CMU'S CENSORSHIP COMMITTEE SHOULDN'T CENSOR ITSELF
The administration's committee created to review the censored Internet bulletin boards now has censored its own members.
At the December 1 meeting, a majority of the committee, prompted by the chair, voted to gag its members from releasing information about what the committee discusses.
This gag order is alarming, for the group of people who supposedly represent the campus community's concern about access to information have now made detailed information about their discussions unavailable to the community.
The gag order was levied because Jackie Koscelnik, the university's attorney, refused to speak unless it was off-the-record. She said she was afraid her comments might implicate the university -- a fear that is unfounded, according to lawyers specializing in online liabilities.
However, the committee not only censored her comments, but gagged committee members from discussing the remainder of the meeting. This violated the committee's original policy, decided during the first meeting, to allow full disclosure of discussions.
President Robert Mehrabian created the bboard review committee last month after students, faculty, and staff protested the administration's decision to censor almost 100 Internet bboards with sex-related material. The committee's voting members include two representatives each from Staff Council, Faculty Senate, and Student Government, and the committee is chaired by Vice-Provost Erwin Steinberg, who has defended the current censorship policy to the press.
According to Steinberg, since students still can access the banned bboards by using special software and connecting to other schools' collections of the banned alt.binaries.pictures.erotica Internet bboards, the current policy isn't censorship.
He's wrong. Take TV broadcasts of movies, for instance. When a TV station bleeps out certain obscene words from a movie, it's still censorship even though you can rent the movie from a video store.
Steinberg's refusal to admit that the bboard ban is censorship shows in the way he runs committee meetings. One of the items he placed on the agenda -- without the consent of committee members -- was, ``Is there no difference between Joyce's `Ulysses' and D.H. Lawrence's `Lady Chatterly's Lover' on the one hand and the alt.binaries pictures on the other?''
Is there a difference? Sure -- the novels are text and the alt.binaries.* trees carry images. But the danger of making this analogy is that the administration's censors are trying to judge the quality of the messages posted to the Internet. Okay, a lot of the images on the banned bboards are poorly-photographed. But if the censors don't like the alt.binaries.* tree because of the quality of the photography, what's to stop them from banning grammatically-poor discussions of ``Ulysses'' on netnews.bit.listserv.literary?
Steinberg has confused the issue further with another agenda item that read, ``If posting posters or calendars of scantily clad women is considered `sexual harassment' or creating a `chilly climate,' how will a picture of a bound woman being raped by a ski pole be considered?'' To dramatize his point, he passed around a green folder with that image in it, allegedly taken from one of the banned bboards.
His argument, essentially that CMU should ban the bboards because images on them can be used to harass women, is misleading and deceptive. Carnegie Mellon University already has a policy in place prohibiting sexual harassment (``Sexual harassment could be, but is not limited to ... displaying sexually-explicit pictures or other materials'' in a work environment.) If a male administrator stood in an office and quoted passages of ``Ulysses'' discussing penis lengths to a female co-worker, that could be harassment. But is that a reason to ban ``Ulysses'' from the library? Is that a reason to ban collections of pornographic artwork?
Because the committee is becoming sidetracked by irrelevant issues like this one, it might take months to reach a final decision. For that reason, the members must consider the Faculty Senate and Staff Council resolutions and bring back the censored bboards until the committee can investigate the issue in detail.
The original decision to ban the bboards was made in haste, in a single closed meeting of the Academic Council, without adequate legal advice, and at the insistence of Bill Arms, the same Computing Services vice-president who went before the Human Relations Commission last year and tried to get the bboards banned. There is no legal, moral, or academic reason to keep the ban intact.
The committee should not uphold the administration's original arbitrary and flawed decision. It should reverse the ban and resist the urge to censor.
Declan McCullagh, student body president, is one of the two student members of the Bulletin Board Committee.
More detailed information about the committee can be found in /afs/andrew/usr/sbp/Censorship and on graffiti.bboard-censorship. Also, the Clitoral Hoods, a women's anti-censorship direct action group, is meeting today at the Craig Street Arabica at 7 pm.