There's no such thing as justice on campus.

• Author: Gottlieb, Scott

ON COLLEGE campuses across the nation, students' rights continue to be violated by deans and chancellors bent on enforcing a political correctness doctrine. Don't be fooled by a few signs of creeping sanity. Where "sensitivity" and "consciousness raising" workshops are being rejected, student judicial boards have sprung up to fill the void as campus activists fight the backlash against PC.

At Williams College in the spring of 1994, a male student left a message on the telephone answering machine of another male student with whom he had a dispute. In it, the student tried to provoke his adversary by pretending he was a well-known gay student and saying he wanted to go on a date with the person who owned the answering machine and to engage in homosexual activity. When confronted about this message, the caller admitted his role in the matter and apologized. According to Williams' judicial codes, though, he had violated a rule barring "offensive" speech and was suspended for an entire academic year. At the University of Pennsylvania, a student journalist attacked affirmative action and called Martin Luther King, Jr., an adulterer and a plagiarist in a series of columns for the campus newspaper. Following their publication, the writer was called by the Judicial Inquiry Office and told that he was accused of "racial harassment." An ensuing investigation would be dropped, college officials said, if he would meet with 31 of his accusers. He refused, and the board eventually withdrew the threat after an influential faculty member intervened and the incident gained national attention--threatening to embarrass the school severely.

These events are evidence that student judicial boards have become increasingly politicized to punish those who stray from the prevailing political orthodoxy. Colleges codify lists of harsh and specific penalties for violations of their internal codes and combine them with generic offenses. The vagueness of the offenses and the possibility of ominous, complicated proceedings before mock courts have created the desired air of uncertainty and intimidation. Often, such judicial boards intervene in campus discourse, punishing students for what is considered protected speech elsewhere. This was the case at Marietta College, where a student who wrote an article in the school newspaper in which he referred to lesbianism as "deviant" was charged with sexual harassment and faced expulsion. The Individual Rights Foundation, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, intervened on his behalf, promising to sue the school if he was expelled. The Marietta Board of Trustees overruled the administration's action, and the student was allowed to remain without sanction. A similar incident took place at Oberlin College, where the student editor of a conservative newspaper was charged by a group of campus activists with harassment and abuse as a result of an article he printed in the paper. Hauled...