GUEST COLUMN: The fate of intellectual freedom

Store, Lesley Rimmel still wonders why it carries cosmetics. One of the pleasures, for women, of the undergraduate experience used to be the temporary escape from omnipresent reminders of our inherent ugliness and our need to be enhanced, remade or covered over. For four years, at least, one could focus on books, ideas, friends, lovers, sports, art, politics, whatever, all without expending too much thought or energy on external appearances. The latter were considered to be, well, superficial. So I was taken aback when I first saw the huge Clinique and Revlon sections right in the middle of Penn's Book Store. What kind of message were these displays sending to students, who have enough pressures here without additional reminders that their faces just aren't good enough for going out in public? I therefore welcomed the news of last semester's protest about the make-up counters at The Book Store. Frankly, the presence of the Clinique and Revlon sections was one of the reasons I decided to place book orders for my classes elsewhere. Now that spring classes have begun, and students are again flocking back to The Book Store, it's worth asking what place Clinique (and its parent, EstZe Lauder) and Revlon have at a university, which above all is supposed to safeguard intellectual freedom? In pondering this question, I couldn't help remembering Gloria Steinem's much-reprinted article "Sex, Lies, and Advertising" (Ms., July/August 1990), in which she heralds the freedom of speech that the new, ad-free Ms. magazine will have; by contrast she cites her past experience with potential advertisers, who were always trying to influence the editorial copy. A few examples are notable in the context of this discussion. Item one: Desperate for more advertising revenues, Steinem had lunch with University Trustee Leonard Lauder (Wharton '54), president of EstZe Lauder. Lauder reportedly stated that he would never advertise in Ms. because its editorial profile did not fit with the "kept-woman mentality" that Lauder was selling. When Steinem reminded him that 60 percent of EstZe Lauder users were salaried women working outside the home, he replied that his customers really wanted to be "kept women." Item two: In 1980, Ms. ran a cover story on four Soviet feminists who were exiled from the USSR for producing an underground (samizdat) feminist publication that, among other things, protested the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The KGB deemed the women so dangerous that they were expelled. Ms. scraped together the funds to interview them when they first reached Vienna, and the resulting scoop won an important press award and garnered a great deal of attention. However, the story lost Ms. a potential advertiser -- Revlon (whose current chairman is University Trustee Ronald Perelman, Wharton '64, Wharton Graduate '66) -- which objected to the fact that the four Soviet women on the magazine's cover "[were] not wearing make-up." Perhaps it is difficult to expect everyone to be equally awe-struck at the courage of a group of people who stood up to the KGB during the Brezhnev era. To get a sense of Revlon's trivialization of these women, imagine Rogaine refusing to advertise in GQ magazine because it featured the balding former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky on its cover! Higher education has been under a great deal of financial stress in recent years, and colleges and universities have had to be creative and resourceful in finding new sources of revenue in lean times. Yet in becoming more dependent upon corporate (and individual) sponsors, do universities risk giving up some of their freedom? One only has to think of the recent Bass affair at Yale -- but there are certainly examples closer to home. Are private universities really more "free" than government institutions? And did the appearance of the Revlon and Clinique counters in The Book Store have anything to do with the large monetary contributions that executives of these companies gave to the University? Was there any pressure, subtle or otherwise, to install these in-your-face make-up stands? In her very sensible 1992 book, Body Traps, University President Judith Rodin wrote, "[T]he beautiful self we want isn't real. The beautiful people -- the synthetic illusions created by the media -- don't look that much better than we do when they wake up in the morning. Perhaps this is the ultimate trap. We are all casualties of the technology of the fabrication of looks and the dehumanization of spirit and individualism" (my emphasis). (For example, Dr. Rodin noted that model Lauren Hutton's photographs had been retouched in Revlon ads to remove the "flawed and imperfect" gap between her teeth.) Thus I applaud the students who protested the presence of make-up counters at The Book Store. They did it in a humorous way -- always a plus -- but their message, one of freedom, was serious indeed. Universities, in a time of financial distress, should be careful not to betray their mission (or mortgage their souls). And students should remember that the freedom to be themselves is the most precious freedom they have.