RECLAIMING THE TRADITIONAL VIRTUES? Administrators and students at Columbia University seem bent on getting the folks at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education upset. First comes a recruiting flyer for the hockey club that rubs the women of the fevered brow the wrong way.

A free speech controversy has hit Columbia's campus-even if some refuse to admit it. On Wednesday, the Office of Athletic Communications released a statement announcing a reduced punishment for the men's ice hockey club. While we are pleased the club has regained its season, even the remaining punishment is disconcerting. Administrators and student government representatives have eschewed the free speech issue at the heart of the controversy, instead clinging to the club's procedural errors and disciplinary history as being the reasons behind the punishment. But would the club be facing any punishment if its flyers did not contain the phrase "Stop being a pussy?"

(Sorry for the mixed metaphor: the women of the fevered brow probably haven't been rubbed the right way, let alone the wrong way, in the past 30 years.) Here, Columbia's president Lee Bollinger comes off to the Foundation as pandering to the discontented.

President Bollinger has repeatedly extolled the virtues of free speech and has promised Columbia students the freedom to express their ideas. In 2004, he sent student leaders a letter stating, "In order to maintain an atmosphere of free and spirited inquiry and discussion, we must choose to forego our natural instinct to punish those who are intemperate and even offensive." One wonders if Columbia administrators bothered to read this letter before deciding to punish the hockey club for using a single word that some students found offensive.

For some reason, the George Carlin "seven words" sketch comes to mind.

Columbia's overreaction to the flyers represents an attempt to enforce a Victorian notion of civility and decorum upon its students, the vast majority of whom are adults capable of setting their own moral guidelines. As one of America's leading universities, Columbia should not punish students for saying "bad words," nor attempt to control the content of their speech. Until these most basic principles are understood and honored, Columbia's commitments to free expression are empty promises.

Bad words. Bad. On the other hand, what is Columbia doing admitting crude, street-talking louts in the guise of having a hockey club?

And what is Columbia doing admitting crude-street talking louts in the guise of diversity? The author of a linked opinion piece in the Columbia Spectator does not approve of the recent shout-down of Minuteman organizer Jim Gilchrist.

Did I miss a memo? When did an opinion (any opinion) become so revolting and odious that the only option available to highly erudite Columbia students is to shout and drown out the voices of opposition? When did the free exchange of ideas become so dangerous that debate could not be allowed and only violent intimidation is an appropriate response? In the past two weeks, Columbia University, my venerable alma mater, has seen two separate incidents of private censorship that threaten to destroy any claim she might make as a pinnacle of thought and enlightenment.

The memo has been public policy among many of the Perpetually Aggrieved for years.

The real possibilities of human freedom are relative to the attained stage of civilization. They depend on the material and intellectual resources available at the respective stage, and they are quantifiable and calculable to a high degree. So are, at the stage of advanced industrial society, the most rational ways of using these resources and distributing the social product with priority on the satisfaction of vital needs and with a minimum of toil and injustice. In other words, it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.

Thus,

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

From which it follows that suppressing the phrase in question in the hockey flyer is necessary, and Mr Widlanski's question is misguided.

Hopefully, as the dust settles, Columbia students will reexamine their methods of voicing disagreement—this time realizing that in our free society, as Ben Widlanski sagely notes, freedom of speech requires that “everyone who has something to say should be allowed to say it.”

That's not the game plan for the individuals the New York Post characterizes as "speech thugs."

"It was fundamentally a part of free speech," one protester told The Columbia Daily Spectator. "The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration."

Can it be true that free speech at Columbia applies only to those who are deemed "legitimate" by a self-proclaimed group of political purists?

So it would seem. And, sad to say, Wednesday night's fracas was no isolated incident.

And, even more sad, it's not just students who have made Columbia so inhospitable to the First Amendment.

Conservatives, supporters of Israel and others who want to win the War on Terror routinely see their First Amendment rights trashed - while the university throws open its doors to tyrants like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the latter invitation being withdrawn under extreme public pressure).

Simply "suppression of the regressive ones" as far as the powers that be at Columbia are concerned.