Erin O’Connor reports (and I heard this story when I spoke at Emory about speech codes and academic freedom on Tuesday) that when the College Republicans at Emory sought funding for the student council to bring David Horowitz to speak on campus, two university administrators appeared before the council to urge it not to approve funding:
In an editorial published by the Emory Wheel, Ezra Greenberg, an Emory student and member of the College Republicans, described one of the administrators’ arguments thus:Erin reports that there is good news:Assistant Dean of Campus Life Vera Rorie delivered a speech littered with euphemisms and doublespeak, all but urging the Council to vote against someone who would “divide us.” Rorie”s statements exhibited classic, anti-free expression duplicity.
“We are all for free speech, but …” and “We are all for academic freedom, but …,” Rorie said.
She insisted, “If we were to take a vote, I”m sure everyone is this room would support free speech.” Yet supporting free speech in the abstract is meaningless.
The question is whether you will allow someone whom you detest to speak, or if you will boo and hiss, as anti-Horowitz students did last year but campus conservatives have declined to do time and again.
Race, according to Rorie, is a very delicate issue, which she is obviously mature enough to discuss, while campus conservatives are not. Writing in the Wheel a few weeks ago, she said that her white colleagues could not look at race in the same way she could, because “the very existence of white privilege and institutional racism frames our experiences differently.”
What happened next is little short of astonishing. Rorie received a hostile email from one S. Siles, sent from an aol.com email address. The email was a brutally pointed reminder to Rorie that the internet makes it possible for her actions and words as an administrator to be judged by the world. Quoting her confused comments about free speech and academic freedom, the email condemns Rorie as a censor and a fool:
Here’s some free speech: you, madam, are incompetent and a buffoon. The internet is making it more difficult for people like you to hide behind the walls of academia. I also would like to remind you that internet search engines record these articles instantly and forever for posterity to see.
That’s not the astonishing part (as any blogger knows, having a public presence, however small, attracts its share of hate mail). The astonishing part is Rorie’s response, which is recorded on the Emory College Republicans’ web site. After the Horowitz vote, Rorie had agreed to meet with Greenberg and Ed Thayer, the Chairman of the CRs, to discuss alternative possibilities for bringing a conservative speaker to campus. But when she got the email quoted above, she withdrew her offer in an email that effectively blamed them for the fact that S. Siles felt compelled to give her an electronic piece of his mind. She wrote:
Dear Ed & Ezra,
My office had offered to assist the College Republicans in planning an event that would bring a conservative speaker of your choice to campus. In light of the attached email and link it is clear that you are not interested in practing [sic] community. The information you provided to outsiders is the source of the enclosed personal attacts [sic] on me. I am rescinding the offer to meet.I will not participate in email name calling or personal assaults.
Dean Vera Dixon Rorie
Negative publicity has done its work at Emory. A reader reports that Emory president James Wagner has apologized to the College Republicans for Dean Vera Rorie’s censorious and punitive behavior, and that, despite being denied funding by the Emory College Council, the CRs have raised enough money to bring David Horowitz to campus next month after all.Frankly, I am much less enthusiastic about this outcome than is Erin. A college administrator who engages in such blatantly biased and unprofessional behavior should be disciplined (I don’t think anyone ever gets fired on a university campus unless he does something illegal) (oh, and for those of you who will instinctively cast aspersions, when I heard the story on Tuesday from Prof. Ann Hartle with fewer details, I suggested immediately that Dean Rorie’s behavior should have professional repercussions, and at the time I had no idea that she was African American). Is there any indication that Dean Rorie has suffered any negative consequences for her actions? And why hasn’t she apologized? And if Emory’s president really wanted to square things with the CRs, how about if he offered to use college funds to bring in Horowitz, allowing the CRs to use the money they raised for other purposes? I think that we have come to expect so little from spineless college presidents that even the most minimum signs of decent behavior are seen as great victories.
POSTSCRIPT: At my own alma mater, Brandeis, I had personal experience with a “student life” administrator who obviously believed that part of her role was to make the university as unwelcoming as possible for Republican, conservative, and libertarian students. So forgive me if I take this one a little personally.
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