That’s Life — Steve Bornfeld: Who’da thunk it? Free speech lives!

Friday, April 21, 2000 | 9:26 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His column appears Fridays. Reach him at steveb@lasvegassun.com or 259-4081.

Professor Expresses Politically Incorrect Thoughts -- And Survives!

Holy academia, Batman!

As National Enquirerish as it sounds -- and as believable as a half-human/half-aardvark baby raised by alligators in the Everglades -- it is nonetheless true:

Clyde Frazier, a professor at the all-women's Meredith College in North Carolina, circulated a provocative course proposal around campus. His thesis, according to the Raleigh News & Observer: "Masculinity is being abandoned in our culture ... American schoolboys are falling behind and fatherhood is being devalued." He told the paper: "We have endangered things about (masculinity) that are valuable to everyone."

Amazingly, this Y chromosome creature still draws a paycheck at this X chromosome campus. That isn't a victory of testosterone over estrogen. It's a triumph of free speech over shackled speech. Frazier didn't preach hate or violence. He raised sociological issues for debate. So ...

Anti-Frazier petitions were signed. Angry letters flooded the school newspaper. Protesters suggested that the heretic get the heave-ho.

The first two reactions fall under free speech. The last reaction falls under free-speech-only-if-it's-OUR-kind-of-speech. But after years of that kind of smug political correctness -- which has turned college campuses into ideological gulags -- winning the day, Frazier found some high-level defenders who returned free speech to its rightful perch: atop their priorities.

"We've got 100 people here stirred up about ideas," Michael Novak, chairman of the history and politics department, told the newspaper. "That can't be anything but good." Said Rhonda Zingraff, coordinator of women's studies: "Anything that would compromise his academic freedom to teach these ideas could be used to compromise the academic freedom of everyone on the campus. That would be too high a price to pay."

You said it, sister. Free speech lives. But we sometimes forget that free speech extends to closed minds as well as open ones.

Consider Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker's homophobic/racist rant about New Yorkers that triggered his psychological evaluation. The arrogant implication: If you don't think like us, you're nuts. (He was also slapped with a lengthy suspension, later cut to two weeks.)

Well, Rocker isn't nuts (and I write that as a proud New Yorker). He's just a word beginning with "a" and ending with "hole." And in America, he's guaranteed the right to be one.

While Rocker's ramblings seem more hurtful -- and stupid -- than Frazier's gender theories, both men poked a stick into the hornet's nest of political correctness. Rocker is entitled to his redneck-edness, which will earn him a nasty greeting when the Braves visit New York. (Good -- as long as it doesn't stray from verbal to violent.) Frazier is entitled to his hail-the-male hypotheses, which might result in many dateless Saturday nights.

Scorn is an acceptable consequence of free speech -- as long as it doesn't snowball into retribution. Neither man committed crimes against humanity -- just crimes against accepted thought.

And fortunately for Frazier -- and all of us -- the Thought Police failed to make an arrest in North Carolina.