| January 4, 2002 Greg Lukianoff Dear Mr. Lukianoff: I read your December 3 letter with some amusement. Your statement, a reply to my November 26 communication, is a case study in lawyerly sophistry, postmodernist antirationalism, multiculturalist subjectivism, and moral relativism. Your letter turns on a sophistic interpretation of the phrase: core political speech. You said, in your November 8 letter to UNCW Chancellor Leutze, it "should be self-evident" that the administration is guilty of "complicity" with a student, my daughter, Rosa Fuller, "in punishing core political speech." I replied, on behalf of my daughter, with this promise: if you can find any core political speech in the e-mail letters sent by four people at the University and mentioned in my daughter’s several complaints, she will "retract all her accusations and send each one of these people and the University an apology." I indicated how I understand these words in the English language: "core political speech" does not consist in "rants and threats." It consists in substantive and sometimes refutative speech of the kind that could cause, in your words, the "failure of [other political] arguments in free and open discourse." Rant is not political refutation. Name-calling is not refutation. The communication of a threat is not refutation. You answer me with this claim: "virtually all the content" of each one of the e-mail letters in my daughter’s complaints "is considered political speech." So be it. The communication of a threat is derivative political speech insofar as it threatens someone because this someone has uttered political speech. The communication of abusive and libelous speech is derivative political speech insofar as it abuses and libels someone because this someone has uttered political speech. Derivative political speech, insofar as it libels or communicates a threat, is not always free speech. Laws rightly limit such speech. One example: Federal law prohibits the communication of threats on the life and safety of the US president. Libelous and abusive speech is certainly not "core political speech." The word "core," in this phrase, logically and grammatically signifies basic, essential and substantial, not derivative, "political speech." You report, on the contrary, that the word "core" is "routinely added in Constitutional law to emphasize that political speech is the type of speech that we, as a society, consider most important." A conventional routine, in the use of language, insofar as it defies logic and grammar, is always problematic. Does "core" qualify "speech" or "political speech"? On your interpretation, it qualifies neither the one nor the other. It tells us neither what kind of speech (a comma after "core" would let it do this) nor what kind of political speech is signified. It inertly sits in the sentence between two other words. It signifies nothing and everything. You insist "core political speech" means speech that is core because it is political in some, perhaps derivative, sense, and not political speech that is core because it addresses core political issues. Grammar and logic oppose you. Sophistry always relies on ambiguities in the use of language. Perhaps not satisfied with your explanation of "core political speech," you then add: "in disagreeing" with Rosa’s statement, "her critics offered other political opinions." You provide one example of such "other" and "disagreeing" opinions. My daughter wrote: "innocent Arab and Muslim Americans, including children, are being attacked and threatened in the chauvinist, racist fervor stirred by the war-mongering US media." A student who included a threat on my daughter’s safety in her e-mail letter also wrote: "I do not agree with anyone who gives Muslims in our country a hard time. They are hard working Americans who don’t deserve this." The one instance of a "disagreeing" opinion you found in the four e-mail communications sent by Rosa’s "critics" and mentioned in her complaints actually expresses complete agreement with her position. Why do you get this wrong? You conclude, in reference to this "disagreeing" opinion: "I am at a loss to understand how that isn’t political speech." Political speech is speech about government. Does either formulation of this "opinion" comment on any governmental action in reference to the popular "fervor"? The answer is: no. The one instance of non-derivative "political speech" you believe you found in the relevant letters is not really speech about politics. Why do you get this wrong? Do you suppose the popular harassment of American Muslims is a derivatively political reaction to the derivatively political action of Muslim terrorists? Would this supposition turn any statement on this reaction into political speech? The definition of political speech implicit in such a supposition would turn nearly every utterance in modern America into political speech. The word "political" would then lose any definitive sense. After you confuse agreement with disagreement, and non-political with political speech, you suggest the confusion is mine. You write: "the confusion comes from your repeated assertion that Dr. Adams’s speech is somehow invalid because he did not specifically engage and refute [Rosa’s] ideas in a ‘rational discussion.’" I said, in my letter, that Dr. Adams violated the professional ethics of a university professor when he berated my daughter with a series of abusive names, because he offered no argument in support of these names. I said my daughter "wanted and expected a ‘rational discussion’ of the issues" from Dr. Adams. I said: "professional and ethical responsibility puts limits on a professor’s free speech" in his relations with his students. Professional ethics invalidates Dr. Adams’s name-calling speech. He has a political right but neither an ethical nor a rational right to revile his students. Note: a political right is not always the same as a rational or an ethical right. You fallaciously reduce ethical and rational matters to political issues. You also conflate political and professional conduct. Free speech, you declare, is "not limited by your ideas of politeness, decorum, or the proper way to argue, and certainly not by some arbitrary definition of ‘rationality.’" You thus dismiss professional ethics. You thus dismiss the responsibility of a university professor to address his students rationally or, indeed, irrationally. Irrationality is a defective form of rationality. Dr. Adams’s name-calling speech is neither a form of rationality, defective or otherwise, nor a "way to argue." It exhibits no argument. You suggest, in the most flagrant postmodern fashion, that my, or any, definition of rationality is arbitrary. I define rationality as thought in accordance with the principle of noncontradiction. Do you have another definition? You conclude that, if we let "anyone" limit "free speech rights on the basis of your [ethical and rational] criteria," we would "utterly destroy free speech and leave it entirely in the hands of the arbiters of ‘propriety.’" Doctors, lawyers, police officers, psychologists, journalists, spies, and other professional people always assume appropriate limitations on their free speech in the performance of their professional duties. Responsible people in these professions always arbitrate professionally proper speech. Somehow democracy survives. University professors also have professional responsibilities and rightly submit to ethical and rational limitations on their speech. You, on the other hand, claim professional ethics is merely a matter of "style" and subjective choice. Dr. Adams’s name-calling speech is, in your multiculturalist perspective, a "teaching style." Professional ethics, you would have us believe, is an "extremely subjective" matter and no ethical truth is rationally determinable. What then is to be done? You, like the sophists in Plato’s Republic, would have us submit the definition of ethical concepts to public opinion or, as you put it, the "marketplace of ideas." You would have these issues "fought out" in this forum. Would you have us submit these ethical disputes to a public vote? Should students vote on the professional conduct of university professors? Should donors decide what this conduct should be? Or should legislatures decide? Or do you merely mean each professor should have a "free" subjective choice in the purchase of a "style" of professional conduct in a "market" where merchants of ethics peddle different "styles"? I suppose we should celebrate the diversity in teaching styles, fashions and cultures, competent as well as incompetent, deleterious as well as salutary, malicious as well as virtuous, which this moral relativism would then license. FIRE, you tell us, shall not "adjudicate teaching styles." Instead you deny the propriety of any such judgment by reasonable and responsible people. You helpfully cite a number of free speech and civil rights cases that have no relevance to the case of a university professor who berates a student. Free speech is not an issue in our case. Academic freedom is not an issue. Civil rights is not an issue. You ignore the specific difference between (1) speech by a professional person in the conduct of his professional responsibilities toward someone whose interest he serves and (2) speech by a citizen who addresses his fellow citizens as citizens or as citizens in positions of authority. You reduce professional speech to political speech, ethical and rational speech to political speech, core political speech to political speech, speech as such to political speech. Your forest has no trees. Or it has only one species of tree. The imposition of one and the same generic "theme" on specifically different cases is a kind of monomania or fixed idea. "This," you tell us, "is what FIRE is all about." Indeed, but society is not only about this. Lastly, you address my use of the word "partisan" in reference to FIRE’s defense of Dr. Adams. You insist you "made no mention of politics whatsoever" in your first letter. Suddenly, we have a case of non-political speech. You claim, in your letter, my daughter "harshly criticized" the United States and "to no one’s surprise" then "received a torrent of criticism." If I may use your words: I am at a loss to understand how that isn’t political speech. What I wrote in my letter is this: FIRE’s "actions and statements heretofore have belied its supposedly nonpartisan defense of individual rights in education." I cited the "assistance" FIRE has provided Dr. Adams in his "national publicity campaign, in newspapers and magazines, on the internet and television, which is supposed to portray him as a conservative martyr in the cause of free speech." I cited the many lies told by Thor Halvorssen, the executive director of FIRE, in furtherance of this campaign. Mr. Halvorssen, who has a history of conservative partisanship, continues to publish these lies. I note his and Dr. Adams’s partisanship not because, as you perversely allege, I believe the "opinions of some political parties are simply invalid and not worthy of discussion" but because I wish to offer an explanation of his and Dr. Adams’s political motivations in this case. FIRE published an article, in Mr. Halvorssen’s inimitable prose, on December 19, which consists in one falsification after another. Mr. Halvorssen repeats his lie that my daughter "blamed the United States for the [terrorist] attacks." My daughter in her statement blamed the terrorists and the particular policies of particular administrations that nurtured the reactionary "freedom fighters" who then became these terrorists. Mr. Halvorssen reduces the United States, its history and its principles, its people and its institutions, to these particular policies. He also repeats his lie that my daughter intends to "sue" Dr. Adams. My daughter has never expressed an intention to sue Dr. Adams. Her parents have never expressed such an intention. We have always believed the idea of a suit in this case is absurd. Mr. Halvorssen and Dr. Adams invented the idea of a court suit in order to provide some substance to FIRE’s sleazy campaign. Mr. Halvorssen also deceptively claims Dr. Adams answered Rosa’s letter "with criticism of her opinions" and certain "others" answered her "with forceful criticism." He cannot admit Dr. Adams sent my daughter a series of libelous insults and these others sent her threats on her safety. One conclusion on the basis of the available evidence is inescapable: Mr. Halvorssen is a pathological liar. Mr. Halvorssen then turns his attention to my daughter’s petition to inspect the e-mail messages Dr. Adams sent, from his University address, with the use of the University’s computing facilities, from September 15 to September 18, as public business, in accordance with the Public Records Law of the State of North Carolina. Mr. Halvorssen hides the fact that my daughter submitted a public records petition. FIRE’s strategy in this case is not to acknowledge the fact that Rosa’s petition comes under a public records law. As one writer wrote to an internet web site, "if FIRE believes that privacy laws trump state open records policy, or that the University interpreted the open records law incorrectly, then they should explicitly say so, and say why they believe so, instead of depending on the ignorance of their readers." FIRE has relied on the ignorance of its readers from the start. Behind a mock defense of free speech, FIRE has entered on a public campaign to deny the citizenry of this state its democratic right to hear the speech of its public employees. The right to hear such speech is a free speech right. The North Carolina Public Records Law provides that the "public records and public information compiled by the agencies of North Carolina government or its subdivisions are the property of the people." It further declares: "it is the policy of this State that the people may obtain copies of their public records and public information free or at minimal cost unless otherwise specifically provided by law." Dr. Adams, a state employee, sent his libelous e-mail letter to my daughter and others from a state-owned e-mail address with the use of a state-owned computer and state-owned computing facilities. Such e-mail letters are the property of the people of this state. Why does FIRE refuse to acknowledge this fact? The time has come when FIRE should stop its campaign of lies and tell the truth. Mr. Halvorssen ends his article with this promise: "FIRE will soon begin a long-term initiative to educate UNC-W’s regents, students, parents, and donors." Come on down. We welcome all the education we can get. Mr. Halvorssen can educate us on why a campaign of lies is the best defense of free speech. FIRE President Dr. Alan Charles Kors, a history professor, can teach us when a public records petition is "senseless" and has "no legal merit" and why one should never "prosecute" libelous speech or the communication of a threat. Either you or Mr. Halvorssen can instruct us on why someone who uses a state-owned computing system retains a "right of privacy" in this use despite the provisions of a computer use policy and state public records laws. You or he can teach us why we should never ask to see public records in accordance with these laws. You can tell us why we should adopt moral relativism, ethical subjectivism and intellectual irrationalism. You can also teach us why we should always treat different kinds of cases as if these cases were instances of the same kind. I would attend your lecture on the logic and grammar of the phrase: core political speech. You or Mr. Halvorssen can educate us on why professional ethics never limits free speech. I think you will find us worthy students. A last note: my daughter and I have posted on an internet web site most of the documents we have produced and some of those we have received in the course of this dispute: www.oocities.org/uncwtruth. Dr. Dennis J. Fuller Cc: James Leutze, Chancellor |