Hoping to salvage something, and desperate not to fall too far behind the faculty on this, the University Committee now reversed itself and proposed abolition to the Faculty Senate meeting that would occur on March 1. The anti-code minority of the faculty on the ad hoc committee, however, feared that they could not secure a victory without the support of their pro-code colleagues, and they almost lost sight of their actual goal. Working with the committee majority and with members of the University Committee, they labored to find compromise language that might command the overwhelming support of the Faculty Senate. Faculty politics can do such things to otherwise rational people.
Near victory, the anti-code faculty members on the ad hoc committee did not want to insult code co-author Ted Finman, and at a University Committee meeting a few days before March 1, Finman succeeded in getting two clauses added to what was supposed to be the abolition proposal. All expressive behavior by faculty members was permitted unless 1) it constituted illegal discrimination or 2) it was unprotected by the First Amendment and by academic freedom.
This, however, was a breach large enough to drive an entire engine of repression through, because in leftist "critical legal theory," any expression that "demeans" the powerless is illegal discrimination, and nothing that creates "a hostile environment" is protected by the First Amendment or by academic freedom. The seemingly sensible "compromise" in fact invited prosecutions that still would be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Free Science, Free Speech
By the time the Faculty Senate considered this motion on March 1, it was beset by ambiguous and confusing language and by a profusion of tortured amendments. Clause after clause was proposed to modify Finman's language, and no one quite could explain what anything meant. By everyone's account, the meeting was in chaos, until it was rescued by William Onellion, a professor of experimental physics whom almost no one knew.
Onellion proposed an amendment putting a period after the declaration abolishing the code and deleting everything after that--namely, Finman's two conditions. Someone asked who would make the decisions necessitated by Finman's language. A pro-code professor, Bernice Durant, probably secured the abolitionists' victory by answering "the Office of Equity and Diversity Resources," which many faculty associated with such things as an earlier failed campaign to demand sensitivity training of any faculty member with a federal research grant. Downs argued that the office was always sympathetic to a complainant. The Faculty Senate approved Onellion's abolitionist amendment by a vote of 71 to 60.
Onellion is amused to find himself a hero in his colleagues' eyes. "I'm not a very political person," he tells me. "I have better things to with my life expectancy than campus politics." An elected senator, he had decided to attend his very first meeting because he wanted to vote to abolish the speech code. After 75 minutes of parliamentary wrangling, however, "I was bored out of my mind."
In Onellion's view, there were only three choices: retention, revision, or abolition. At a certain moment, "I saw that I could get what I wanted by putting a period at the end of a sentence and deleting everything that followed it." When a proponent of the code described his amendment as "just another ploy by the abolitionists," it took Onellion "three minutes to realize what abolitionist meant" in this context. Raising a point of personal privilege, he said that since his family descended from pro-Union Louisianans, he had no trouble being called an abolitionist. "I can play the game of cheap rhetorical tricks also," he observes.
I ask Onellion why he got involved in this controversy. He replies that scientists, unlike colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, are not "preoccupied" with social and political issues. Professors of physics are probably some of the most liberal voters in the country, he continues, but where "issues of free speech and censorship are involved," they part company with the politically correct: "It's a question of both principle and practicality. You can't get at the truth with-out pushing people and arguing wholly freely."
Scientists, he says, have a frame of reference for all this: "We remember the fate of science in Nazi Germany and of Lysenko in the Soviet Union." He draws a moral that professors would do well to learn: "If government has the power over discussion, the search for truth ends." Onellion reminds us why it is so important for the scientists at our universities to join the struggle for liberty.
Will the opponents of free speech find ways to stop this revolt? Will the vice chancellor for legal and executive affairs, the chancellor, or the Board of Regents block the repeal on legal grounds? When the University of Wisconsin's Office of Affirmative Action declares the abolition of the speech code to be a violation of employment law, will the administration force the faculty to take their university to court? Stay tuned.
In the meantime, as student Amy Kasper says, the tide is changing. Keep your eyes and ears on the undergraduates, for from them may come the most auspicious changes of all. I ask Jason Shepard how he felt after the vote for abolition. He says, "We were a couple of students who truly changed the face of this university. To play a small role in defending free speech is humbling. You have to spend your lifetime chipping away at oppression and censorship."
Amen. At Wisconsin, they did more than chip away.
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