Columnist Nat Hentoff, who later that day delivered the Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture, talks to members of the student press in the Yale-Princeon Room of the Statler Hotel Oct. 5. Cornell senior Farhad Manjoo, a writer for the Cornell Daily Sun, is at right. Frank DiMeo/University Photography
To steal and burn copies of even a free newspaper in protest contradicts the First Amendment and should not be condoned at colleges and universities, said Nat Hentoff, a columnist who has written about such incidents at Cornell, last week on campus.
Student protesters have twice publicly burned copies of the Cornell Review, a conservative student newspaper -- in April 1997, protesting a satire in the paper about Ebonics and in November 1998, in reaction to a syndicated political cartoon the paper ran about African-American abortions. Hentoff, who has published several books on free speech, commented on these events in columns in the Village Voice and The Washington Post. He delivered the annual Daniel W. Kops Freedom of the Press Lecture Oct. 5 on the topic "Free Speech at Cornell and Other Centers of Higher Learning."
"Freedom of the press is circular," Hentoff said at a discussion with student journalists and Cornell administrators in the Statler Hotel's Yale-Princeton room earlier on the day of his lecture. "It's the right to publish and it's the right of readers to read, if they want, what is published. This was a symbol of repression of free press, and the scandal to me was that there was no response of any substance from the administration."
Cornell President Hunter Rawlings issued a statement following the April 1997 incident criticizing the "divisive" intent of the Cornell Review articles as well as several of the tactics adopted in response by protesters. "All of us, by our words and actions, shape this university every day," Rawlings said in his statement. "We should do our utmost to make it an intellectual and ethical home for all its members."
"My main objection is that Cornell, rather than attending the capacity for intellectual independence and due process of those students who protest, is indulging them in the belief that they're not up to the challenge of being fully responsible citizens of the university," Hentoff said during his evening lecture in Goldwin Smith Hall's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium. "There are many other ways to express what to you is your justified indignation and fury."
At the afternoon discussion and after his lecture, Hentoff was questioned on several aspects of his argument, including the issue of how it is possible to "steal" a free newspaper and why he didn't consider the incidents a case of acceptable, symbolic protest rather than "arson," as he has asserted.
According to Hentoff, "hardly any" faculty members or administrators spoke out against the paper-burning incidents -- an assertion several faculty members took issue with during Hentoff's visit. "The administration should have said," according to Hentoff, "'Why don't you have another way of protesting?' You can make your views heard without symbolically as well as actually interfering with the right to publish and the right to read.
"They can protest, they can picket, they can write terrible letters to the editor, they can run their own papers, or they can put Post-It notes around saying, 'This is an awful insult to us.' They have no right to steal and burn. That is not protected speech," Hentoff said of the protesters.
Such protests have been prevalent nationwide, with over 450,000 newspapers stolen or destroyed from 121 campuses between 1992 and 1998, according to a New York Times article cited by Hentoff. As at Cornell, most of these were conservative papers being protested by liberal students, who usually went unpunished, he argued.
Hentoff compared these demonstrations to book burnings in Nazi-era Germany and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the early 1600s. "This is part of a tradition of suppression, and to call it symbolic is to miss the point," he said.
That the paper is free is irrelevant, Hentoff said. Student protesters of free papers have been prosecuted at the Universities of Texas, North Carolina, and Kentucky and given fines and suspended sentence for community service. "The courts have said again and again, if it's a free paper it's still a newspaper. The First Amendment applies," he said. Public universities, as agents of the state, must follow the First Amendment, Hentoff said, including Cornell on this list because it is partially state-funded, and he also said that even private institutions should "uphold the spirit of free speech."
Some in his afternoon and evening audience took issue with Hentoff on several of his points. "The administration did treat this as a First Amendment issue," said Henrik N. Dullea, Cornell vice president for university relations. "It's not a desirable form of protest. I don't think anybody would suggest that. But nonetheless we protect it," he said, pointing out that such protests are protected under New York State law.
Dullea also pointed out that, at the larger protest, only 50 papers were burned out of over 5,000 printed. "Had the students in question seized all these newspapers and prevented the community from seeing what was written, that would have been taken, I think, very differently. But they didn't. They burned less than 1 percent," he said.
"The whole history of this country has been against that form of terminal censorship," Hentoff said. "You don't even argue about it, you burn it. That's not American. That doesn't have anything to do with American free thought, as hard as it is to maintain it."
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