WSU fence drives controversy

A dispute at a recent College Republicans demonstration at Washington State University – which included a professor cursing at students – is becoming the latest cause for activists who argue that colleges are hostile to conservative views.

The president of WSU’s GOP club is expected to appear on the Fox News program “Hannity & Colmes” tonight, and the event has become a frequent topic of news articles, blogs and letters to the editor on the Palouse since the demonstration Nov. 2.

The College Republicans erected a 24-foot chain-link fence on the Glenn Terrell mall to show support for the congressional passage of a bill to build a fence along part of the border with Mexico, and drew accusations of racism and other harsh reactions from counterprotesters.

Videos from the incident were posted on www.YouTube.com, including moments of one professor demanding the student ID of the student videotaping him. Witnesses said another professor, John Streamas, combined “white” and a vulgar term in reference to a student or students, though that wasn’t on film.

The videos were later taken off the Web site, with YouTube citing an unexplained copyright infringement.

The students involved in each incident are filing complaints with the university.

“Everybody has a right to free speech,” said Dan Ryder, the club member who said Streamas cursed at him. “But when a professor of a university, a paid state employee, while he’s on the clock, comes out and intimidates students and tries to use their power to impose their beliefs on students – when that happens, that is unacceptable.”

Streamas and the professor who demanded the student ID, David Leonard, are both assistant professors in the department of Comparative Ethnic Studies. Streamas said Wednesday he didn’t want to do an interview but wrote in an e-mail message that the use of the fence was a provocative symbol. “It is a violently racist symbol, no different from Nazis carrying a swastika through a Jewish neighborhood or the KKK rallying around a Confederate flag in a black neighborhood,” he wrote.

In an interview with the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, he acknowledged cursing but said it wasn’t directed toward a single student.

Leonard said he would have no comment. But in a letter he submitted to the student newspaper, the Daily Evergreen, and which had not been published by Wednesday, he apologized for his actions and said he hadn’t intended to stifle debate. But he also wrote that he, his colleagues and family had been subject to vilification and threats since the incident.

Daniel Schanze, who is the political action chairman for the WSU College Republicans and was taping the incident, said he considered Leonard’s actions a “gross display of power” in an attempt to stifle his opinions.

“I had every right to film and document what was going on,” he said.

Like Ryder, Schanze said the incident was part of a larger pattern of conservatives being discriminated against at the university. He said he considers it ironic that the professors involved in the dispute were both from the Comparative Ethnic Studies department, which promotes diversity, but could not tolerate his conservative views.

Attempts to reach Fox News to confirm the appearance of the WSU club’s president, Kiley Smith, were unsuccessful Wednesday. But several members of the organization said that she has been scheduled to appear on “Hannity & Colmes” tonight to discuss the incident and the issue of conservatives on campus. The group has turned over nearly two hours of video images filmed at the demonstration.

Complaints from conservatives about liberal bias in academia are longstanding. In recent years at WSU, a national group that supports free speech on campuses – often regarding conservative points of view – became involved in two cases and helped raise their profile. In one case, the group, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, demanded that WSU President Lane Rawlins withdraw public statements that disruptive protesters at an intentionally offensive student play were exercising their free-speech rights. Rawlins refused.

In another, a student in the College of Education was threatened with discipline over comments that he didn’t believe white people are privileged and that he opposed gay adoption. FIRE said at the time that the college’s “dispositions” assessments – which are becoming common at education colleges around the country – were being used as ideological litmus tests.

While many people at universities object to the assumption of a liberal bias on campuses, the perception is firmly entrenched. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey in 2004 found that half of respondents said colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into classes. Even among respondents who called themselves liberal, 30 percent said colleges lean left.

Lance LeLoup, a longtime professor of political science at WSU and the associate vice provost for international programs, said he thought the professors behaved improperly in the WSU fence incident – but it’s untrue that liberal bias pervades the university.

“As somebody who has been a political science faculty member for 35 years, I have tried assiduously to make sure the students in the class don’t know what my political leanings are,” he said.

He said such complaints sometimes come as part of a political strategy by some conservatives “to maybe make more of this than is really there by seizing on issues such as this.”

But LeLoup said that the College Republicans had an absolute right to put up the fence and demonstrate – even if some found it offensive – and that the professors shouldn’t have tried to intimidate the students.

“It really is a free-speech issue, and free-speech issues are often unpopular,” he said. “That’s not what should happen at a university.”