Speech, Not Debris

STUDENT publications were justifiably outraged last week when the masters of Kirkland and North Houses announced a ban on door-to-door distribution of "unsolicited" material. Although the motive for the ban--cutting down on garbage in the halls--sounds innocent enough, the new policy represents an unwarranted restriction on free speech at Harvard that ought not to be tolerated.

The fact is--and every campus publisher knows it--that "unsolicited" is simply a buzzword for "student." With the exception of The Crimson, there are no "solicited" student publications. And every single publication--including The Crimson--depends on door drops to distribute its work.

Admittedly, groups can easily circumvent the new restrictions by signing students up for free "subscriptions"--at the cost of a serious drain on their resources.

To solicit subscriptions takes more people. To deliver selectively to only certain rooms requires more time and organization. Many publications do not have enough time and labor to go around as it is--why should they have to endure an another logistical difficulty?

In addition, people who are happy to pay to see their advertisements distributed to the entire Harvard student body will think twice before advertising in a paper that gets left in a rack in dining halls. The equation is a simple one for most student publications: fewer ads mean fewer issues.

THE reasons for the ban appear to be perfectly straightforward, but comments made by Kirkland House Master Donald Pfister last week betray a serious problem in the attitude of some administrators.

"We just seemed to have a lot of debris," Pfister told The Crimson.

Debris? Empty pizza boxes are debris. Copies of The Harvard Independent, Perspective, The Salient, The Advocate, Padan Aram and the Harvard Lampoon are not. Nor are any of the other publications that hundreds of students on this campus spend hours of their time trying to get people to read.

For a house master to be so callously judgemental is a travesty. Who is Master Pfister--or North House Master J. Woodland Hastings or any other Harvard official--to decide what is garbage and what is not? The simple truth of the matter is that members of the Harvard community are being denied the right to speak out in a manner which they find effective.

This attitude is unconscionable at a University, which by definition depends on free speech and free exchange of ideas for its survival. And yet it one that is becoming all too common in the realm of student-administration relations.

It is the same attitude that lets the administration tells students that postering is a privilege, not a right. It is the same attitude which allowed Henry C. Moses, the dean of first-year students, to continue delivering the official Yard Bulletin--on the grounds that it contained information students needed to read--when a similar door-drop ban was announced in the Yard last year.

WHO decided what was necessary? Presumably Moses and Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III. Why are announcements of course information and housing lottery deadlines more important than news and student opinions? One thing is certain, the residents of a house ought to make the decision, rather than the master.

Hastings says that the policy is just temporary, until he can get wire baskets installed on the North House doors. In the case of the Yard, this has proved to be a reasonable compromise toward keeping litter separate from reading matter.

But if wire baskets will solve the problem, why don't the house masters simply install them? The litter problem, if one really exists, has been around for years. The halls will endure for the few weeks necessary to install the baskets. For that matter, if litter is such a problem, why weren't they installed over the summer? Kirkland already has such baskets--why do they need a ban on door drops?

Instead of opting for a reasonable compromise, house masters chose a course that creates organizational problems for dozens of student publications and undermines the foundations of a free press--all for the sake of clean hallways. This goal may be a noble one, but it in no way justifies a policy of de facto censorship.