For those of us that follow freedom of speech and higher education issues, it would be tough to have missed the recent controversy over showing of “Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge” (described as a hard core porn flick) at the University of Maryland-College Park. While many aspects of this controversy are tough to asses from afar, from whether the movie constitutes constitutionally unprotected speech to the original purpose for showing it, what concerns us more is the response and pressure from legislators over this event.
To recap, the largely student-run union at UMD scheduled a showing of the movie along with a safe sex talk/lecture from Planned Parenthood. Legislators, specifically Republican Senator Andrew Harris balked and used the various tools in the legislative toolbox to pressure the University into canceling the showing, which they temporarily did. Students, led by one of the slates for the student government—the Student Power Party—balked at the idea that there was something they weren’t allowed to see and that the pressure from the legislature was determining their extracurricular programming. They re-organized a showing of parts of the film, accompanied by a panel discussion on the many issues surrounding its showing. In response to the controversy and continued pressure from Senator Harris and others in the Senate, the Board of Regents for the University are now looking into/developing policies for when, if and how similar films will be shown on campuses.
Unfortunately, it would seem that many of the reporters and commentators on this series of events are focused on at best tangential points. College students being interested in watching a porn flick, talking about sex is not exactly ground breaking. The issue that is more interesting is who decides what programming is allowed on campus—members of the campus community or politicians and their agendas?
While the legislators stopped short of making this sort of event illegal, they certainly used a powerful legislative tool—appropriations—to ensure that their will would determine what content could be present on campus. In this case, that action came about as a result of a legislator’s view of porn. But, this isn’t the first such action. Earlier this year, legislators made threats over higher education budgets in both Georgia and Alaska because of faculty members’ expertise in sexual education and environmental issues respectively. In 2007, members of the Wisconsin Assembly went so far as to try and slash the budget for departments whose topics they disliked.
The bottom line is, decisions over what is taught on campus belong on campus where they can be driven by the latest expertise in the field. Likewise, presuming the speech is constitutionally protected in the first place (again, regarding this specific event, we’re not in a place to know for sure), students should be able to speak and hear any manner of views on the campus quad and similar areas where student programming is typical. Let’s have academic concerns, not political agendas, rule the campus.