Free Speech Right Violated, Cal Poly Student Editors Say

Student editors of two alternative magazines circulated at Cal Poly Pomona say their right to free speech is being violated by faculty and other university employees, whom they accuse of tearing down politically provocative flyers they post on campus.

A third organization, Student Call to Organize for Peace and Empowerment (SCOPE), also has had its posters torn down, member Sachin Kalbag, 23, said.

Members of SCOPE and editors of Low and Grotesque magazines, who obtained school permission to post the flyers, have enlisted the help of the First Amendment Coalition, a civil rights group.

The controversy has also come to the attention of Cal Poly Pomona President Bob Suzuki, who had lunch recently with Low student editor Mark Cromer to discuss the problem.

Cal Poly officials deny there is an orchestrated campaign to tear down flyers approved for posting and say they plan to issue a statement saying such behavior will not be tolerated.

The students concede they do not know for a fact that there is an organized campaign to tear down the posters, which often focus on controversial topics and contain profane language. But the students fault the university for not responding promptly to their complaints and for not making it clear immediately that such actions are unacceptable.

“It’s not so much that (the posters have been torn down), it’s that the (administration) is not doing anything to stop it and, therefore, implicitly condoning it,” said John Engelke, 23, editor of Grotesque, which will make its formal debut this spring.

Engelke describes the magazine as a “journal of creative fiction, naked commentary and other interesting stuff.”

“We believe there is systematic, institutionalized censorship on campus,” added Cromer, 27, who is a staff writer for the Daily News in Whittier and has written free-lance articles for The Times. “This is a university and it should be an uninhibited free forum for debate. But these bureaucrats are basically control freaks.”

All three groups say they often put up 300 flyers one night and return the next morning to find them all torn down.

Low, which is published off campus and has no official affiliation with Cal Poly Pomona, and Grotesque are known for tweaking the school psyche with posters that some find offensive.

One recent flyer featured a photo of a baby allegedly deformed by a nuclear accident in Central Asia in the former Soviet Union. “Nuclear Energy Means Cleaner Air . . . Just ask this Kazakhstan mongoloid,” the poster said.

Cal Poly officials initially claimed that those tearing down the posters were only exercising their own rights to free speech.

In a letter to Cromer dated Dec. 18, Gail A. DiSabatino, director of the Office of Student Life, wrote:

“Faculty, staff and students . . . are encouraged to exercise their privilege of free speech. If they find a poster distasteful or offensive, we, of course, would ask that they . . . allow others the right of free speech and yet individuals would be within their constitutional rights to remove that poster as a form of expression.”

Cromer, who has published Low for five years, then approached the First Amendment Coalition for help. On Jan. 5, the coalition’s executive director, Terry Francke, sent Cal Poly Pomona officials a three-page letter blasting the university’s “utter insensitivity” to Cromer’s complaints. Francke called the tearing down of campus-approved posters “petty theft, malicious mischief or both--a criminal offense.”

In the last month, university officials have moved to distance themselves from DiSabatino’s letter.

After meeting with Cromer, Suzuki said he intends to issue a statement that tearing down placards approved for posting violates students’ First Amendment rights. Meanwhile, a committee is revising the campus policy on posters and signs.

“Dr. Suzuki is a staunch defender of the First Amendment,” said Norm Schneider, Cal Poly’s director of news and publications. “Certainly Mark’s material has sometimes been offensive to some people, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to take action against something they disagree with. If anyone is found tearing down material that has been properly posted, they would be told that is wrong.”

Both magazines have roots in Cal Poly Pomona’s mainstream student media. Cromer and Engelke have written for the Poly Post newspaper and OPUS, the school’s official magazine but said they felt stymied there.

Cromer said his moment of reckoning came in 1988, when OPUS censored a four-letter word in the magazine. He decided to start his own magazine, and Low’s first cover that year featured the same four-letter word in big letters with the word censored stamped across it, next to the text of the First Amendment.

Beginning with an initial printing of 200, the irreverent magazine now publishes 2,000 copies, which are snatched up quickly. A recent issue skewered commentator and politician Bruce Herschensohn, detailed one woman’s diary of her abortion, discussed the difference between pornography and erotica and described one writer’s drunken weekend.

Past issues have taken jabs at former Cal Poly Pomona President Hugh La Bounty.

“Most of the time it’s hard to get a copy,” Schneider affirmed. “It’s grabbed up pretty fast. Most of the people I see reading it have a good chuckle over it.”

Cromer and Engelke say they do not use profane language or sexual imagery gratuitously but rather to convey a political message.

“These words are the only ones that will convey what we want to say,” Engelke said. “We want to offer something a little more intriguing, provoking and interesting to our students.”