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Northern Kentucky in tight spot

Last week, Northern Kentucky University English professor Sally Jacobsen revealed her absolute ignorance of the First Amendment when she "invited" a group of graduate students to join her in tearing down an anti-abortion display of crosses on a campus lawn. Jacobsen, whose eager participation in the destruction of the cross display is pictured in this slideshow, has shown herself to be utterly befuddled by the difference between free expression and censorship, not to mention by the difference between being offended and being assaulted. "I did, outside of class during the break, invite students to express their freedom-of-speech rights to destroy the display if they wished to," Jacobsen told reporters, adding that "Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it. Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged."

NKU has done the right thing, insofar as it's possible to do so: President James Votruba has repudiated Jacobsen's actions as violations of the expressive rights of those who erected the "Cemetery of Innocents," he has removed Jacobsen from the classroom and placed her on leave for the rest of the term (which ends next week, and which coincides with her retirement), and he has declared his willingness to cooperate with the police in pursuing charges against Jacobsen.

But while it's well and good--not to mention politic--for NKU to distance itself from Jacobsen's actions and to use the occasion of her misbehavior to trumpet the institution's support for free expression and robust debate, it's also troubling to reflect that any institution could have any professor on its payroll who possesses such thoroughly warped notions of individual rights. Jacobsen is nearing the end of her career; her ignorance is not due to naivete, but to years of consolidation. She has worked in an academic climate that does not value rights particularly, and that regularly attempts to scramble precisely the issues that confused her: campus speech codes, after all, are attempts to legitimate institutional efforts to curb offensive expression; as such, they are also a principal means by which hundreds of colleges and universities across the country send the message that if you are offended on a question of race or gender, you have been assaulted--wounded--by those offensive words, and you therefore have a right to insist that your institution prevent you from coming into contact from such offenses. It's not a big leap from those basic premises to the assumption that one's own expressive rights include the right to destroy the offensive expressions of others.

This is not to apologize for Jacobsen, but merely to note that her astonishing ignorance should be understood in the wider context of an academic culture that has quite purposefully pursued analogous lines of thought. It is also to note that, just as the current debacle at Duke must be read as symptomatic of a larger problem with college athletics, the debacle at NKU might best be read as indicative of broader, deeply disturbing trends in higher education.

In 2003, FIRE surveyed American college students and administrators to see how well they understood the First Amendment. The results were shocking--so much so that they render recent events at NKU not shocking at all. FIRE reported that

Only six percent of administrators and two percent of students correctly named freedom of religion as the freedom that the First Amendment addresses before all others. Worse yet, only 36 percent of administrators at private institutions and 50 percent at public institutions reported that their administrations took the view that religious individuals should spread their beliefs "by whatever legal means they choose." Students were similarly intolerant of those who would communicate their religious views: only 32 percent of all students surveyed believe that religious people should use any legal means to spread their beliefs.

Students and administrators were also asked whether, under current U.S. law, a religious student group that believes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender behavior is against Scripture is allowed to exclude those who practice such behavior. As a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court case of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), a public university may not use anti-discrimination policies to dictate the leadership or membership of religious groups, but more than 80 percent of administrators were ignorant of the law. Students were more informed on this issue, with 40 percent drawing the correct legal conclusion.

Other survey results of pressing interest include:

--24 percent of administrators believe they have the legal right to prohibit a student religious group from actively trying to convert students to its religion.

--49 percent of administrators at private universities and 34 percent of administrators at public universities report that students at their institutions must undergo mandatory non-curricular programs, "the goal of which is to lead them to value all sexual preferences and to recognize the relativity of these values compared to the values of their upbringing."

In other words, the vast majority of college officials don't really have any grasp at all of what their obligations are to the expressive rights of students. It's no wonder Jacobsen thought she had that right, too.

Worth noting: NKU may have sung the praises of free expression as a means of distancing itself from Jacobsen's actions. But NKU also has a speech code on the books, one that, ironically, speaks quite directly to the assumptions Jacobsen made about her right not to be offended. FIRE gives NKU an ominous "red light rating" for its policies on expression, noting that the school defines punishable harassment as, among other things, "making an offensive coarse utterance, gesture or display, addressing abusive language to any person." That's just about anything the beholder wants it to be--and in the case of Sally Jacobsen, it was the anti-abortion crosses dotting a campus lawn. As Jacobsen herself put it, that display was a "slap in the face" to women.

If NKU is serious about preventing behavior such as Jacobsen's in the future--if the school really wants to make good on its (legally required) promise to honor free expression--it could begin by repealing its speech code. NKU might also consider providing some much needed civic education to all faculty, administrators, students, and staff. People who know their rights and responsibilities are a lot less likely to act as Jacobsen did.

Posted by acta online on April 18, 2006 at April 18, 2006 08:10 AM

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Posted by: fred at April 18, 2006 06:21 PM

Posted by: Phil at April 21, 2006 05:10 PM

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