Your editorial on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s ranking of Syracuse University as the worst violator of free speech was deeply flawed. The crux of your argument is that because The Daily Orange and other publications exist, because people can rate professors online and send out party invitations, and because the First Amendment is written on the side of Newhouse III, free speech is protected. You then mention my own case (SUCOLitis) and Hill TV, suggesting them to be merely extreme cases and not characteristic. This misses the point spectacularly.

A university, as with a country, is not characterized by its treatment of day-to-day noncontroversial behavior but by the behavior it seeks to regulate. Your logic would posit that China is not a totalitarian state since people can write some things on the Internet and write some things in independent publications. Furthermore, you overlook the First Amendment having been written in direct view of the chancellor’s office following a faculty panel’s decision to denounce her handling of the Hill TV saga.

It is disingenuous to use my ability, and those of other detractors, to speak out as evidence of the protection of free speech. SU can only police behavior within its own sphere of influence. As a private school, it is unable to stop those people using the public channels the First Amendment protects. It was those channels that people used to speak out, not the school’s own forums. The attempt to gag me from speaking publicly that the College of Law attempted, and which this newspaper previously criticized, should be evidence enough that SU is far from ‘hypersensitive’ about the matter.

Len Audaer

Syracuse University College of Law