Censorship at the Brown Daily Herald: Former QA President Denied Right to Publish

In a letter in Thursday’s edition of the Herald (“Spectator’s views on free speech hypocritical,” Nov. 2), members of the Queer Alliance charge members of the Brown Spectator editorial staff with having interfered with the Queer Alliance’s right to free speech. The letter quickly moves to an attack of all political conservatives, stating, “Conservatives place high value on their own free speech but will gladly appoint themselves censors and resort to petty criminality when they face the speech of a group whose ‘agenda’ they disagree with.”

How do we move from a charge against a specific set of individuals to the indictment of an entire political group? Were the scenario to be played out in the reverse, we’d be reading about a clear case of homophobia; gross generalizations about entire communities are dangerously irresponsible.

The letter also asks that the campus “remembers this hypocrisy the next time one of Brown’s martyred conservatives complains that his freedom of speech is not respected.” According to email correspondence of which I was a recipient, gay administrators in the Student Activities Office (whose identity politics are as deeply institutionalized as is their receipt of paychecks every-other Thursday), encouraged the writing of the Queer Alliance’s letter. The concerns of conservatives and other political minorities on this campus should not be written off as mere “complaints” when there is so much evidence to back up claims of repeated institutional impropriety and whoring out of identity politics. Instances in which authority is abused in an effort to direct political discourse by promoting a particular position should not be tolerated by any group–especially when the justifications for doing so are as thin as, “well, we’re both gay” (insert other empty identity label here).

In early November, I submitted the above letter to the BDH in response to a letter authored by members of the Queer Alliance attacking the Spectator (“Spectator’s views on free speech hypocritical,” Nov. 2); I was told that the letter would run on Monday, November 6. When the letter never ran, I emailed the BDH opinions editors to find out what had happened. They replied, stating that other editors had nixed the letter because it was “inflammatory.” I asked if it would be possible for me to briefly defend my letter to those “other editors,” to which I received a response stating that my options were to either change my letter or not have it printed.

Upset about the situation, I contacted Pratik Chougule, Editor-in-Chief of the Spectator; he found nothing wrong with my letter, agreed to print it, and asked that I write this accompaniment.

At his suggestion, I also then contacted BDH Editor-in-Chief Robert Corey-Boulet to voice my concerns; Pratik felt that there was good chance that perhaps the BDH’s Editor-in-Chief was not aware of the circumstances surrounding my letter. As I had expected however, I came to find that Robert was in fact the very editor who had nixed my piece. In his response to my inquiry, BDH Editor-in-Chief Robert Corey-Boulet stated, “Commenting on the sexual orientation of administrators is just not something we do (regardless of how relevant it might be to this particular incident).” Essentially, the letter was not cut for language—the letter was neither vulgar nor obscene, and the somewhat independent BDH opinions editors had already given it the “go ahead.”—but was instead cut for content. It was the letter’s very suggestion that sexuality and identity politics might actually play a role in the policy making of particular powerful individuals with which BDH Editor-in-Chief Robert Corey-Boulet personally found problematic.