More Voices

The following letter is one of many that have been sent to me, the board of trustees, and the president. The writer has ties both to academia in a broad sense and to Virginia Tech and he offers a sincere plea to the administration and the board to act for the greater good of our community. I welcome your thoughts on what he has to say.

October 31st, 2009
Centreville, Virginia

John Hargrove,
President, Butler Board of Trustees

Dear Dr. Hargrove,

I am writing to you concerning the continuing embarrassment to Butler University that is “Zimmerman-Gate”. Unlike some commentators, I have taken the time to read all of Jess Zimmerman’s relevant blog entries, and what struck me most was their relative civility and restraint in comparison to much of the sometimes vulgar and incendiary comments that one sees on the Internet. Certainly, there are some sharp words here or there, but is the Administration of Butler University really so thin-skinned that a few critical remarks warrant such a massive over-reaction?

I have read that a particular concern is the fact that Jess’s remarks were published anonymously. While there are pros and cons to this approach, there is a proud tradition of anonymous public commentary dating back to the American Revolution. For example, Sam Adams wrote under the pseudonym “Determinatus”, and Thomas Paine wrote as "Humanus," "Vox Populi," "Aesop," and "Atlanticus."

You may think it a stretch to link Jess Zimmerman’s blog posts to the impassioned essays of our Founding Fathers, but Dr. Fong’s linking of Jess’s remarks to the shootings at Virginia Tech is far greater hyperbole. As a resident of the Virginia Tech shooter’s home town and one with two nephews who recently graduated from that excellent institution, I must protest that those ill-considered remarks trivialize the tragedy of that mass murder in a way that is deeply offensive. In the battle of analogies, let me offer this: Butler University’s attempt to suppress dissent brings to mind Liberty University’s recent banning of the campus Democratic Party Club. Do you really want Butler University and Liberty University mentioned in the same breath?

You may think that the adverse publicity generated by this fiasco will soon subside, but ongoing publicity like this latest column in The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stu-kreisman/guantanamo-bay---college_b_333786.html) and this recent video satire (http://sometimesdaily.com/2009/10/butler-butts-in/) indicate otherwise. Butler’s heavy-handed approach, including a very dubious civil suit, break new ground and serve as a case study that will likely be studied for some time.

There is only one honorable way out of this morass. Butler University should rescind all of the adverse actions it has taken against Jess Zimmerman and offer a profound and public apology to Jess and his family.

Sincerely,
Dick Lessard

Cc: Butler University Board of Trustees
The Butler Collegian

Defamation

If it weren’t so sad, and if it didn’t have the potential to really negatively impact my life, the action of Butler’s public relations department would be incredibly funny. Apparently, when people write to the president or to a member of the Board of Trustees at Butler questioning their actions in The True BU fiasco, a form letter is immediately dispatched. That form letter, according to my attorney, is a textbook case of defamation.

Marcia Dowell, executive director of university relations, is comfortable making the following statement: “Please know that in the fall of 2008, an internet web blog – True BU - published communications that included defamation, threats, harassment, and intimidation, directly harming the honesty, integrity, and professional reputation of Butler University and several of its administrators.”

I challenge anyone to find anything I wrote in The True BU that could even be remotely construed as a threat. Indeed, when raising the specter of a threat, the only words the president keeps citing come from a fragment of a sentence which he acknowledges he has no evidence I wrote. And I keep assuring everyone that I didn’t write it.

But Butler University is apparently comfortable telling everyone that my blog made threats. And they’re comfortable saying that my words harmed the reputation of Butler University and several of its administrators. As Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, noted on his radio show on Wednesday, there’s certainly no evidence that anyone was harmed by what I had to say in The True BU. Did I make them uncomfortable by bringing their actions to the public? Did it annoy them that I demonstrated the repeated inconsistencies with what the administration said and what they did? Absolutely – but all of that falls well within the bounds of acceptable speech. My blog was not defamatory: They couldn’t prove it in court, and now they’re trying to tell anyone who asks about it that it was. As I said, every lawyer I have asked has been certain that the only defamation in this entire ordeal is what Butler is saying about me.

Even this afternoon, the chair of the board of trustees issued a statement about the case in which he said that "The Trustees also reaffirm Butler’s pledge to provide for the safety and welfare of its students, administration, faculty and staff." What do my concerns about administrative abuses of power have to do with the safety and welfare of anyone on campus? Why does everyone associated with the Butler administration want to turn every criticism into a physical threat? Could it be that they have no credible response to the criticism itself?