UPDATED: Dec. 26, 2010, 10:03 p.m.

Freedom of speech and the Internet was supposed to be the topic of debate at the College of Law Wednesday, but despite organizers’ efforts, the focus derailed to the controversial blog SUCOLitis.

The debate, ‘Anonymous Free Speech and the Internet at a Private University’ held Wednesday at 12 p.m. in MacNaughton Hall, was part of National Freedom of Speech Week and was hosted by the Tully Center for Free Speech and the American Constitution Society.

Ryan Suto, president of the American Constitution Society chapter at SU, said the event was not held to promote SUCOLitis, the satirical and controversial WordPress blog. The blog pokes fun at the Syracuse University College of Law and is written by a group of second- and third-year law students who began posting online in early October. The blog had more than 12,000 hits before it became private Wednesday night.

‘This event is not supporting any particular blog or any specific speech,’ Suto said. ‘The participants in this debate do not necessarily support what they argue today. They are merely playing a role.’

SUCOLitis is not a news blog and has no actual news and ‘should not be attributed to any persons, living or dead,’ according to a disclaimer on the blog.

Len Audaer, president of the Parliamentary Debate Society, is the sole person currently being investigated for harassment by the College of Law for authoring the blog. Audaer has neither confirmed nor denied authoring the blog and said the Office of Judicial Affairs is also likely to soon start an investigation.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, and Jason Feldman, a first-year law student, spoke in support of free speech, but first-year law student Chris Lattuca and assistant professor of law and LGBT studies Tucker Culbertson spoke against it.

Gutterman said the panel should be just the beginning of a process to discuss and debate the blog and its controversial aspects.

‘We are participating in one of the remedies right now because the best way to deal with offensive content, offensive speech is to talk more about it and to have a dialogue,’ Gutterman said.

The blog highlights the issue of the right to anonymous speech on the Internet, Gutterman said. And these students are within their rights because people viewing the blog are reading it knowing it’s satirical — principles protected under the First Amendment, he said.

But the amendment does not protect the authors of the blog within the confines of the private university, as SU has its own free speech policies and does not have to adhere to the First Amendment, Lattuca said.

‘If Syracuse University decides to find a way to punish the students who created the SUCOLitis blog, they have every right to do so, and they’re not going to be bound by the U.S. Constitution,’ Lattuca said.

SUCOLitis is just another form of bullying, Lattuca said. He said a post on the blog that called the current first-year law class the best-looking and hinted at the students’ promiscuity was offensive. He said students should not have to wait until the blog becomes more extreme and offensive to take action.

‘The thing about going too far is you haven’t gone too far until it’s too late,’ Lattuca said. ‘We don’t look at these blogs and say ‘Wow, this is wildly offensive’ until something bad has happened.’

One of the problems with SUCOLitis is many of the people it pokes fun at are ‘women or people of color’ when the law school is ‘blindingly white,’ Culbertson said. Those students who are most vulnerable should not have racial and ethnic slurs thrown in their faces, although derogatory names for sex, race and sexual practices are thrown around at SU often, he said.

Culbertson referenced cases of five lesbian, gay and transgender students who committed suicide over the past four months during the debate, including Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University. He committed suicide on Sept. 22 after his roommate secretly filmed him during a sexual act with another man in his room and posted it live on the Internet.

The blog might be a bad joke, Culbertson said, but it still has the potential to cause harm.

But the students should not be punished for writing the blog, Culbertson said. Although expelling the students would be much easier than going through the remedy process, it would not be a successful means to handle the situation, he said.

‘I’m interested in restorative justice as a manner by which not simply to defend a community but to make one,’ Culbertson said.

In his closing comments, Gutterman agreed with Culbertson about the punishment of the students and said the best way to deal with these issues is discussion. He said the blog should not result in the law school punishing the authors.

But previous students at SU were disciplined and even threatened for similar actions.

In 2005, freshman Amanda Seideman created a Facebook group which was critical of her writing class teaching assistant, Rachel Collins, according to an article published in The Daily Orange on Feb. 8, 2006. The group, which was called ‘Clearly Rachel doesn’t know what she’s doing ever,’ put Seideman and three of her friends under investigation from Judicial Affairs, according to the article.

Seideman told The Daily Orange in the article that she was threatened to be made an example of by Judicial Affairs. The students were told if they made fliers explaining the dangers of Facebook, their punishment would be lenient. By the end of the controversy, one student decided to transfer to another school, and Seideman and the other two students were placed on disciplinary reprimand, according to the article.

‘In a time where we’re dealing with wars, crushing unemployment, financial costs of education, I think we have more serious fish to fry than a couple of jokes, even bad jokes,’ Gutterman said.

As for the blog damaging SU’s reputation as an institution, Gutterman said the offensive content would not deter him from attending the College of Law if he was a prospective student.

But Andrew Natalo, a first-year law student, said SU has every right to protect its image by disciplining the authors of the blog.

‘I think the blog is offensive, but I’m OK with that,’ Natalo said. ‘I’m also OK with the university coming down hard on the people that made it. I feel like the university has every right to do that. I feel like they had every legal right to publish it, but in the end it’s a private university.’

SUCOLitis is different from ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ and other satirical shows because the blog goes after private citizens rather than public citizens, said Jeff Winston, a third-year law student who attended the lecture. Yet he said the authors of SUCOLitis should not be kicked out of the university.

‘Don’t kick them out, but put a face to them,’ Winston said. ‘Don’t let them hide behind the wall of the Internet and be anonymous.’

Ryan McCarthy, a third-year law student who attended the lecture, does not think the students should get punished for writing the blog.

‘It says right on there that it’s satirical, and the one article had a (third-year law student) who is a very good student and a friend of mine and is getting a job at Chipotle,’ he said. ‘It’s funny and has redeeming quality in and of itself.’

jdharr04@syr.edu

Published on October 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Jon: jdharr04@syr.edu