On the night of January 13, 1993, Eden Jacobowitz, a freshman at the University of
Pennsylvania, had been writing a paper for an English class when a sorority began
celebrating its Founders' Day beneath the windows of his high-rise dormitory apartment.
The women were singing very loudly, chanting, and stomping. It had prevented
him from writing, and it had awakened his roommate. He shouted out the window,
"Please keep quiet," and went back to work. Twenty minutes later, the noise yet
louder, he shouted out the window, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" The women were
singing about going to a party. "If you want a party," he shouted, "there's a
zoo a mile from here." The women were black. Within weeks, the administrative
judicial inquiry officer (JIO) in charge of Eden's case, Robin Read, decided to
prosecute him for violation of Penn's policy on racial harassment. He could
accept a "settlement" -- an academic plea bargain -- or he could face a judicial
hearing whose possible sanctions included suspension and
expulsion.1
The JIO's finding that there was "reasonable cause" to believe that Eden had
violated Penn's racial harassment policy for having shouted "Shut up, you water
buffalo!" to late-night noisemakers under his window was outrageous in terms of
normal human interactions at a university. Loud and raucous festivities had
occurred beneath the windows of students since the Middle Ages. For centuries,
would-be scholars, disturbed or awakened in the still hours, had shouted their
various and picturesque disapprovals at the celebrants. "Water buffalo" would
have been one of the mildest such epithets ever uttered.
The JIO's decision also was unconscionable given the history of the debates over
speech codes at Penn. In 1987, over the strenuous objections of a handful of
professors, Sheldon Hackney, President of the University of Pennsylvania,
promulgated the University's first modern-era restrictions on speech, in the
form of prohibitions on "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or
victimizes individuals on the basis of race, ethnic or national origin...and
that has the purpose or effect of interfering with an individual's academic or
work performance; and/or creates an
intimidating or offensive academic, living, or work
environment."2 In September 1989, to explain the policy
to incoming students, the administration gave specific examples of what would
constitute the serious crime of "harassment": students who drew a poster to
advertise a "South of the Border" party, showing a "lazy" Mexican taking a
siesta against a wall; a faculty member who referred to blacks as "ex-slaves";
and students who, in protest of "Gay Jeans Day" (when undergraduates were asked
to dress in jeans to show solidarity with gay and lesbian students), held a
satiric sign proclaiming "Heterosexual Footwear
Day."3
There were ironies in this presentation of "incidents of harassment." When
Louis Farrakhan spoke at Penn 1988, over the protests of several Jewish organizations,
Hackney issued a statement in which he conceded that Farrakhan's statements were
"racist, and anti-Semitic, and amount to scapegoating," but concluded: "In an
academic community, open expression is the most important value. We can't have
free speech only some of the time, for only some people. Either we have it, or we
don't. At Penn, we have it."4
Indeed, in the very month that his administration was prohibiting social criticism
of Gay Jeans Day and posters of sleeping Mexicans, Hackney was campaigning, to
great national applause, against Senator Jesse Helms's efforts to deny federal
funding, by the National Endowment for the Arts, of works such as Andres Serrano's
"Piss Christ," a crucifix immersed in the artist's urine. According to Hackney,
it was impossible "to cleanse public discourse of offensive material" without
producing "an Orwellian nightmare" or the horror of "self-censorship."
"We are not," in Hackney's words, "Beijing" (an argument put to him earlier against his
own speech code), but the "Land of Liberty," where efforts "to limit
expression" deemed "offensive" violated the essence and spirit of "democracy"
and made social "satire" impossible.5
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9/19/98
