Friday, October 12, 2007

Hate Jumble at Columbia: Crime or Speech?   [Candace de Russy]

What’s behind Columbia Teachers College’s stonewalling for two days before handing over surveillance tapes that could shed light on what malevolent person or persons hung a noose outside a black professor’s office? College officials say that privacy concerns had prompted them to first request a subpoena; lamely, they also told officers for a day and a half that the technician in charge of the surveillance cameras was not available.

An NYPD spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, commented that police were "disappointed and surprised" at the school's initial refusal to turn over the tapes. "It is always important in an investigation to get information as quickly as possible," Mr. Browne said. "It gives the perpetrator less time to concoct a story or cover their tracks."

This peculiar turn of events raises some intriguing questions:

Did Columbia, believing the hanging of a noose to be a hate crime, call in the police in the first place? If so, it is passing strange that the university did not forthrightly and expeditiously cooperate with the hate-crimes unit brought in by the NYPD.

But maybe Columbia does not think a crime has been committed but rather that the incident is a matter of hate speech and can thus be handled by the university itself.

Perhaps university president and first amendment scholar Lee Bollinger will enlighten the police and the public on this issue.

While he’s at it, he can also clarify whether the anti-Semitic vandalism discovered yesterday in a Columbia bathroom, consisting in a caricature of a man wearing a yarmulke above a swastika, constitutes hate speech or crime.

And would Bollinger make the same distinction regarding students’ use of violent Brown Shirt tactics over a year ago to prevent a speaker from expressing a view on immigration on which they disagreed? The president dithered for months and months in allowing judgment – in the form of a wrist slap – to be passed on these thugs. What about their reprehensible action crime? Crime or speech?

10/12 11:07 AMShare