President Lawrence Bacow wants to solidify the university's positions on freedom of speech.
To that end, he has created the Task Force on Freedom of Expression, which will submit to him a university-wide policy on free speech. He announced the formulation of the task force in a Jan. 23 e-mail to the Tufts community.
The move follows a turbulent 14 months for the Tufts community, during which the university castigated its conservative student magazine, the Primary Source, for two controversial articles, then retracted some of the punishment because of freedom of speech concerns.
"I created the Task Force because I thought that the events of last spring indicated ambiguity in our university policy regarding freedom of expression," Bacow told the Daily in an e-mail.
Professor Jeswald Salacuse will chair the task force, which will be made up entirely of faculty and staff members. He is the Henry J. Braker professor of commercial law and a former dean of the Fletcher School.
Salacuse said that the team will only draft policy, as stated in the charge. "We are a task force that is going to make a recommendation to the president," Salacuse said. "We have no authority to legislate for the campuses."
Any policy recommended by the task force will need approval from the Board of Trustees before it can be added to the university's codes of conduct. The task force has yet to meet to discuss its work.
Bacow charged the task force "with recommending proposed policy language regarding freedom of expression at Tufts University that can be presented for adoption by the Board of Trustees," according to a Jan. 3 directive that he gave to its seven members.
In this charge, Bacow said that the Tufts community must have both freedom of expression and freedom from harassment.
"The operative issues in my mind are how best to preserve freedom of expression in a way that protects unpopular speech and ideas consistent with the First Amendment, and how to protect members of the community from harassment without defining it so broadly as to require the university to respond to offensive speech with administrative action," Bacow said in the charge.
Dean of Students Bruce Reitman said that although Bacow would like to see a proposal from the task force by the end of the semester, the deadline is not concrete.
"I don't think there's an absolute deadline; it's just a goal to do it as quickly - but, more importantly, as thoroughly - as possible," Reitman said.
The Committee on Student Life (CSL) ruled on Apr. 30 that the Primary Source had violated Tufts' non-discrimination policy in its Christmas carol parody, "O Come All Ye Black Folk," and in a later critique of fundamentalist Islam. The CSL ordered that the publication start attributing all articles to authors, and found the magazine guilty of harassment.
In August, the publication appealed the CSL's verdict, and Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser ruled in the Primary Source's favor. Glaser reversed the ruling on article attribution, saying that it violated students' freedom of speech. He upheld the harassment verdict, though.
Bacow wrote in an e-mail to the university on Aug. 27 that the "CSL was ill-advised to hear this case."
Bacow went on to say that he did not want any restrictions on freedom of speech at Tufts. "While Tufts is a private institution and not technically bound by First Amendment guarantees, it is my intention to govern as President as if we were," Bacow said. "I believe that students, faculty, and staff should enjoy the same rights to freedom of expression at Tufts as they would if they attended or worked at a public university."
Former Primary Source editors expressed skepticism at Bacow's intention to create a First Amendment-friendly environment at Tufts.
"President Bacow is clearly embarrassed for his role in censoring political speech last spring, so he's clearly trying to do an about-face to make up for that," said junior Matthew Gardner-Schuster, who served as editor-in-chief of the magazine between April and December 2007.
Gardner-Schuster also expressed frustration that two of the seven members on the task force, Associate Professors Steven W. Hirsch and Colin Orians, were serving on the CSL during the Primary Source hearing in April.
Orians still serves on the CSL, and Hirsch serves on the Equal Education Opportunity Committee, Reitman said. Both committees deal with student rights and freedoms.
Senior Alison Hoover, who served as the Source's editor-in-chief in the fall of 2006, said that she hopes the task force will fulfill Bacow's promise of ensuring First Amendment rights.
"I believe the ideal policy is the embodiment of the principles of the First Amendment allowing free speech on campus, regardless of the potential offensive nature of that speech," Hoover said.
Junior Duncan Pickard, a TCU senator and the chair of the Media Advocacy Board, expressed disappointment that students would not be on the task force.
"I think that moving forward ... means the TCU Senate and the Media Advocacy Board should take a step to gauge student opinions better," Pickard said. "Student government should be empowered to hold a campus-wide discussion about what our community values are and what they should be, and help the Senate translate that into policy."
Reitman noted that, in the charge, Bacow encouraged the task force to reach out to different student organizations for their opinions and feedback.
Pickard said he hopes that the task force will create a definitive policy.
"I think that hopefully the task force will come out with a policy that is very clear about what students can and can't do," Pickard said.
