Ivy League Leader Lets Porn Parade as Protected Speech, Prof Says
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
March 26, 2004
(AgapePress) - A leading First Amendment scholar says Harvard University is allowing free-speech rights to be exploited on its campus, but he asserts there is no such thing as the "right to pornography."Harvard recently approved a student-run sex magazine called "H Bomb" that features photographs of naked undergraduates and articles about sexual issues. Undergraduate Katharina C. Baldegg, who proposed the magazine along with fellow student Camilla A. Hrdy, says she does not object to H Bomb being called porn.
Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd told the Harvard Crimson newspaper that officially approved organizations do not necessarily represent the views of the school, and she anticipates that varied reactions to the publication will come from "people who will value the free speech" and "people whose sensibilities are offended."
But Dr. David Lowenthal, professor emeritus of political science at Boston College and author of Present Dangers: Rediscovering the First Amendment (Spence Publishing, 2003), thinks it is "absurd" for Harvard to have approved the obscene publication.. He says instead of being a place of higher learning, Harvard University has become a place of low vulgarity.
Lowenthal says if the school's administrators think such obscene "free speech" is part of the First Amendment rights of students, they should be reminded that "even now, according to the Supreme Court, there isn't any right to pornography."
And Lowenthal points out that the publication is unapologetically obscene. "The students keep saying that this is going to be a pornographic magazine," he says, "so there isn't any right. The Supreme Court has never, never gone that far -- although it has allowed all kinds of things that in a way lead up to that."
But the scholar says there is an even larger issue to consider. He cites the principle that an institution can and should set rules governing its own community for the good of the members. "If you're part of an organization, that organization has a right to set those rules necessary to its own function -- in this case higher education," Lowenthal says.
The author feels Harvard officials are completely wrong if they imagine that their hands are tied. "The thought that they must bow to any kind of a Supreme Court or any other judicial ruling that is going to allow these students the same rights that they would have outside as individuals -- if they had such rights -- why, that itself is a major error," he says.
Lowenthal claims many universities like Harvard have "collapsed, and no longer have an integrity of their own." The scholar says it is important to remember that there was a time when many U.S. states and cities had systems in place to censor themselves, but he says those systems fell into disuse after the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned indecency.
