a result, I spent an unexpectedly large amount of time typing away — when the controversy died down, things started getting quiet again on campus and, of course, when finals kicked in, my blogging eventually petered out completely. Here, though, it will be reincarnated into an at-least weekly column that I will eventually pass on to VIO’s next editor in chief after I graduate next spring.

MNL is going to be The Informer’s student rights blog, written by Braum Katz. Mr. Katz was just named the College’s secretary of student rights, and has also done a tremendous amount of work with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). The Informer also ran a front-page story on Mr. Katz for our last issue of the 2007-2008 academic year.

Mr. Mayer’s blog, Political Aurora, touches on subjects that are typically beyond The Informer’s realm in our print edition. It has more to do with national politics and goings-on, including foreign affairs, the presidential election and other larger, national issues that The Informer does not cover. By bringing PA onto VIO, I hope to broaden our opinion pages and perhaps even elevate the discussion of topics not generally covered by regular campus media — we shall see if this actually comes to fruition over the next few months, particularly with the election closing in.

Remember to check VIO often to get the latest in common sense opinion at the College of William and Mary.

[NCF]

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.

Today’s Flat Hat staff editorial is an excellent example of how, it would appear, the student body is now dealing with an editorial board much more reasonable than those in years past. “Nichol snubs students” accurately reflects the nature of former William & Mary President Gene Nichol’s interview with Williamsburg’’s local PBS station a few days ago. The entirety of the editorial is as follows:

Former College President Gene Nichol ended his near month and a half of silence Friday to talk to the press. But he wasn’t talking to reporters or answering the questions you might expect. Instead of granting repeated interview requests from the student media, Nichol appeared on PBS, talking cozily with WHRO host Cathy Lewis about issues ranging from the strain on his family to the intellectual rigor of students at the College.

While Nichol has a right to privacy, his resignation e-mail raised more questions than it answered. He has yet to justify his accusations against the College’s governing body — accusations that put Board of Visitors members in the awkward position of having to defend their decision while avoiding further damage to the reputation of Nichol and the College. The BOV faced an interrogation from students, faculty and staff while Nichol shied away from further discussion of his unsubstantiated allegations.

Nichol has snubbed the very students he claims to have championed. It is time for him to answer for his actions in an open, honest dialogue — the way BOV members answered for theirs.

There isn’t much more to say about it than that. Honestly, though, I’m shocked I’m reading this in The Flat Hat. A year ago, an editorial like this would never have been a reality. Cheers.

[NCF]