Letters to the Editor | Faculty errs on The Imperialist

Sometime during the teacup-sized campus storm leading up to the Moderate, Independent and Conservative Alliance’s (MICA) de-authorization, Dean of Faculty Ronald Sharp noted that although The Imperialist might “find shelter from formal punishment under the tent of free speech”—guess again, Mr. Sharp—“[nevertheless] that scarcely protects it from critical scrutiny or from condemnation for being hurtful to many readers.” Very true.

I can’t help but wonder, however, if some of the “critical scrutiny” may not have been a little myopic, and the “condemnation” correspondingly severe. In a letter printed in the 10.28.05 edition of The Miscellany News, 51 faculty members accuse students involved with the offending publication of harassment, intimidation and misogyny. They hold The Imperialist staff responsible for depriving all students and faculty of a learning and working environment free of hostility, for violating the rights of “those among us who have been injured and/or threatened by this disturbance” and for compromising the safety of two Vassar students whose names have appeared on a neo-Nazi website. The outrage crescendos with a flourish bordering on the operatic: “This is an attack,” they write, “on ALL women who dare to speak out.”

The letter ends with a call for a return to “the values of respect, equality, goodwill and purposeful dialogue.” I’d like to second that motion, and add this appeal to the letter’s 51 signatories: you first, professors.

It’s hard to conduct a “purposeful dialogue” with someone who’s thundering accusations of hate from every available rooftop (or editorial page). In the e-mail I quoted above, Mr. Sharp writes that we must “distinguish argumentation from name-calling.” He refers, of course, to The Imperialist’s use of inflammatory language, but in the past weeks, words like “racist,” “fascist” and “Nazi”—some of which, I hope you’ll agree, are nearly as hurtful as “ghetto” and “zoological”—have been bandied about in connection with MICA. I’ll avoid using the h-word here because it’s not very nice (also, I’m not sure I can spell it), but surely The Imperialist’s critics should hold themselves to the same standard of civility to which they would like to hold The Imperialist.

In a campus-wide e-mail, Dean of the College Judy Jackson wrote that the words of the magazine at issue “reverberate beyond the local, campus audience for whom they may have been intended.” But those reverberations were born not from the ideas expressed therein, but from well-meaning efforts to silence those ideas—ideas which President Fergusson named “hateful speech,” and which Dean Jackson said have “offended and injured” many in the Vassar community.

She should have stopped at “offended.” Hate speech by definition injures; it is speech to incite injurious action. But no matter how crudely it was expressed, and whether or not one agrees (I don’t), the idea behind “Race and Freedom”—that the diversity respected at Vassar is only skin-deep—is not hate speech. Neither are the prejudiced images and rhetoric of its expression. If they were, what word would be left for objective hate speech—for intimidation, for threats, for exhortations to violence? Perhaps both sides of the MICA debate could temper their language.
—Chris Adams ’07