"censorship" at Stanford (25)

Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@VM.EPAS.UTORONTO.CA)
Mon, 13 Mar 89 19:46:25 EST


Humanist Mailing List, Vol. 2, No. 719. Monday, 13 Mar 1989.

Date: Mon, 13 Mar 89 12:03:27 EST
From: Stephen Clausing <SCLAUS@YALEVM>
Subject: censorship

I would like to respond to Joe Giampapa's remark that no one had responded
earlier to his comment on "censorship" at Stanford. I suppose my own reasons
for not responding were that I was not particularly disturbed by Stanford's
actions. It seems to me that freedom of speech does not necessarily
guarantee the right to publish. If Stanford finds a message offensive then
it is presumably in their right to decline publication, publication here being
defined in an electronic sense. Censorship to me involves the intervention of
another agency, such as the government, in the publication of materials that
have already been deemed acceptable for publication by the publisher. Since
Stanford is the publisher, there is no censorship here. Now that Joe Giampapa
has brought this up, I would be curious to know what the legal definition of
censorship is.