ow we name things is hardly trivial.  I could be merely expressing my informed opinion about something.  Or, I could be launching a full-fledged verbal attack.  Now, what exactly am I doing when I express my disagreement with your views?  Offhand, it would not occur to me to think that I am attaching you.  Although it might be that I am attacking you, that most certainly need not be the case.  Nor am I attacking you if I present arguments and reasons for why I disagree with you.  This is so even if you have counter-arguments to my arguments. 

So it came as quite a surprise to me to run across a blog-entry entitled “When Colleagues Attack!”  In my blog entry, I confined my remarks to the issue; accordingly, it would not have occurred to me to think that I had attacked the writing professor whose students had criticized her on the website Facebook.Com.  I did not call her names.  I did not make allusions to her character.  What I did do, however, was defend the view that the University did not handle the situation properly and that what the students said was protected by the First Amendment as free speech.   Unless I am missing something, this does not constitute attacking her—at least not unless you hold the view that expressing views at odds with hers thereby constitutes an attack. 

Professor Rachel Collins maintains a blog.  I maintain a blog.  She is absolutely entitled to express her opinion about my views regarding the situation.  She has not in fact attacked me.  But just as I do not suppose that she attacked me, I am at a loss as to just how it turns out that I have attacked her—unless disagreement thereby constitutes an attack.  But since I assume that she rejects that view in her own case, I am going to allow myself that possibility in my own case.

Now, I stand by my initial assessment even as I take seriously the difference in standing between me and Ms. Collins.  I am a male; I am a full professor.  She, as the pronoun would suggest, is a female; she is a graduate student.  This is not a trivial difference at all.  And I am quite mindful of the fact that she is vulnerable in ways that I am not.

Let me also be unmistakably clear that I most certainly hold that the remarks made by the students were utterly distasteful.  Many of those remarks were in fact mean-spirited.  Here are four such comments made by students on Facebook.Com:

■I’d rather watch my brother masturbate to midget porn with my mom than go to your class

■I’d rather be eaten out by a monkey than go to your class

■I’d rather eat all the hair stuck in the drain of the showers than go to your class

■I’d rather scrape the discharge off your vagina from your yeast infection than go to your class

Are these remarks utterly vulgar and distasteful?  Absolutely.  Are these remark threatening, harassing, slanderous, and libelous?  I do not see that they are. 

Would it have been better had the students not have made such remarks?  Obviously it would have been better.  I am no fool.  I can see the horrendous indecency of the remarks. 

But the indecency of these remarks is not the issue.  The issue is whether or not these remarks ought to have been protected as a form of free speech; and is it relevant that Ms. Collin’s is a female graduate student. 

Well, I do not see the relevance of being male or female here.  For I can think of equally disgusting sexual allusions that might be said regarding a male. 

I also think it quite interesting that Ms. Collins rather nicely passed over my claim that I accept, in the name of free speech, the right of black students on the Syracuse University campus to regard me as an Uncle Tom.  I have always accepted that view.  I have not always been a full professor with a long list of publications.  Yet, Ms. Collins masterfully passes over that reality. 

Now, calling a black an Uncle Tom is obviously not parallel to making disgusting sexual allusions.  But as far as a black insult goes, the label “Uncle Tom” pretty much defines the nadir of things.  Yet, I accept that black students should be free to have this opinion of me and to express it on a public website such as Facebook.Com.

And if we are going to move into oppressive-trump card mode, let me just say that no non-black on this campus has a clue as to how painful that appellation is.  The depth of alienation that I often feel walking across campus is extraordinary.  I might as well be a spirit or something, as there is an utter sense of invisibility that I have in the eyes of so many black students.  No recognition; no greeting.  Worse, most of my white colleagues and most of my Latino colleagues are utterly oblivious to the depth of that pain.  Nay, I would dare say that some think that I deserve it.   If it were not for my publication record, it is not at all inconceivable to me that many a white and many a non-white on this campus and perhaps among members of the administration would have found a way to dispose of me.   I have dared to have the courage of my convictions.  And liberals on the Syracuse University campus have had more than a little difficulty with that, their undying committment to open-mindedness notwithstanding. 

It would be one thing if I were talking about minority students whom I have taught.  But not so.  I am talking about minority students to whom I have never ever said a word and who have never heard me say anything.  Would things be worse were such opinions of me expressed on a public website?  This is hardly obvious to me. 

So I know something about pain on the Syracuse University campus.  Noting that I am a male, Ms. Collins blithely passed over the issue of pain to which I drew attention.  How is the argument supposed to go?  Is it that tenured males are in no position to say anything about moral pain?  The problem, undoubtedly, is that no one thinks of me as an underdog, though I am visibly and unmistakably black; accordingly, my being considered an Uncle Tom by black students was conveniently passed over. 

This brings me to the issue of status.  It would be bothersome if the amount of free speech which students had turned upon a professor’s status with the university.  This is especially so if an instructor’s actually standing with the university is not impacted by the remarks. 

The truth of the matter is this.  Syracuse University requires anonymous teaching evaluations and it claims to take these very, very, very seriously.  Students are free to give the instructor any ranking that they please.  I could be missing something.  But next to anonymous teaching evaluations, stupid unsavory remarks on Facebook.Com have next to no impact at all upon an instructor’s university standing.  Yet, there is no accountability here at all.  Students can evaluate professors as they please.  And yet, the University trips all over itself attaching importance to teaching evaluations.  Given how the University carries on about them, one would think that teaching evaluations represetend some form of Platonic truth that descended from the heavens. 

So let us see.  On the one hand, we have (a) stupid and nasty and distasteful comments on a public website that the University does not take into account in when assessing an instructor (where no slander or harassment or threat or libel is involved).  On the other, we have (b) anonymous teaching evaluations where, without any accountability at all, students can give a professor any ranking that they please and which are accorded enormous weight by Syracuse University.  Whether one female or female or white or non-white, which leaves one infinitely more vulnerable in terms of one’s university standing?  The answer is too obvious for words: (b).

Given the truth that one’s vulnerability as an untendured instructor lies with (b) and not at all with (a), I can consistently hold that the view that I hold about the ACLU.  I do not deny that the psychic pain of (a).  In fact, I have spoken to the psychic pain quite personally, though that was ignored.  However, I hold that in the absence of very special circumstances psychic pain alone does not suffice to limit free speech, which is why I hold that the ACLU did the right thing in supporting the right of Nazis to march through Skokie (IL), a town with a great many Holocaust survivors. 

Three final comments: (i) The University could have and should have handled the matter in a more constructive manner rather than in the ex post facto and ad hoc manner in which it did.  (ii) I do not mean to discount the psychic pain that Ms. Collins has endured.  I commiserate with her in this regard.  But I consistently hold that psychic pain alone does not warrant limiting free speech.  If I thought for a moment that her standing with Syracuse University would be adversely impacted by those stupid Facebook.Com remarks, I would be an unfailing ally.  There are undoubtedly cases where it is not at all clear whether a person’s university standing will be adversely impacted or not.  Not so in this instance.  I know somethng about being treated unfairly by students.  And it is both that knowledge and pain that informs the position that I have taken in this blog-entry.  (iii) In the oddest of ways, freedom of speech did the professor a favor.  Or so it is, given that the students could have anonymously turned in teaching evaluations that gave her a completely negative rating; and these evaluations would have been taken seriously by Syracuse University.