Tribe 8 performance within the bounds of artistic expression

Regarding Tribe 8's controversial performance in the disco: I can say with certainty that the behavior in question was in no way generically different from that exhibited by many other bands and performers who have been seen in various campus venues over the past 25 years. Oberlin has a long history of sponsoring the sort of performances that would make Tribe 8 look pretty tame.

And yet...in the Nov. 8 issue of The Oberlin Review, President Dye was quoted as saying : "The Tribe 8 Concert was absolutely contradictory to the values of this community. It was way over the line, wherever you want to put it."

Well ... this got me a little worried. Because if it's true that Tribe 8 is way over the line, what about a lot of the images that I (among others) routinely share with students in classes devoted to public controversy and the arts? Just for starters: the homoerotic and sado-masochistic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, or images of Karen Finley smearing chocolate on her otherwise naked body, or Andres Serrano's notorious photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine, or Lynda Benglis' famous advertisement from the pages of Artforum  in which she anticipated the spirit, if not the letter of Tribe 8, well over 20 years ago. Just for the record: Benglis posed naked with a very large dildo between her legs.

So if Tribe 8 is incompatible with the standards of this community, surely that's also true of much of what I teach in my classes. And I assume that this would apply to many professors in the Art Department and the English Department as well.

Now at first, I thought that the only courses of mine that might run afoul of some new Presidentially-imposed Standard of Decency are those that deal with art of the 20th century. Surely, I had no reason to worry about images I might exhibit in courses that focus on classical drama. But then I thought some more ... and remembered that you can't teach the classical dramatist Aristophanes without talking about the enormous phallic costume accessories that his performers originally wore (way back in the 5th Century B.C.) , the so called Golden Age of Greek Culture.

President Dye no doubt, will be quick to reassure us that she has no intention of infringing in any way on the sacred principle of academic freedom. But can we really establish such a hard and fast distinction between what's permitted in the Disco and what's permitted in the classroom?

I for one often assign or recommend to my students events that occur in the 'Sco and in a wide variety of alternative performance spaces all over the campus. And it seems to me essential to the Oberlin ethos that we not create artificial distinctions between the curricular and the extracurricular. I've always thought (or at least wanted to believe) that the heart of our philosophy of residential life is that what happens in spaces like The Student Union is co-curricular rather than extra-curricular. Any attempt to establish a line that divides what's permitted in the disco from what's permitted in the classroom is flirting with what civil libertarians call the slippery slope. And the slope that President Dye has perched herself on so precariously is made of pure ice and it's set at an angle of about 45 degrees. In other words, there's no way not to slip off.

Now, these icy images that I'm conjuring up give rise to another fear often voiced by civil libertarians: the fear that statements like those that President Dye has uttered about Tribe 8 will have a chilling effect  on freedom of speech and expression.

Here's the great danger as I see it: Even if President Dye appears to back down, and doesn't publicly or officially impose a new "Decency Code," it may well be that the damage has already been done. In other words: when the person who has the responsibility for setting the moral and intellectual tone of the institution - and who also just happens to have the ultimate power to hire and fire - when that person let's it be known that certain forms of speech and expression are deeply offensive to her, she's bound to deter anyone who might be tempted to book such artists or speakers in the future.

Two years ago, President Dye attacked the student publication Below The Belt  in the pages of The Review.  She suggested that perhaps the organization had violated the terms of its charter and that its writers might even have been guilty of libel. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Below the Belt  soon withered away, and to the best of my knowledge has not been heard from since.

No doubt, some of you will say good riddance, because Below The Belt  - as tasteless and numbingly unfunny as it often was - nonetheless specialized in deflating Politically Correct Orthodoxies of the sort that often hold sway at schools like Oberlin. (Parenthetically, I might add that it's a contradiction in terms to suggest that a satirical magazine could ever be guilty of libel. It's legally impossible. Nobody sues Mad Magazine  or The National Lampoon  for libel. But when it's the president of the College who makes such a threat, the threat carries a lot of weight whether it deserves to or not. Similarly, when the Sexual Offense Review Committee is impaneled as it was last week - to decide whether or not Tribe 8 and the people who booked them somehow committed an act of sexual harassment, that's an example of the chilling effect written large and clear. (How, I ask you, can an artistic performance - even if it contains images or representations of sexual violence - and to the best of my knowledge this one didn't, but even if it did - how can such a performance possibly constitute sexual harassment?)

I'm not suggesting that President Dye or any other member of this community doesn't have every right to be personally offended by a publication like Below the Belt  or a band like Tribe 8. But given the power that the President wields, when she expresses her subjective likes or dislikes, it's incumbent upon her to reaffirm Oberlin's traditional commitment to unfettered freedom of expression.

There's been a lot of talk in the last few days about the decline of morality at Oberlin, about a lowering of standards; and I'm inclined to agree: For I can't think of any previous Presidential Proclamations that have so comprised Oberlin's history of support for the First Amendment. And the First Amendment, we have to remember, applies not just to words, but to what the Supreme Court calles "speech plus," images and other modes of expression that may be non-verbal, but which still communicate political, artistic and intellectual information. Speaking of court decisions, I'd like to remind the community of a decision rendered by a U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia last June when it struck down key provisions of the Communications Decency Act, legislation that would have prohibited "indecent" and "patently offensive" speech on the Internet. Judge Stewart R. Dalzell concluded his opinion with this unqualified endorsement of free expression:

Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

Should freedom of expression at Oberlin be any more restricted than freedom of expression on the Internet?

Shouldn't a liberal arts college like Oberlin pride itself  on being a similar haven for free speech?

Above all, it's essential to realize that when Oberlin presents a band like Tribe 8, the institution isn't directly endorsing Tribe 8's message - whatever  that message may be - any more than it's lending its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to Kwame Ture when he declares that "the only good Zionist is a Dead Zionist." When we sponsor a speech by Kwame Ture or a concert by Tribe 8, the only thing we're endorsing as an institution is the one principle that's absolutely indispensable to higher education: a belief in the value of unfettered free expression. And it's that principal that I call on President Dye to reaffirm in the most unambiguous language possible.