University goes easy on Editor using Vulgarity

The Board of Student Communications at Colorado State University has shown they have no sense of journalism, or personal responsibility or at the very least are just cowards. Their recent decision to admonish student newspaper editor David McSwane for public vulgarity in the newspaper’s op/ed page rather than fire him shows just how far we have regressed as a country of ideas and discourse.

     McSwane wrote a retort to a letter condoning the tasering of an obnoxious Florida student for refusing to leave the floor during a talk by U.S. Senator John Kerry. McSwane replied with a sophomoric four word rebuttal. His response, called a column or opinion piece was hardly that. The entire extent of McSwane’s rebuttal was Taser this. F**k Bush.

     Now there is no point to this comment by McSwane. Is he saying the tasering of the student was ordered by the President? If a moment’s thought was applied to the retort it would be obvious the President wasn’t personally involved in the incident. Was the point that President Bush was somehow involved or responsible in repressing public discourse? Wasn’t the young man who was tasered actually criticizing one of the President’s biggest critics in Senator John Kerry? Under those circumstances wouldn’t the evil President have preferred the police taser the senator?

     The University has become divided over McSwane’s juvenile retort and that is just going to make student life on campus all the more difficult. To the credit of the students, a great many of them demanded McSwane lose his job. Unfortunately a great many of them are running around screaming about McSwane’s right to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.

     I just love it when twenty-year-olds lecture us on a two-hundred year old freedom; a freedom that has been defined and molded by a thousand Supreme Court decisions over the decades According to these First Amendment proponents, Parents need to be on guard. Soon the Cartoon Network and the Family Channel and even such children’s staples as Sesame Street will soon be filled with vulgar words and epithets. Kindergarten teachers will soon be heard telling their five-year old students to shut the F**K up and sit down and of course that will be appropriate. They are of course just using their right to free speech.

     Now I appreciate free speech as much as anyone. Over the years it has allowed me to give innumerable opinions in the newspaper as well as on the web but I understand the lines that do not get crossed. The line of using vulgarity surpasses free speech. It just sends us back to the schoolyards and playgrounds and bars where children or adults just throw out inane and totally unacceptable words because they aren’t equipped to actually bring a disagreement to a root cause.

     McSwane and his lawyer cancelled a press conference after the hearing gave him a mere slap on the wrist for showing absolutely no journalistic or decent self control. Of course he cancelled. How could he complain about breaking a rule that a Junior High editor understands and then get away with it.

     In the event McSwane had decided to actually write an editorial, condemning the President or stating that Bush was inept, or even the worst President in the history of the country I would have backed the young editor’s right to say those words. Instead, McSwane, resorting to vulgarity that has no place in the mainstream media doesn’t deserve a moment’s support. Rather his words deserve a lifetime of condemnation.

     The young man also has shown just how personally selfish he is. After his brief diatribe, advertisers pulled out of the privately funded newspaper in droves requiring the entire newspaper’s staff to take a ten percent pay cut with possible further cuts or layoffs possible as this debate continues. A decent person would have admitted he failed to follow the code of ethics and walked away. Instead McSwane is on the job basking in the support of misguided students who think anyone can say anything they want without facing repercussions.

     Imagine just for a moment if this free speech writing editor had called African Americans that special racial slur. Or the Jewish community that word that is condemned by our standards of fairness and decency. Do you for a minute think that young man wouldn’t have been fired instantly? Of course he would have. Yet isn’t that freedom of speech protected by the first amendment. Of course it is not. The right to say what we think has always and must always be tempered with the truth, facts, and a responsibility not to condone or create hostility towards a group or specific person. It also lays upon us a responsibility to not use vulgarity, or name calling in mediums that have standards prohibiting such words or phrases.

     Freedom of speech has responsibilities and sensibilities. The Board of Student Communications at Colorado State University just doesn’t seem to understand this so what does that say of them as an arm of an institution of higher learning.

     Something else very sad is coming out of this issue. Conservative students, up in arms over the failure of the board to act appropriately against McSwane are thinking of starting their own conservative newspaper. What will be on campus then will be a newspaper heavily slanted to the right with another newspaper heavily slanted to the left. The truth then can take a back seat to ideologies and agendas that will twist something as pristine as a news story into something else to feed their readership’s point of view regardless if it is fact or not. The truth then be damned.