Bridge vandalism falls outside of purview of free speech

A lot has been said already about the whitewashing of the queer pride slogans on the East Campus bridge by the Department of Facilities Management. What concerns me here is not the incident itself-which Tallman Trask has publicly admitted was "an error in judgment which cannot be condoned"-but the debate about whether or not, in the context of students painting slogans on University property, the University frustrated a legitimate expression of free speech.

The first point which should be made is that, since the bridge is University property, technically, every act of painting something on that bridge is an act of vandalism. This point may seem harsh, but it is true nonetheless. It is just as much an act of vandalism to spray "Yanqui Go Home" on the bridge as it is to scrawl your name on a carrel in the library, write something about UNC on the wall of a washroom or to underline a sentence of a library book. This much is true regardless of the content. If I paint "2 + 2 = 4" on one of the pillars of Lilly library, that too is an act of vandalism, even though what I have painted on the wall is perfectly true, and would not offend the sensibilities of anyone (except, perhaps, professors in the Literature Program). Tallman Trask is mistaken, then, in his letter to The Chronicle, to imply that the facilities management only remove material that is vulgar or obscene.

In the case of the bridge, the situation is that the University tolerates a certain amount of vandalism in a certain specified area. I do not know when this quasi-official policy of tolerating this kind of vandalism began, but it is safe to say that if the University decided tomorrow to treat the bridge in the same manner that it treats the rest of its property, such that no more writing on the bridge was permissable, then it would be perfectly within its rights to whitewash anything that was written on the bridge and to repremind or even prosecute students for writing on the bridge. I could imagine this happening if, for example, the only things ever painted on the bridge were swastikas or death-threats or various other kinds of inflammable hate-speech.

The second point to make is that, technically, whatever is written on that bridge is graffiti. Again, this is a harsh point, but it iis true nonetheless. If I spray-painted the "Critique of Pure Reason" on that wall, it would still be graffiti. Graffiti is, as it were, a state of being, and has nothing to do with content. So it is the quasi-official policy of the University to tolerate a certain amount of graffiti in a certain specified area.

Why then does the University tolerate this much vandalism, this much graffiti, in a certain area? Because, I take it, the bridge has come to function as a kind of giant notice board for student events and activities-everything from birthdays and frat parties to AIDS awareness week. The University sees nothing particularly wrong with allowing students to use an otherwise hideously ugly concrete bridge to notify other students, at their own expense, about upcoming events. That is, so long as what is painted on the bridge is not "vulgar or obscene graffiti," according to Trask.

The upshot of what I am arguing is that the whole notion of championing the cause of vandalistic graffiti in terms of freedom of thought and freedom of expression strikes me as ridiculous. I never thought the day would come when I would read an administrator at the University declare, in the context of a bridge normally boasting puerile slogans or party dates, that in defending the freedom of students to vandalize the bridge the University was defending "the principles of such [free] speech and open inquiry." There are much, much more serious ways for the University to defend such important principles.

Furthermore, the very idea of drawing up "instructions" on how to control graffiti is absurd. Graffiti is, by definition, prone to obscenity and vulgarity. What you are talking about is regulating something that is illegal and anti-establishment anyway. If the University is going to continue with its quasi-official policy of allowing a certain amount of graffiti in a certain specified area of the University, then it must drop its self-righteous talk of defending this graffiti in the name of a policy of defending "freedom of speech" on campus. What the University in fact has is a policy of sanctioned vandalism. And this is an inherently unstable policy, as the week's events conclusively proved.

James Mahon is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Philosophy.