October 23, 1995 FIRST AMENDMENT TANGLE IN THE 'NET Colleges Struggle to Balance Free Speech, Cybersensitivity By Michael D. Shear Washington Post Staff Writer When a message of hate was posted last month by a Virginia Tech student on a gay men's Internet home page, the university was deluged with demands that it punish the writer. This month, Virginia Tech officials did so, though they refuse to release details of the sanctions or the student's identity. But by disciplining him, administrators at the 25,000-student state university in Southwest Virginia have run headfirst into the First Amendment and the newly emerging debate over freedom of speech in cyberspace. The student's message -- which included calls for gays to be castrated and to "die a slow death" -- may have been distasteful, some civil libertarians say, but it was clearly protected. "This was really bad speech. Well, guess what? That's exactly what is protected by the First Amendment," said Eric Schlachter, a California lawyer who specializes in cyberspace law. "The guy had an opinion, and they didn't like it, so they went after him." First Amendment lawyers, technology specialists and college officials say the Virginia Tech incident and an earlier one in which a University of Michigan student was prosecuted for a sexually explicit story he put on the Internet (the case was dismissed) are evidence that a difficult struggle is beginning. Throughout the country, universities are faced with the task of balancing the rights of student computer users to speak out against the rights of the on-line community not to be offended or harassed. "Most universities err wildly, and in many cases, illegally on the side of control, and they give the users no rights at all," said Michael Froomkin, an associate law professor at the University of Miami. Debates over what students are allowed to say and how offensively they can say it have been raging on campuses throughout the 1990s. Now, the debate has gone high tech as the technological capabilities of universities lunge ahead of much of society. College dormitory rooms are being wired with high-capacity phone lines while most homes still have old-fashioned copper wires. The universities' mainframe computers -- which form the backbone of the Internet -- offer free gateways to the huge network for students and faculty. In the Virginia Tech case, the student admitted using the university's computer network to access the World Wide Web, a graphics portion of the Internet, officials said. Using a piece of software called a browser, he signed on to a site for gay men called Out and Proud and posted the message, along with four pictures of naked women. "There was an initial feeling of extreme anger," wrote Todd Simmons and Scott Kendall in a letter they posted on their web site. "We had been threatened, harassed, and our privacy had been invaded." The student was punished for violating a two-year-old university policy that prohibits "use [of] mail or messaging services to harass, intimidate or otherwise annoy another person." George Mason University also has a policy that prohibits students from using "computers to harass, threaten or abuse others." The University of Maryland has a similar prohibition against using computers to harass others but does not ban "annoying" messages on the Internet. Administrators at Maryland have not disciplined any students for posting such messages to home pages. "If he had sent something to a specific person saying, `I'm following you. I know where you live. I think you should die,' that would be different," said Gail Miller, coordinator for policy and planning at the university's computer science center. "I certainly don't condone the kind of posting you are talking about. But do we have the authority to say he can't post it? I certainly err on the side of the First Amendment on these kinds of things." Virginia Tech takes "the position that if you use our server, then you have some responsibilities because you associate the name of the institution with what you say," said Cathryn Goree, dean of students. "This was so clearly over the line that it wasn't a question." However, according to Goree, there is no university definition of language that "otherwise annoys another person." "What you are talking about is a place where everyone has to take a dive for the policy manual and consult with an attorney," Goree said. "The big issue is where do we draw the line? Well, we don't know right now." And that situation worries many people, not the least the students who use university computer systems daily. Jack Mazzeo, a fourth-year student from Burke at the University of Virginia, is in charge of the on-line version of the Cavalier Daily, a student newspaper at U-Va. He also is gay. "I don't think the university should impose excessive regulations on students who go out into cyberspace," he said after hearing about the Virginia Tech incident. Although he called the message deplorable, he said, "Limiting people's Internet freedom, especially students' Internet freedom, would be just a travesty." Omar Karram, a George Mason University senior from Alexandria and a government and politics major, agrees. "To have his words censored because he had written his opinion about this gay page is really against his constitutional rights," he said. "The thing that worries me most is that everyone wants to be so politically correct." Kevin Hsu, a fourth-year student at the University of Maryland at College Park, is no stranger to computers and the Internet. He is the immediate past president of the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. But Hsu said he believes there should be limits to what people say while they are on-line. "Deliberately going out to harass people and hurt them on the Web, I think that's really wrong," he said. "The line between freedom of speech and abuse of other people's happiness is [sometimes] fuzzy. But the Virginia Tech case is clearly an abuse." In essence, the debate about what can go on the Internet is a repeat of the recent controversy over so-called hate-speech policies, which many universities adopted in an attempt to end offensive speech directed at particular groups. Several of those policies, including one at Stanford University and one at the University of Michigan, have been struck down by the courts as an infringement on free speech. Now, according to Lee C. Bollinger, former dean of the law school at Michigan and now provost at Dartmouth College, universities are reinventing the same kind of codes for cyberspace. "One of the great issues facing society is whether this new medium of e-mail will be treated like the press" or like something else, Bollinger said. Bollinger and others said people naturally assume new laws must be drawn up for the Internet because it is a new medium. But he said many existing laws and regulations could apply. "With the Internet, we are in the situation where there are no controls, no cybercops, no speed limits," said Frank Connolly, a professor of computer science at American University. "The other side of these freedoms is that individuals have to exercise responsibility for their actions. "Nobody," he said, "has come up with really good answers yet."