RECANT, OR BE EXCOMMUNICATED. The Diet of Worms convenes in Colorado Springs, where a Colorado College student posts less than ninety theses that parody the women of the fevered brow. Colorado College administrators use our troubles to justify the Holy Inquisition that follows.

College spokeswoman Jane Turnis emphasizes that The Monthly Bag was plastered around campus just weeks after the shootings at Northern Illinois University. Fine, but from the outset officials were intent on condemning speech as much as in discovering whether they had a weirdo on their hands. That much is obvious from a campuswide e-mail President Richard Celeste sent out the same day. He denounced the flier's content as both "threatening and demeaning" before pompously urging an "appropriate" discussion of "how gender impacts our experience of the world and one another."

The e-mail could have been written by the folks in Feminist and Gender Studies.

Celeste - who may be unfamiliar with the rich tradition of anonymous political satire in this country dating to the Revolution - invited the "coalition of some dudes" to identify themselves, which the two-man coalition promptly did. Case closed, right? Two normal students and a harmless parody. No, not quite.

[Parody author Chris] Robinson tells me that his appearance before a "student conduct committee" was an hours-long ordeal in which he was quizzed about his views on gender, class, sexism and privilege, among other things. It was "political correctness on steroids," he says, engineered by a "persecuting special-interest group" that has the college administration in its thrall.

Apparently neither Colorado College president Richard Celeste nor the Holy Inquisition found it necessary to show Mr Robinson the instruments of torture.

Fortunately, the rest of the world understands that today's Holy Inquisition is a figure of fun.

Does Celeste appreciate the losing hand he holds? Perhaps, since he told a Colorado Springs TV station that the two students "were not sanctioned or punished." No? Perhaps not officially, but being taken to task by your college president and dean of students, as well as interrogated by a tribunal, might reasonably be considered punishment by some. Or at least an exercise in intimidation.

Colorado College's policy on academic freedom insists that "On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden." Robinson is challenging the college to reclaim that ideal.

As he declared recently in the campus newspaper, "Colorado College is a private institution, which means that from a legal standpoint it can do whatever it wants regarding speech. It can enforce political positions it regards as sacrosanct with legal impunity. But should it? Do you as a student think CC should be a campus with less protection for free speech than Pikes Peak Community College?"

That's a weak ending, although the editorialists might have something satirical in mind, mocking the upscale private college with a decent hockey team providing a hothouse environment for its charges, while the local community college (by law?) behaves as though its charges are made of sterner stuff. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclaimer: I am supporter and contributor) has a roundup of Colorado College coverage.