Criticism surrounding article opposes First Amendment

Last Thursday, The Purdue Exponent ran a front-page story about a Chronicle of Higher Education story about a Purdue graduate student who may be a "neo-Nazi."

Promptly, the Exponent, not the graduate student, nor the Chronicle, was attacked. How dare we make someone's personal beliefs public? How dare we violate his right to say what he will in this country?

Let me tell you how we dare

The Chronicle of Higher Education is not a tiny publication. Though it caters to a very specific audience of college professors and administrators, that audience includes more than 450,000. It's the academic equivalent of Sports Illustrated to a university.

For a Purdue student to show up in a Chronicle article is worthy of mention in The Purdue Exponent, if only in a brief. And for a student to be the focus of a Chronicle article for his potentially negative views and writings, it is the responsibility of a campus newspaper to inform its campus of the controversy.

It's not a newspaper taking a side about whether or not the student is in the wrong; it’s a newspaper objectively informing the public of what has been said, hence the extensive quoting of the article.

If a star athlete at Purdue was under investigation for illegal drug use, it would be a responsibility of our newspaper to report on the investigation and would not imply that we thought the athlete was taking drugs. It wouldn't be part of our "hidden agenda" to force that athlete out of the NCAA circuit, and it wouldn't mean that we were staffed by a bunch of straight-laced puritans who were entirely beyond reproach.

The graduate student that is the source of the controversy is not under investigation and has not broken the law. But graduate students are the academic equivalent of star athletes to Purdue, and things they do that reflect negatively on themselves (i.e. writing anti-Semitic articles) may reflect negatively on the university that has chosen them as one of their graduate students.

Especially when you consider a topic as heated as anti-Semitism. This article showing up in the Chronicle will bring negative attention to Purdue because even if there were 10 amazing research discovery stories about Purdue in the same issue of the Chronice, the one people will remember will be about the alleged anti-Semite.

It may not seem "fair" in a society built on freedom of speech and thought, but it's the way of the world. It's not fair; it's public relations.

The other reason the story was newsworthy to the Exponent was the strange quality of the case. I can't be the only one in America who thought anti-Semitism was all but driven out of existence by concepts like rational thought and the fundamental good in human beings.

I'm so naïve. I really thought the only practitioners of such ignorance were so malformed from generation after generation of inbreeding that they had lost the ability to form language and discourse with the rest of mankind.

And yet, there are suddenly allegations that a practitioner of these lost arts of hatred is here at Purdue with a reasonable amount of higher education and writing skill. So, there was definitely a surprise factor to be considered. The same as if there was a suspicion of wooly mammoths still walking the Earth.

That said, I adore the First Amendment and the right it gives to any jerk with enough time and paper to say whatever he wants. It lets me get away with this job. Why, if there was any particular amendment I could marry and have babies with it would be the First (although, let's face it, the entire Bill of Rights is pretty sexy).

However, I don't adore all the stuff that some cowards spout off under the umbrella protection of the First Amendment. In choosing to embrace the freedom to speak, write and think, you sacrifice the safety of living a life in which you aren't exposed to things that attack you or your lifestyle or fill you with rage.

Demon in the deep end

In order to make this sacrifice less painful, a while back we figured out that if we started learning about other cultures and respecting them maybe we wouldn't be so bigoted all the time. This would help our foreign policy and increase discussion between cultures and countries. Thus, multiculturalism was born.

Now, there's this nasty little demon that lives out at the deep end of multiculturalism called "cultural relativism." Cultural relativism is essentially the belief that whatever anyone does is OK because right and wrong are made up by a culture and are not absolute. This means even unsettling thoughts such as cannibalism and genocide cannot be condemned because to do so holds one culture as better than another. Right and wrong disappear into a murky gray and discourse is silenced. After all, since everything is OK and everyone's on the same side, what is there to discuss?

Universities, as huge melting pots of cultures and ideas, can easily produce cultural relativists by not providing students with the tools to at least form a sense of morality while continually emphasizing the need for multiculturalism. College shows us all the complexity of the world and how rarely there are absolutes. With few absolutes it becomes very difficult to assert any sort of morality. And cultural relativism is the easiest and most politically correct way out.

It's the sort of thought process that makes people unwilling to criticize philosophies of hatred. You can respect a person, their culture and still say what they do and say is wrong. Otherwise, there's no need for ethics or the law. Otherwise, I'm out of the job.

Do I agree that this graduate student, or that any of us, should be able to say and think what we want? Yes, and I would die in defense of that right, even if I think it could be utilized better.

It's his right as an American.

Do I agree with the philosophy contained in the articles he may have written? No, and I will spend the rest of my life attacking and condemning that ignorance.

It's my right as an American.

Tom McHenry is a junior in the School of Liberal Arts. He can be reached at opinions@purdueexponent.org.

Criticism surrounding article opposes First Amendment

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