CFP96 Paper

For the plenary session: On-line speech on campus

Declan McCullagh

In the last year, a wave of student online speech restrictions has swept across America's colleges and universities. Administrators are cracking down on student web publishing at Georgia State University, the University of South Carolina, Northwestern University, Winthrop University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Florida, and IMSA, an elite public high school in Illinois. Local talk show hosts are complaining about "socalist" web pages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Offensive" posts on a singles discussion group led to "obscenity" charges at the University of Memphis. Carnegie Mellon University is considering an Orwellian speech code that extends to online communications, and has yet to restore the Usenet newsgroups banned in November 1994. At Cornell University, four freshmen who sent misogynistic email to their friends -- who then redistributed it -- were pressured into "volunteering" for community service.

Often administrators try to censor material that portrays their school in a negative light. In other cases, the Communications Decency Act has caused university administrators to become increasingly nervous over their liability for student web pages and Usenet posts. In my experience, administrators have enacted bans that usually result in restrictions on publications that would be allowed if distributed on newsprint.

Justice on Campus Project

        http://joc.mit.edu/

Fight-Censorship Mailing List

        http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/top/ 

Information about censorship attempts at: 

        Winthrop University

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=1135 

        University of South Carolina

                http://joc.mit.edu/carolina.html

        Georgia State University

                http://joc.mit.edu/gsu/

        IMSA (Public High School)

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=1157 

        University of Florida

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=986 

        University of Massachusetts

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=1013 

        Carnegie Mellon University

                http://joc.mit.edu/cmu.html

                http://joc.mit.edu/fcca.html

        University of Memphis

                http://joc.mit.edu/roundup.ht
ml#Memphis

        Emerson College

                http://joc.mit.edu/roundup.ht
ml#Emerson

        Cornell University

                http://joc.mit.edu/cornell.html

        Northwestern University

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=1340 

        University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

                http://fight-censorship.dementia.org/fight-censorship/dl?num=1325 

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