To the Editor,
Sometime in the near future Carolyn Kaminski, treasurer of the Students’ Association Appropriations Committee, might want to sit down with the United States Constitution (http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html) and review the amendments. She is quoted in the Campus Times as saying that City Paper is “not in a position to criticize a private institution and they don’t have a right to tell us not to spend money on porn”. In fact, they are and they do.
It is the job of a free press to criticize all institutions, public and private, when there is a constituency in society who thinks that an institution is on the wrong track. Private clubs all over the country have broadened the ethnic diversity of their memberships in response to press coverage of the admission restrictions that once existed. Furthermore, Chris Busby’s City Paper article did not tell UR students what to spend their money on. Actually he was more or less making fun of the UR students and administration for pretending that campus porn was a free speech issue although no one is actually talking about it. And not just to the press, but also among themselves. George Morrison, the assistant director of student activities said in Busby’s article there has been relatively little debate about the issue in the last 10 or 12 years. Student Senator Danielle Friedman admitted that the vast majority of students prefer not to discuss the issue at all.
Chris Busby is doing what the press is supposed to do in a free country, which is to encourage discussion and debate about the issues. The level of discussion at present is low. One the one hand we have male students claiming that pornography shown on campus is not degrading to women and that female students are not afraid to express their opinions about it. On the other hand we read of an anonymous letter to Joan Knihnicki that shows us that exactly the opposite is true. Many student representatives defend the Spring Porn screening on the grounds that a lot of people turn out for it. A lot of people used to turn out for public hangings too.
Bill Chaisson50601
