Acting Up in Syracuse

by Meg Gutman Klosko

When her children or grandchildren would act up, my mother-in-law used to say that it is children who cause mental illness in their parents and not vice versa. Those of us who are parents or who have taken on parental roles—camp counselor or teacher—understand what she was talking about. Sometimes it seems that the most important item on a kid’s agenda is to get a figure of authority to run screaming from the room.

Driving Mom and Dad crazy may have been on the agenda of the four child-women whom Syracuse University censured after they wrote dreadful and disgusting comments in Facebook about a teaching assistant. Some might figure that the students, in psychological parlance, were begging someone to set boundaries for and punish them. Syracuse University, in loco parentis, appropriately obliged.

I know about this story as I know about other obscure but culturally significant phenomena—by reading Inside Higher Ed. On February 14, Rob Capriccioso reported (http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/14/facebook) that the four Syracuse students had created a chat group linked to their personal Facebook pages, where they blithely posted, along with the TA’s pleasantly smiling photo, many rude and graphic complaints laced with sexually explicit and gratuitous insults.

And although some have defended the students’ postings as a legitimate form of criticism, most would admit that even their tamest comments do not meet the level of reasoned analysis:

“This group is for those of us who have to sit through this woman’s boring, non English-speaking lectures for 3 hours a week and put up with her flaming red hair and disgusting, leopard print outfits. Not to mention her teeth and bad breath!”

And

“I’d rather watch my brother masturbate to midget porn with my mom than go to your class, Rachel.”

When Syracuse administrators got wind of this naughtiness, they expelled the women from the T.A.’s section and placed them on “disciplinary reprimand,” a censure that will remain on their school records for seven years.

Like most children, the students felt victimized in receiving their just deserts. One resents the reprimand going on her record for seven years. She expresses regret about posting inappropriate material on the Internet and, in her next (presumably sweet) breath, blames the TA for being too insecure to deal with the challenge to her authority that the students’ insults represented.

Some say the university’s response violated the students’ First Amendment rights. Others argue that crude ad hominem attacks on another human being are not constitutionally protected as defined by Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942).

The story goes that, in 1940, Walter Chaplinsky uttered to a city marshal who was leading him away from a restive crowd, “You are a God damned racketeer and …a damned fascist and the whole government of Rochester are Fascists or agents of Fascists.”

Chaplinsky was convicted of violating a Rochester, New Hampshire law that prohibited public speech that involved calling others “any offensive or derisive name.” His appeal, based on the First Amendment, ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him in a unanimous decision that found:
There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. [Fromhttp://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/speech/arts/topic.aspx?topic=fighting_words]

Even John Stuart Mill, possibly the greatest proponent of freedom of expression, acknowledges limits on the kind of speech that serves no purpose beyond the mischief the speaker wishes to make, or that offends basic standards of decency:

…there are many acts which, being directly injurious only to the agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but which, within the category of offenses against others, may rightly be prohibited. Of this kind are offenses against decency; on which it is unnecessary to dwell. . . . [J.S. Mill. Ed. On Liberty. Page 97. 1978. Hackett Publishing. Indianapolis.]

Unfortunately, the obligation we all have to human decency is an obligation without clear borders, because the object of our obligation is in flux—a state that Earl Warren often described as “evolving standards of decency.”

The Syracuse case is a good study in the way in which standards of decency are difficult to draw and, when drawn, are controversial. If you are over 50, you may remember mouths washed out with soap and school suspensions for those who used the F word in public. On the other hand, for many under the age of 40, using the F word as elocutionary filler—instead of “um”—is not considered Coprolalia, but simply an innocent verbal tic. Should we chalk up our disgust at the vile language these four students used to describe their TA as the language of a new generation, and an indication of changing mores?

There are other questions. Just as decency is a moving target, so is the notion of public and private. The kind of decency involved in the Fighting Words doctrine, in Mill’s equation, and in the Syracuse case is public decency. Did the Syracuse students mistake cyberspace for private space? Does the false sense of privacy that many have when posting thoughts on the Internet excuse indecent behavior? Is the kvetching they did about their TA in Facebook equivalent to the kvetching we all do about the authority figures in our lives? Should college students be considered minors and not fully responsible when it comes to social obligations?

Certainly, public utterances that insult and attack others are affronts to civility and so injure communities. In college and university communities, where the free exchange of ideas is necessary to teaching and research, civility must be particularly well guarded against those who, from ill will, ignorance, or lack of maturity, would offend standards of decency. Those who do offend decency owe a debt to society that they ought to pay back somehow—ideally, with service to the community they have injured. Syracuse is right to take action against its own disturbers of the peace, violators of decency, and anti-social louts.

The question that remains is how to define decency, and what constitutes an insult to it? Perhaps others can do better, but my definition does not go beyond what Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography. I cannot define indecency, but I know it when I see it. This is not much for the Syracuse University child-women to go on, but with J.S. Mill, and constitutional law, it is something they might think about during their penance.