Top officials share XXX film policy qualms

Student leaders and faculty  members have spoken out and supported legislation fighting a university system-wide pornography policy they say will curtail their First Amendment rights. Turns out, top university and system officials share those same concerns.

Although these officials won’t resist the state legislature’s decree to develop a policy regarding offensive content, they are trying to walk a fine line between pleasing legislators and not violating the Constitution.

“I’m sure nobody wants to go down this path, but when you do, how do you do it in the right way?” said System Chancellor Brit Kirwan, who oversees 13 of the state’s public institutions. “Many people are questioning, do we need this policy? If we do have to have a policy, is this the best one?”

Last April, state legislators threatened to cut off university funding after discovering the planned on-campus screening of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, one of the most expensive hardcore pornographic movies ever made. Administrators nixed the event, but student activists screened it anyway to protest the censorship.

Following the controversy, the legislature ordered the University System’s governing body, the Board of Regents, to create a policy for screening movies shown “only for entertainment purposes,” to avoid having to vote either for porn or against funding the state’s flagship university.

Their deadline is Dec. 1.

The Regents were originally going to discuss the policy at their monthly meeting tomorrow but postponed the debate until November to give themselves more time.

Brady Walker, the chair of the University System Student Council and a law student at the University of Baltimore, said some students may see administrators as the “bad guys” because they are tasked with drafting the policy, but noted this is not entirely accurate.

“It’s important to make it clear that this is not what they want,” he said. “No one at the system wants this policy. This was never something that would have occurred to them if not for the legislature.”

The draft of the porn policy, which was influenced by First Amendment scholar and former University of Virginia President Robert O’Neil, says that organizations showing objectionable content must include an educational element. But it doesn’t define what constitutes objectionable content.

University officials echoed arguments made by faculty and students in recent months, saying the right to explore potentially offensive topics is an important element of free speech and higher education.

“I’ll be happy if the policy comes forward and protects people’s rights and protects the university’s right to explore controversial topics,” university President Dan Mote said. “We need an opportunity to talk about awkward, uncomfortable topics.”

In the end, he said, “probably no one will be happy.”

Although the policy has been thought to be the first of its kind in the nation, The Catonsville Times reported yesterday that the University of Maryland, Baltimore County had a similar porn flap in 1981, resulting in a university-wide policy very similar to the System policy being debated now. It didn’t ban the showing of explicit films, such as the X-rated movie that triggered the controversy — Debbie Does Dallas. Instead it laid out guidelines those intending to show questionable content must follow.

That policy was lost and forgotten. Cliff Kendall, the Regents chairman, said he had never heard of it.

Last spring, the controversy surrounding Pirates II reached news outlets as far as Australia, leaving some officials wishing this hubbub would fade away, too.

Kendall said he was particularly “disturbed” that the University System is now associated with porn.

“Because of all the national publicity we’ve received over it, my colleagues in higher education are discussing what we’re going to do with porn,” he said. “It’s not really what I like to be talking to people about at the University of Maryland. I’d rather be talking about our high moral standards, great education, great athletic teams.”

cwells at umdbk dot com