Administrator responds to professor's criticisms

Professor Kasibhatla is right to take me to task in his letter. I should not have used the word "never." The point I was trying to make in response to the reporter's questions was that the public discussion of this issue had in the main been focused on the comments of Trinity sophomores Berin Szoka and Jay Strader and the challenges to them which, in a number of cases, unfortunately had taken the form of attacks on them personally as opposed to challenging the premises of their argument. Certainly public attention to the issue of whether a new major or a concentration within a major should be created in Hindi and related studies ended up being lost in the noise of the personal attacks on the two students. While my reading of the situation at the time indicated that Szoka's and Strader's statements and letters to The Chronicle probably were intentionally designed to provoke those with whom they disagreed, the general debate which ensued lent more heat than light to the core issue and indeed, in many ways, had obscured it.

At the time, some people had suggested that the University administration should publicly censure the protagonists on one or the other side for their statements in The Chronicle. The University is not in the censorship business. As I indicated in a statement on behalf of the University last May, "the antidote for obnoxious speech is generally, in our view, more speech, not less speech-speech which challenges the premises and arguments of others and which enables people of independent views to assess those arguments and make up their own minds. Threats of physical violence, whether they be verbally or electronically expressed or physically administered, are a different story...."

I am encouraged to hear that now that a new school year has begun, different groups at Duke are thinking of ways to have a debate on the issues.

John Burness

Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and

Government Relations