The Passion of the Administration
| By Campus Progress - Dec 13th, 2005 at 1:15 pm EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
In light of the controversy surrounding Chris Lee's play, this blog post has been created to allow discussion about Lee's opinion piece detailing his side of the story and allow Washington State University students or other participants in either the play or its protest to respond. In addition, feel free to discuss free speech on campus or any other relevant topics.
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I'm a fan of good satire. I'm especially a fan of good satire that offends plenty of people. I'm going to go out soon to see Sarah Silverman's "Jesus is Magic", a movie almost entirely centered around AIDS and Holocaust jokes, and gratuitously laced with racial slurs.
That said, after reading the script, the play is just - tepid. So unbelievably tepid, and full of itself.
There will always be tensions between the forces of free speech and the forces of censorship, though I do think the University might, in moral terms, be buying a bit of say in the content if they're financing a portion of your production. That's ongoing, and it's not of much interest in any given incident; nothing changes. College kids on both sides of the aisle will continue to do stupid things until history comes to a close.
That said - what a waste of exercising one's right to free speech. It manages neither to make a coherent point through its offense, nor to entertain.
Frankly, it strikes me as the work of someone who wanted a higher profile, and manufactured a play that he knew would bring him the media's faux 'outrage' as necessary for that.
That's not novel, either. It's a reverse-Sister Souljah scenario, and more than a little dated.
For someone trying to offend, Lee has manufactured a situation that is undeniably ho-hum.
But in the issue of free speech, I do think the play should have been allowed. In Collin v. Smith, where a Nazi group (the ultra offensive) decided to visit a Chicago suburb Skokie, where there was and is a large Jewish population, to demonstrate (what im not sure other than their ignorance) the circuit court said this...
No doubt, the Nazi demonstration could be subjected to reasonable regulation of its time, place, and manner….Because the ordinances turn on the content of the demonstration, they are necessarily not time, place, or manner regulations….To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control. Any restriction on expressive activity because of its content would completely undercut the "profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."
And look it, this caused a debate, kudos to you student for causing people to discuss race and ignorance issues, shame on you for being so dumb and having no point.