Dean's Address

There are probably those in this audience, including my children and their mother, quietly imploring me to stop picking on their school. I agree, so let’s move about 40 miles south of Berkeley to a place I dearly love, called Stanford University. Its founding motto is “Let the Winds of Freedom Blow.” It was at this semi-rural paradise that the nurtured and privileged sons and daughters of industry burned down the ROTC building in the 60’s.

More recently, the Board of Trustees enacted a speech code, specifically defining the type and kind of speech which could and could not be used on campus. The code made no exception for the large shopping center located on Stanford property. Hence, watch what you say when you enter the lingerie department at Nordstroms on the Stanford shopping center. A courageous law student named Robert Corry filed suit against the University in the Santa Clara County Superior Court, seeking an order enjoining and prohibiting the speech code. Notably, Corry and the University both stipulated that the judgment of the court would be deemed final, and that there would be no appeal.

My suspicions were aroused by such a stipulation for two reasons. First, that the University’s belief in the sanctity of its speech code was on weak underpinnings; secondly, that the University would never want to see an adverse and published appellate opinion in the official reports.

Similar speech codes were defeated at the University of Wisconsin and at Michigan. The trial court in the Stanford case pointed out that: “By denying the defendants the ability to discipline or expel students for violation of the speech code, defendants’ ability to express its message is not impaired because defendants retain numerous alternative means of expressing their views.”

Bowdoin College prohibits “leering, staring, cat calls, vulgar jokes, language, photographs or cartoons with sexual overtones, and even “terms of familiarity.” Syracuse University prohibits “leering, ogling, sexual innuendos, and sexually derogatory jokes.” Brown University prohibits “unwelcome sexual propositions, invitations, solicitations, and flirtations.”

I am not for one moment defending bad taste, but there are and have long been other ways in which to enforce human decency, and punish unacceptable conduct. In 1896, when the “Winds of Freedom” kicked up, Stanford put down the law, by declaring its “Fundamental Standard:”

“Students at Stanford are expected to show both within and without the University such respect for order, morality, personal honor and the rights of others as is demanded of good citizens. Failure to do this will be sufficient cause for removal from the University.”

Many many other colleges, universities, secondary, and primary schools have similar mandates. One is the University of New Mexico, to which I will refer later. There are new and different modes of education, which, collectively, their supporters refer to as “deconstruction” or “post-modernism.” For example, there are no longer any such things as ultimate or irrefutable facts. Facts and truths are now said to be relative, and always subject to political interpretation. Hard facts are gone. Tell that, if you will, to the heart broken widow who comes to your office and reaches out for your guidance and expertise. The study of Western culture has been minimized and undermined. The masters of the renaissance, for example, are too closely related to kings, queens, lords and ladies. Gutenberg, Galileo, and Michelangelo are not to be considered. They are far too reminiscent of old class distinctions of the past.

Art has been degraded and cynicized, as never before. While in London a year ago, Sally and I visited a newly constructed modern art museum. I viewed a large cubic structure approximately five to six feet in all dimensions. It was comprised exclusively of old scraps of carpet, tin, and broken pieces of wood. Only a few steps away from this abomination, I saw encased in a lucite box a urinal.

At the college level particularly, there is an emerging desire for sameness at the expense of merit or accomplishment. Some institutions have dispensed with grading altogether. How many law students have you recently inter-viewed for employment, finding that they can relate no class standing to you, because they are unaware of it? The role of the Valedictorian is a disappearing distinction. Regrettably, intimidation of our teachers and professors is a growing concern/

These valued people are criticized and ostracized for the positions they take or the ideas they express. The victim of this growing tendency is, I fear, academic freedom itself. In yesterday’s fine address by General Reimer, he reminded us that our most valued asset in this country is our youth. In Wieman v. Updegraf, 344 U.S. 183 (1952), Justice Felix Frankfurter said: “Teachers, in our entire educational sys-tem, from the primary grades to the university are the priests of our democracy. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens. Teachers must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry. They cannot carry out their noble tasks if the conditions for the practice of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them.”

If we haven’t the benefit of free thinking, robust teachers and professors charged with passing on the ideas and concepts which make us free and great, who will do it? A law professor recently remarked: “When the subject of affirmative action arose in my constitutional law class, a few students raised questions concerning its validity and constitutionality. These students were almost immediately attacked — being hissed in the classroom and later away from class by being called fascist, racist, or Nazi.”

Professor Julius Lester of the University of Massachusetts speaks as follows about being shunned by his colleagues: “I can’t describe what it’s like to walk down a hallway and people lower their voices or they stop talking or they close the doors as you walk by —just to walk through that atmosphere of hostility, week in, week out. The intent of it, of course, is to make you think twice the next time you sit down to write.”

Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, a professor from Orange Coast College here in Southern California was charged by certain Muslim students with making offensive and combative statements about Muslims in general. The college administration suspended the professor (with pay), thus generating obvious fear among other faculty members. When the investigation was completed, and the administration concluded that the accusations were ill-founded, the professor was restored to his full duties.

At some colleges, the fate of allegedly errant teachers or professors is often decided behind closed doors, without benefit of confrontation, and with the use of secret ballots. One member of such a committee at Hampshire College remarked “The First Amendment was written by a rich, white, male slave owner.” At the University of New Hampshire (not to be confused with Hampshire) another such committee member stated “Perhaps to you it’s as sacrosanct as the flag or the national anthem; to us, strict construction of the First Amendment is just another yoke around our necks.”

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