The announcement last week of the Speech and Expression Committee’s revised policy on anonymous publications on campus has thrown student leaders and campus publications into a relative frenzy, as the prospect of University censorship has become a concern. As a newspaper, The Georgetown Voice fully supports the ideals of free speech and expression and thus is completely against the policy. Due to student reaction and the flawed logic behind the proposal, it can never be successfully implemented.
The policy will be rendered ineffective by its own faulty logic. A publication that has no named publisher and that “targets identifiable individual members of the community” is not more offensive simply by virtue of the fact that it is anonymous. Furthermore, there is just as much potential for useful speech and ideas to emerge from a publication that violates the policy of anonymity as there is for slanderous or offensive rhetoric to come out of a publication that is signed.
There is, however, no cause for immediate alarm for several reasons. First, the revised language as it stands makes no major change to the policy in the student handbook; it simply clarifies the duties of the Vice President of Student Affairs with respect to anonymous publications. Thus campus groups and fake Hoya publishers alike should not necessarily expect to be treated any differently than they were in the past.
Secondly, the revised policy has only been proposed and not yet adopted. The Speech and Expression Committee’s plans to present its work to numerous campus committees in order to receive feedback. Judging from the brief but strong outcries against it so far, the proposal will be booed and hissed so much that the proposal will either be drastically changed or dropped altogether.
Finally, the pledge by some publications to uphold freedom of speech and reprint any confiscated material in its entirety has the potential to cause the administration more problems than it will solve. A group could choose to publish something anonymously and use the increased publicity that it would receive to further its message, thus backfiring on the policy’s original goal.
Rather than take such a preemptive stab in the dark against an unknown “enemy,” the committee should instead set up procedures for a reactionary policy that would base the University administration’s response on the specific circumstances of a future incident. The student body reaction against the announcment has shown that students do not support protection from offensive publications at the cost of free speech. We hope that the proposal will take into account that student response and not implement a policy that is doomed to failure.
