CAMPUS CORRESPONDENT : University E-Mail a Test of Internet Free Speech

Last month, four Cornell University freshmen attracted national attention with their innovative use of the Internet. The students’ brief encounter with fame did not stem from academic achievement, but rather from a misogynist e-mail message they authored and titled “75 reasons why women (bitches) should not have freedom of speech.”

Calling themselves “the four players of Cornell,” the students complied a list of offensive and threatening commentary and distributed it via e-mail to 20 friends. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the message quickly infiltrated computer networks across the country, prompting death threats against the authors and other outraged responses from women nationwide.

Within days of its inception, the list sparked heated free-speech debates on college campuses as students, faculty members and administrators reflected on the enormous role the Internet has come to play in university discourse.

What began as an arcane hobby among nerdy computer hackers has evolved into an essential pipeline of information for college students. Cornell, like many other universities, is gradually developing e-mail dependence. Each student is given a network identification and free access to the university’s Internet resources. Phone calls to professors and visits to office hours are beginning to decline, as students favor the convenience of electronic mail.

Cornell’s electronic addiction is not unique, and neither are the problems created by rapidly expanding access to computer facilities.

Caltech recently expelled a doctoral candidate for allegedly sexually harassing another student via e-mail. The school’s decision sends a clear message that cyber harassment will not be tolerated on the campus. But Jinsong Hu’s contention that he did not author many of the harassing messages illustrates a fundamental problem with the national embrace of the Internet.

More than other forms of communication, e-mail is both anonymous and instantaneous, providing potential harrassers with numerous ways to misuse the Internet.

After conducting an investigation, Cornell’s judicial administrator exonerated “the four players” of sexual harassment and misuse of computer resources because the authors intended the list to remain a joke among friends and none of the original recipients were offended. In forwarding the mail to other students, however, the initial recipients allowed the offense to spread.

After the university announced its decision, another message began to travel through the Cornell network--this one a letter from Judicial Administrator Barbara L. Krause. The e-mail, marked “confidential,” detailed Krause’s opinion of the case as well as her characterization of the freshmen authors of the list as the “four little pigs.” The problem with this message, however, was that it was not written by Krause or any other Cornell official. Rather, someone outside the university used the judicial administrator’s network identification to present a forged letter to the entire community. As experts indicated in the Caltech case, it is nearly impossible to prove the authenticity of an e-mail message.

This problem may result in nationwide efforts to restrict speech over the Internet.

In 1992, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that called into question the legality of campus or other speech codes restricting “fighting words” that have the potential to lead to injury or violence. Many campuses, prior to the ruling on a St. Paul, Minn., city ordinance, had adopted codes that banned racist, sexist or homophobic speech among its students.

While a speech code may have prevented the Cornell students from disseminating their offensive list--which included phrases such as “if she can’t speak, she can’t cry rape”--university restrictions of speech set a dangerous precedent and giving students an unrealistic perception that society beyond the protective walls of college is offense free.

Incidents like those at Cornell and Caltech will no doubt inspire colleges to consider abridging their students’ freedom of speech on the Internet, but administrators must resist this temptation.

The American university is perhaps the last forum where the marketplace of ideas has a chance to survive. Students should be permitted to freely express their divergent opinions and then decide for themselves which views are worth supporting. If campuses begin to selectively stifle forms of expression, students will be stripped of their ability to pursue their diverse educational paths.

Our universities will most likely become test cases for a broader national investigation into the benefits and drawbacks of the current technological boom, but the 1st Amendment rights of college students must not be compromised in the process.