The May 14 hearing was surreal. Outside, there were sound trucks, an army of
reporters, and Eden's pro bono lawyers, Sonya, Arnie, and Stefan, who were excluded
from the proceedings. Inside, Eden and Kors faced an intensely hostile panel of
three professors, one graduate student, and one undergraduate, false evidence in hand,
who had come to decide Eden's guilt or innocence. When Robin Read began the
presentation of her evidence, Kors interrupted and read the letter from Green
to Presser. The panel, Read, and the plaintiffs were dumbfounded to learn that
this was not to be a dispositive hearing.
The panel heard Eden out on the procedural grounds for dismissal. It then asked
the plaintiffs to talk about their experience of that year. The plaintiffs
discussed how they had suffered; Robin Read cried as they spoke; and the panel
convened in private. When they returned, they announced that they had ten days
by which to present a procedural report to the vice- provost for university life,
and, they warned Eden and Kors, that if, in the interim, they "so much as read one
word" in the media about this hearing or this preliminary judgment, then, in the
words of a professor on the panel, "it will go very hard on Eden Jacobowitz. Do
you understand that, Professor Kors? If you speak one word of this to the media,
it will go very hard on Eden." They imposed, in their own phrase, "a gag order."
They refused to dismiss the charges, and ruled that the trial should be carried over
until next fall.
Eden left the building to face a crush of media. News of Brobeck's broken promise
and of the general counsel's retreat was in newspapers and on radio and television.
The media, having waited for hours on a narrow street, seemed annoyed by the gag
order. Arnie Silverstein got off the deepest line of the affair: "I can't wait
to get off Penn's campus," he told the reporters, "and get back to the United States
of America." At an ACLU press conference, Stefan and Sonya explained the events
of the past week, and the ACLU spoke about free speech and due process, but
whenever they were asked about the hearing, they said that they couldn't talk.
When Kors returned to his office, there were scores of calls from the media, but
he told everyone that he could not discuss the hearing. When Dorothy Rabinowitz
called, Kors said the same thing, received an awesome three-minute lecture on a
free country, a free press, and his own lack of testosterone, and broke his silence
and told her everything.
By mid-afternoon, in response to intense media inquiry, Penn simply lied to all
inquirers and said that no gag order ever had been issued by the panel. The
panel's report was due on May 24, and with each day, media coverage intensified.
Eden's picture was on every newsstand, and the ACLU of Pennsylvania was giving
lessons to the country about why freedom and due process matter. There was ever
louder discussion of the likely effect on Hackney's NEH nomination. Indeed, a
member of Clinton's transition team politely and affably requested copies of
coverage of the affair by "the Jewish press." Shortly after, Hackney telephoned
Kors from Washington, D.C., and proposed a deal: if Eden apologized for rudeness,
he believed that the women would drop the case, and the University would dismiss
all charges. He laid out a scenario: "At noon on the 24th, [Vice Provost] Kim
[Morrisson] will hold a press conference, saying that the panel has met and has
decided that the case should be heard on its merits if not right away, then at
the beginning of the fall term. The women will hold a press conference on the
campus and drop the charges. Would Eden be willing to apologize after that?"
When he heard the proposal, Eden, who repeatedly had offered to apologize for
saying "water buffalo," instantly agreed, glad that this whole nightmare would
end. On May 24, 1993, the final act of the farce was played out. The hearing
panel delivered its verdict, and Kim Morrisson held a press conference announcing
that the hearing would occur in the fall. Almost immediately, the women, flanked
by a trustee and eminent professors, held a press conference, and claiming that
media attention had denied them the possibility of a fair hearing at Penn, they
dropped their charges. They said they now would take their case to public opinion
(which they never did). On the heels of that, the University announced that there
were no charges pending against Eden Jacobowitz. The ACLU and the Silversteins
held a press conference immediately after, and Eden once again expressed his
regrets. The ACLU again explained that no humane good could be accomplished
by such speech codes or such malicious prosecutions.
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9/19/98
