GUEST COLUMNIST: Kors: Penn, Hackney mishandled 'water buffalo' case
What Hackney's own Student Judicial Charter actually said was that once a defendant broke confidentiality, "any person whose character or integrity might reasonably be questioned shall have a right to respond in an appropriate forum." Thus, at the height of the case, plaintiffs discussed it with The Los Angeles Times. The problem Hackney faced was that the facts of the case demonstrated the injustice of his regime. His mixing of what Eden Jacobowitz said and what others allegedly said gives you some idea of his notion of individual responsibility. Hackney's attempt to portray this event in terms of right versus left will not stand up to scrutiny. His primary antagonist was the Pennsylvania ACLU. His problem was not Rush Limbaugh but precisely the liberal media: The Forward, which broke the story, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News and CNN, among others. They all sent independent reporters who interviewed both administrators, appalled by Penn's injustice, and students at Penn, including, by their accounts, scores of African-American students, who found the prosecution absurd and preposterous. On the same day that Hackney portrayed himself as the victim of a "right-wing" conspiracy in its newspages, The Washington Post itself editorialized about Penn's "Speech-Code Silliness," terming it a paradigm of overbreadth, vagueness and arbitrary prosecutions. The Philadelphia Daily News, in an editorial, called the Penn administration "a herd of dik-diks." Had the editor been a Penn student, the term would have led to his or her prosecution. When the case began, I asked Hackney if the Judicial Inquiry Officer could legislate or must merely follow Penn's policy. Steve Steinberg, Hackney's assistant, called me a day later, and informed me that yes, in Hackney's view, the charges stipulated against Jacobowitz merited judicial adjudication. The Judicial Inquiry Officer was applying Hackney's policy. Under oath, however, before the U.S. Senate, Hackney replied as follows to Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) who asked if, under Penn's code, the case should have occurred: "No, I think that this was a misapplication of that policy in the circumstances." In his letter to the DP, Hackney places great importance on the race of the students in this case. Here, however, is what he told the U.S. Senate, under oath, during his confirmation hearings for chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities. When asked about political correctness, Hackney said: "It would be a serious problem if it were to capture a campus.? There are various forms of political correctness? but I think in general one can think of it as a term that refers to being overly solicitous of the rights of minority groups and of fashionable and trendy concerns in the present. I think that is one form that could be quite worrisome because you want to have a very balanced and fair approach to things on campus." Dr. Hackney, meet Dr. Hackney. Hackney intervened in the judicial system several times, and in this case repeatedly. I invite the interested to read a chapter from The Shadow University about the water buffalo incident on-line at http://www.shadowuniv.com. How did the case end? Before witnesses, members of Clinton's transition team told me that Hackney's nomination to the NEH could not "bear much further scrutiny" and they asked "how the case was playing in the Jewish press." I told them that Jacobowitz would pursue justice and that the case was playing quite badly in "the Jewish press." They asked me to send them those papers. One week later, whether causally related or not I do not know, Hackney called me from Washington, D.C. -- he left the number with my son, and I took contemporaneous notes on the conversation -- to ask if Jacobowitz would be satisfied if the women dropped the case and the University dropped the charges. That sequence of events occurred exactly as Hackney proposed it. Hackney wonders why I could not find him while writing the book. What I possessed was better: the record of his policies, actions, words and double standards during his exercise of power. If someone tells me, "This has to end, Alan," I don't have to call him to ask if he said, "This has to end, Alan." Hackney writes of "shared governance" at Penn. Having both centralized power and destroyed that shared governance, infantilizing students and marginalizing the faculty, he lacks the moral authority to utter those words. I hope that there is no revival of his failed policies. Human relations have improved at Penn now that students are treated more equally and freely. I co-founded and lived in Van Pelt College House from 1971 to 1978. After its first year, it never was less than 20 percent black, simply because it acquired a reputation as a good place to be an individual. We had Maoist revolutionaries and College Republicans, black radicals and black conservatives, gay rights advocates and the Campus Crusade for Christ, all living under the same roof, without speech codes and without social engineering. They offended each other frequently, but far more than Sheldon Hackney ever could dream, they learned to talk to each other, to understand each other, to humanize their relationships and to live with each other in freedom and dignity. His balkanized and paternalistic vision of a university was a sad alternative.