Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!rutgers!att!chinet!patrick
From: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Freedom of hate
Message-ID: <8217@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 14 Apr 89 05:09:42 GMT
References: <14636@gryphon.COM>
Reply-To: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 76

In article <14636@gryphon.COM> richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) writes:
>So by this reasoning, any student at a State run university should
>be able to get anything published in the state run university 
>supported school newspaper, and if they can't it's censorship ?

Nope, not the same thing. Newspapers have editors; Usenet does not. When a 
writer submits something to a newspaper, he expects it to be edited by the
person in charge of doing so. Spelling and grammar will be corrected. The
article may be a bit too long and have to have a few paragraphs cut out.
The computer analogy to the newspaper would be a moderated news group.

Of course if the campus newspaper at the state run university always, or
rather consistently squelched one line of thinking by some writers and
always or rather consistently promoted and gave a great deal of print to
the opposing ideas of others, then probably a court could be convinced to
rule in the matter.

No prior permission is required to post a message in Usenet, other than the
administrative type; i.e. setting up an account, paying necessary fees to
the school, etc. Once Usenet is available to you, you post away, with
no one to preview/review your article until after it has been published.
Quite a difference from newspapers.

A better analogy would be the bulletin board in the Student Union Building.
Anyone walks up and tacks up a notice. There is no advance editing of what
appears there. Then one day the Building Manager notices there is not a
single inch of spare room on the board, and that new notices have been 
tacked right on top of old out of date ones. The board really looks crappy.

He cleans the whole board off and puts up a sign which says all notices
must be turned in to so-and-so, who will mark them 'approved' with a date
and put them up, and take them down two weeks later. Is he committing
censorship? No, he isn't; not unless the person in charge of stamping the
announcements and putting them up refuses to post notices about one student
organization while giving lots of space to some other group.

He can keep non-university related notices from being posted. He can keep
'apartment for rent' notices out of the section intended for 'employment
opportunities'; but he cannot use purely speech to decide the validity of
a posting. He cannot pick and choose among groups on campus based on his own
like or dislike of their philosophy and purpose. In this sense, the 
bulletin board is like a forum; all have historically been permitted to
make their announcements there, and all qualified persons (some affinity
with the university) and qualified announcements (some news about activities
at the university) must be accomodated.

Of course, he can always take the entire bulletin board down, claiming it
causes too much congestion in the hallway when people stop to read it. He
can move the entire board somewhere else, or put it all behind locked glass
windows to insure that you *must* give him your announcement first.

There is frequently confusion between censorship by the government, which
is unconstitutional, and the exercise of Administrative Convenience, which
has always been held to be quite legal.

Newspapers historically have had editors; bulletin boards historically have
not had editors. The former is not usually considered a forum, but the latter
is. The parallel to Usenet would be the random posting bulletin board rather
than a newspaper.

>And Patrick, notice how *short* this article is.

Yes, I noticed. Did you notice how *thoughtful* my article was?

>       ``Parents who have children, have children who have children''
>richard@gryphon.COM  decwrl!gryphon!richard   gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV

Did you ever notice how my .signature simply gives addresses to reach me
and does not slip another little mini-editorial to the tired reader in the
process?


-- 
Patrick Townson 
  patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@bu-cs.bu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 
  FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) /  MCI Mail: 222-4956