Gonzaga Steps on its Speech Code

Gonzaga Steps on its Speech Code

I would just like to know something. Prior to October 6th, did Gonzaga University in Spokane permit “The New Republic” to sit on its library shelves? That liberal-leaning journal of opinion, arts and culture is probably subscribed to by just about every college and university library in the United States. But, if Gonzaga had the same speech code on September 29th that it claimed to have on October 6th, then it should have been pulled off the library shelves and burned. The feature article in that edition was entitled “The Case for Bush Hatred.” The first sentence of the article by senior editor Jonathon Chait read, “I hate President George W. Bush.”
What clearer example of “hate speech” could we have? The author not only confesses his hate, but also identifies the target of his hatred.
The reason it matters is that, just one week after this particular edition of The New Republic was delivered to its subscribers, Gonzaga declared that word “hate” was forbidden. “Hate” appeared on a flyer posted by that school’s chapter of the College Republicans. The club had invited Daniel Flynn to speak. The flyers identified Flynn as the author of the book, “Why the Left Hates America.”
After fielding a number of complaints, Gonzaga’s great thinkers pronounced that the mere appearance of the word, “hate” on a page constituted “hate speech.” Vigilantes took justice into their own hands. Gonzaga’s Director of Student Activities, David Lindsay admitted that, “ When I saw the poster, I took one down because our publicity policy says that we don't allow hate speech to be posted around campus.”
Incidentally, the poster had been approved by Gonzaga’s free speech gatekeepers and to tear it down was a violation of pre-existing university policy.
Retroactively, Gonzaga declared the posters, “discriminatory.” So offensive was this transgression that Gonzaga placed a letter of reprimand in the College Republicans’ file.
One must ask. How can a university that bans the word “hate” even have a hate speech code?
"You can't very well eradicate 'hate'—as some administrators claim they are determined to do—if you can't even utter the word," said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE),
The whole episode recalls a Monty Python skit in which a man was accused of breaking the law by pronouncing God’s name, “Jehovah,” in public. The problem was that the prosecutor could not proceed with the case without pronouncing the name in public himself, thus breaking the same law.
If it is of any consolation to Gonzaga, they have company in the world of the absurd. The University of Virginia saw fit to harass an employee who used the word, “nigger,” in the following context: “I can't believe in this day and age that there's a sports team in our nation's capital named the ‘Redskins.’ That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called ‘Niggers’ would be to blacks."
Someone at the Staff Union at the University of Virginia heard of the comment and decided to sponsor a "Protest Against Racism at U.Va. and the U.Va. Medical Center After a Recent Racial Incident."
"It doesn't really matter in what context this word was used," Staff Union President Jan Cornell declared. "I will continue to inform the U. Va. administration about racism, discrimination, mistreatment of employees by managers and retaliation issues until U.Va. is a safe place to work for everyone of every race," she said.
So, at Virginia, it’s against the rules to even identify a bad word as a bad word.
And the next time Gonzaga loses a basketball game, they can follow the example of Texas A&M’s athletic director who blamed his footballs team’s poor performance this year on an anti-affirmative action demonstration sponsored by that school’s chapter of the College Republicans.
The good news is that this all finally whimpered to an end last week when Gonzaga agreed to withdraw all sanctions from the Republicans.
Republicans cause such difficulties, don’t they?
I’m sure that Time magazine is relieved by Gonzaga’s turnabout. After all, their cover has a picture of President George W. Bush with the headlines, “Love him, Hate him.” It would have been a shame if Gonzaga’s Director of Student Activities had been obliged to remove all copies of Time magazine from the campus.