S.U. Administration Subverts Student Code
Jonathan Greenfield
Röt Feder
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • December 1991-January 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 3 (pp. 2) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
To the editor:
In his article “White Fraternities and ‘Civil’ (9/13/91), Röt Feder states, “While the S.U. administration found the posters protesting gang rape to be illegal and punishable, the same is not true of the homophobic tee-shirts. The rules in the student handbook were even changed to make it harder to charge the Crows with harrassment [sic].”
As a result, I fee the need to point out that the changes in the harassment clause (as well as other clauses) of the Syracuse University Code of Student Conduct, were the result of the continued efforts of a number of individuals, including myself. Personally I first expressed my concern over the original version of the harassment clause, to Dean of Student Relations Edward Golden, before the original code was formally adopted for its one year trial period. At the end of that one year period, the Task Force on Student Rights and Responsibilities reconsidered the entire code, revising several clauses, and revising the harassment clause to remove content-based restrictions.
On May 7, 1991 Dead Golden sent a letter informing me of the changes which were submitted in a report to the Chancellor on May 1, 1991. As the submission of these revisions occurred contemporaneously with the first complaints regarding the Alpha Chi Rho T-shirts, the suggestion that the revisions were inspired by those T-shirts is simply not plausible.
Nonetheless, Mr. Feder’s point regarding the university’s varying standards is well-taken. It is important, however, that we distinguish between the university’s written rules and the university’s actual practice. In this case, the harassment clause, itself, supports the protection of the fundamental right to free expression and intellectual freedom. It is the university’s abuse in its application of the clause that has created the varying-standard situation Mr. Feder describes.
I wholeheartedly support Mr. Feder’s contention that the university has played fast and loose in its application of the harassment clause. However, it is essential that we direct our concern toward the true problem—the abuse of a regulation by the university administration, not the regulation, itself.
Jonathan Greenfield, Syracuse, NY
Röt Feder Replies
I thank Mr. Greenfield for the opportunity to clarify my argument on this point. It seems quite like that Mr. Greenfield is correct in arguing that the student code was not rewritten as a response to the Alpha Chi Rho tee-shirt scandal; rather, it was rewritten in anticipation of a diverse range of possible future needs. It is no mere convenience that the administration arranged for “student participation” in the drafting of the code: it is both their alibi, and a strategy for coopting key student constituencies, one of which is represented by Mr. Greenfield. (We should not forget that it was Mr. Greenfield who earlier, though perhaps unwittingly, served to open the administration's direct attack on S.A.S. [Student Afro-American Society -ed.] last year by challenging their membership policy.)
Mr. Greenfield contends that the problem was not with the new code, but with the university administration’s uneven implementation of it. This is to miss a fundamental point. It presumes that the only condition that must obtain to secure the fruits of democracy for all is the perfect operation of the state and its legitimate institutions (here, the S.U. administration) in its role as the neutral arbiter of social disagreements through the perfect (i.e., unbiased) implementation of its laws.
This view of society is derived from Enlightenment (i.e., proto-bourgeois) social contract theory in which society is formed through the previous agreement of its various constituents over its basic rules and relations. Thus the U.S. Declaration of Independence maintains that our government was formed by deriving its "just powers from the consent of the governed," and the U.S. Constitution begins by arguing that it was "we the people," who, "in order to form a more perfect Union," ordained and established its Constitution (i.e., supposedly the basis of our entire juridical apparatus) to secure our liberty and happiness.
It is a fundamental tenant of bourgeois "democracies" that justice should be "blind," that all should be "equal before the law" regardless of their particular circumstances in life. But this presumes that everyone is equal to begin with. And indeed it is in presumption of this that "our" Declaration of Independence insists that "all men are created equal." (Since it would have been rather difficult to believe that slaves would have consented to their condition of enslavement, slavery was allowed on the ideological basis that slaves were not human.) But we are not all born with equal freedoms, either economic or political, and bourgeois justice thus turns a blind eye not to the status of those who come before it, but rather to the fact that it tends as a part of its general social function to reproduce pre-existing social inequalities.
Indeed our legal system regularly hands down extraordinarily harsh punishments on the poor, African-Americans, Hispanics, etc., for crimes which often are much smaller than those which go unpunished for the well-to-do and influential. Thus a poor woman who in her hunger stole a loaf of bread was recently sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, and Ollie North, who subverted the very Constitution of the United States, was lightly slapped on the wrist rather than charged with treason. The fact that there are those who are often "above the law" indicates that the law is itself ultimately subordinated to another power -- and by this I do not mean "we the people."
I've taken a rather circuitous route to make a simple point. The content-lessness of the student regulations that Mr. Greenfield celebrates (in its assumption that equality is achieved when all are treated equally before the law) betrays a hidden content: and this content is precisely the inequalities that are already present in society. It is the ambiguity of what such a code cannot see that allows the administration to invoke it opportunistically (much to Mr. Greenfield's dismay). Thus the use of Phi Delta Theta's own rush posters (which show women's legs helplessly and suggestively fluttering upside down in several of the house windows) to protest the prevalence of (though almost never reported) gang rapes in fraternities was punishable because it named an actual fraternity. On the other hand, the Alpha Chi Rho tee-shirts -- which merely incited violence against homosexuals in general -- was not punishable because it did not encourage the clubbing of any particular homosexuals. (Similarly the Phi Delt's rush ad merely encouraged the raping of women in general, and not any particular women.)
The student code is an effective aid in social control in part because fraternities do not have to resort to "illegal" postering to achieve their freedoms on campus. Those who are regularly the target of fraternity oppression do not enjoy such a luxury.
