Free Speech or Vulgarity? : Conduct: Occidental College student may be suspended for his use of a four-letter word. Some say he is a victim of ‘political correctness.’

Is Tim Usher an insensitive punk who deserves to be suspended from Occidental College for flinging a vulgarity at a female student?

Or is he a victim of campus “political correctness” who faces extreme punishment for nothing worse than everyday incivility?

Usher’s fate, to be decided this week by campus authorities, has become a cause celebre at the small liberal arts college in Eagle Rock.

The squabble is a microcosmic reflection of the ongoing national debate over whether the behavior of college students should be restrained by codes of conduct. In an effort to create a more hospitable environment for minorities and women, some colleges have adopted “speech codes,” which make offensive remarks a cause for discipline.

Critics of these codes say they can lead to the repression of ideas or attitudes that challenge a campus’s orthodoxy. The most vociferous critics tend to be conservatives and 1st Amendment absolutists, who accuse campuses of sacrificing free expression for political correctness.

The incident that has brought Usher to the edge of suspension at Occidental--a campus without a speech code--had nothing to do with politics.

Late one night in November, Usher, a junior from Tarzana, was knocking on the locked door of a campus dorm, hoping a passerby would let him in so he could visit a friend.

The student director of the dorm, Jennifer Roth, a senior from Indiana, came to the door and told Usher that she would not open it. Campus policy says visitors cannot enter without advance permission from a dorm resident.

Usher protested and continued banging on the door, hoping another student would assist him. Roth called campus security. In response, Usher called her a four-letter word for vagina generally regarded as insulting.

“What I said wasn’t a commendable thing, but it’s a natural thing to respond to the way I was being treated,” said Usher, who is considered bright and iconoclastic by his friends and obnoxious by his detractors on the close-knit campus. “It’s not a heinous act. I don’t think the school should get involved in an act on that level.”

But it did.

In response to a complaint filed by Roth, a student peer review board, which deliberates in secret, found Usher guilty of “verbal abuse” and attempting to destroy or vandalize college property. The board suspended him for the rest of the school year. Usher has remained in school while appealing the action to the dean of students.

News of the decision broke in Occidental’s weekly campus newspaper last month after Usher brought the suspension to the attention of student editors, setting off a wave of indignant protest.

“I can understand that the Imperial State of Occidental can impose whatever protections they feel their students need,” student Jay Horton wrote in the paper, “but to maintain the untarnished self-image of Oxy’s more delicate members, how patronizingly authoritarian need the administration become? Usher’s cry was not a perversion of the 1st Amendment, but an important test of a college’s all-powerful restrictions.”

Most of the published views, as well as comments by student government leaders, have gone in that direction, though no one is defending Usher’s judgment. Last week, the student Senate voted to investigate the suspension.

Devy Holcomb, a campus feminist activist, said she was troubled by the suspension because it may have been decided arbitrarily. However, she said she felt some punishment was due Usher.

“We aren’t talking about what that word (that Usher used) made her (Roth) feel like, or what the historical context of that word is,” Holcomb said. “We’re talking about his right to say whatever the hell he wants.”

Holcomb said she would support the drafting of a campus policy “to deal with verbal harassment. . . . We need to have some sort of structure.”

Occidental has been through that debate before.

Last year, as the issue of speech codes and political correctness was becoming one of the hottest issues on American campuses, Occidental’s College Council, consisting of student, faculty and staff representatives, attempted to draft “principles of community” to define unacceptable conduct.

The council eventually abandoned the task.

“It was too restrictive, imposing one person’s values on the rest of the campus,” said student body President John Willsie. “Until you can get everyone to agree on what’s obscene, I’d rather err on the side of free speech.”

Roth, the target of Usher’s profanity, declined to comment. But it was clear she remains upset about the controversy.

Last week, she and a friend walked up to a second-floor balcony above the campus’ student activity center and took down a large paper banner, placed there by other students, condemning Occidental as a “fascist haven.” The banner did not criticize Roth by name but included her initials.

A few hours later, Willsie and another student government official, Ty McCutcheon, both angry at Roth’s action, hung another, equal-sized banner in the same spot.

“Why Was the Last Sign Pulled Down?” the new banner asked. “Because Oxy Is a Fascist Haven.”

The banner included a quotation attributed to former Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan: “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

The Occidental administration, citing confidentiality, has declined to comment on the suspension, beyond noting that Usher had twice been summoned to appear before peer boards. Usher said that he was banned last year from living in a student dorm after an argument with a campus postal employee.

Usher, whose father, Harry Usher, is the Los Angeles representative of an international executive search firm and was general manager of the 1984 Olympic Games, appealed the suspension on the grounds of a delay in notification. The dean of students’ office agreed to have a second peer review board rehear the case this Wednesday. In virtually all cases, the administration upholds peer review suspensions, a college spokesman said.

Usher contends that during his first hearing members of the review board “told me that I was endorsing the sexism in society” by using the profanity in question, “and that I sexually assaulted her (Roth) through words.”

That, Usher said, is evidence that the suspension recommendation was based on a politically correct interpretation of his action.

Nick Schou, a member of the campus newspaper staff, found another interpretation of the conflict.

In a column, Schou said it was understandable for Usher to be angered by restrictive campus residency rules that ban casual, unannounced dorm visits. Visitors must telephone from phones outside each dorm and be given permission by the resident they wish to visit.

“Maybe Tim should have saved his angry epithets for the crazed social engineers of residence life,” Schou wrote. “Finally, a student has dared to cross the line of blind acceptance to the policies of this school. . . . I can certainly identify with his frustration.”