Free Speech Sale: $10!
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Student Maciej Murakowski published an appallingly offensive web page of “jokes”–mostly about sex and at the expense of women–which offended and frightened some of his peers at the University of Delaware. He was suspended in the tension-threaded days after 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech, on April 19, 2007. The brother of a female student reported to campus police that his sister who lived in the same residence hall as Murakowski, had found his web page and was frightened.
Her fear doesn’t seem unfounded: Murakowski writes about an affection for black gloves, and a fantasy about choking someone while wearing them. He makes some pretty odd similes, saying gloves “make me feel menacing,” like OJ Simpson, not “the spindly pale virgin” he declares himself to be. Also on the page were meticulous instructions on how to skin a cat and jokes about rape, kidnapping and torture. (Sounds like a total laff fest, right?)
Murakowski and his lawyer, David Finger, sought damages. The original intent of the lawsuit was reinstatement, but the plodding pace of the legal system and time solved that problem: His one semester suspension expired and he completed his engineering degree. The university required he get a letter from a mental health professional certifying he was not a threat to himself or others before he returned to class, which he did. However, Murakowski was also told not to visit his residence hall during the suspension, but he did twice. He was also already on disciplinary probation at the time of the suspension, for a copyright violation. These things mitigated Judge Mary Pat Thynge’s judgment that his suspension was inappropriate and the web page was protected speech–albeit the kind of protected speech that isn’t attractive or substantial to most people, but protected all the same. Thynge found the university was justified for suspending Murakowski for his other transgressions. Thus, Murakowski was only awarded $10. (Most of which will probably go to his lawyer.)
As you can see on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s news blog, the case makes it hard for higher education officials to know how to differentiate between a justified suspension–because of a student’s seeming capacity for acts that harm himself or others–and an unnecessary intrusion into free speech. What do you make of it?