Civility and Censorship at TESC

In a meeting scheduled to occur as this issue goes to press, members of the faculty are due to debate and vote on a resolution affirming the College’s commitment to “civility” and condemning the “threatening speech or action[s]” that have supposedly occurred “in recent months.” Reasoning that “uncivil” or “threatening” words and actions have a tendency to silence debate and chill public speech, the administration has asked that faculty members reaffirm their commitment to the civility called for in the Social Contract.

It seems pretty hard to vote against “civility,” so why are numerous members of the faculty, as well as students and the members of this newspaper so apprehensive about the resolution? Simple: it will not further public discourse by keeping speech from being silenced. Instead, the resolution will do the exact opposite. It will encourage students to sit passively as their rights are trampled and while members of the administration lie to their faces. It will silence far more speech than it protects.

Though the current version does not mention any specific instances of the “threatening” speech or actions it is intended to stop, it seems to be targeted at three specific instances where it is alleged that students voiced their discontent with the state of affairs at Evergreen in ways inconsistent with our founding values. These three instances are all totally unsubstantiated and will be explored here.

The first “threatening” occurrence occurred at the March meeting of the Board of Trustees. In an email sent the next day, President Les Purce alleged that a student had yelled “raise tuition and we’ll kill you.” Later, in an email sent directly to one of the members of this newspaper, Vice President of Student Affairs Art Costantino alleged that a member of his staff was “within 10 feet of the person who made the threat.” The members of the CxPJ collective and other community members have gone to efforts to find any evidence corroborating Costantino and Purce’s accusation only to come up empty handed.

At least two recordings were made of the event. On the Board of Trustee’s official audio recording, which is posted on Evergreen’s website, the threat is not present. On a video recording of the event made for the CxPJ, the comment is also not present. In fact, the last issue of the paper specifically noted Purce’s inaccurate statement and pointed out that what was actually said was “raise tuition and we raise hell,” a rallying cry of the University of California budget protests. The student, Tyler Magnuson, appeared at the May Board of Trustee’s meeting asking the Board and President Purce for an apology and that his name be cleared.

The second occurrence was when Tony Overman was allegedly shouted down while giving a lecture to Steve Davis’s Documentary Photography class. This is also false. A member of the CxPJ was present at the lecture and made a recording of the event. While a few individuals who were not members of the class were present, the closest thing that was made to a threat was when one student told Overman that he was “full of shit” as he described his experiences during the April 8, 2010 march.

Police reports obtained through a public records request show that Overman was, in fact, “full of shit.” After going through numerous documents, the CxPJ has observed that the statements he made while giving his lecture were very different from the statements he gave police at the time of the march. With that knowledge, the individual addressing Overman in that way was calling out his inconsistencies as a journalist and as an observer. Even though it was done in a rather rude fashion, it is not a threat to call a spade a spade.

Finally, the resolution seems intended to address an alleged string of tire slashings targeting cars with pro-police stickers. However, the vandal(s) were never caught and no conclusive motive has been reached. Even the Evergreen Police are not willing to claim that the incidents of tire slashing were due to police stickers. One officer was quoted in the CPJ as saying that “three incidents of vandalism is hardly a pattern.” There is no way to say for certain that this was motivated by anti-police sentiment or perpetrated by students. If the police are unwilling to make any accusations, why is the administration?

Faculty member Zoltan Grossman urged people to understand the context in which the students have made their comments. Referring to military infiltration of local peace groups, police brutality or protestors, and articles and comments on The Olympian’s website, Grossman chastised the faculty. “The response from this community has been either the passive complicity of silence or the active complicity of blaming the victim.” Faculty member Larry Mosqueda later summed up his views.

“We should be civil,” stated Mosqueda, “but we must have free speech.” The Counter Point Journal is, has been, and will always be a strong proponent of free speech. We firmly believe that free speech should never be curbed in the interest of “civility.”

We have seen many media outlets in the United States and abroad curb their coverage in the interests of “civility.” When the video Collateral Murder, which showed US air units gunning down unarmed civilians and international reporters, was released on Wikileaks, it was showed unedited and in full. By the time it made it to CNN, it was 30 seconds long, the footage was covered with a large black box so only audio could be heard during the murder, and news anchors warned viewers to turn away.

You never see the gruesome deaths of American solders or Iraqi civilians because it is “uncivil” to show such things, but that distorts everyone’s view of what war actually is. At Evergreen, the CPJ has refused on at least two separate years (2002-3 and 2008-9) to print articles relating to Israel or Palestine because of the heated nature of such issues. Offering the same rationale, the April 9, 2009 issue of the CPJ claimed the decision was “in the interest of productive and inclusive discourse.”

The Counter Point Collective refuses to believe the backward logic that you must restrict speech to protect it. Noam Chomsky has written, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”