If you browse this page regularly, you’ve no doubt noticed the Emerald editorial board’s acrid convictions about the quality of this year’s student government. In case you haven’t, some January editorial headlines make for a quick, fair primer: “(Programs Finance) Committee threatens free speech on campus” (Jan. 5); “Doing right thing just not ‘feasible’ for ASUO” (Jan. 6); “PFC attacks students by censoring publications” (Jan. 24); “Budget cut contradicts
an ASUO contract” (Jan. 25); and, less subtly, “Incompetent student
government nothing new” (Jan. 27).
Disagreements between student government and student publications are nothing new on this campus, and festering displeasure naturally rears its head when the stakes are highest: at the annual PFC hearings, when (mostly) elected students converge and allocate a whopping $5 million in student incidental fees to student groups. This year, some PFC members upped the ante, however ineffectually, threatening to defund the campus’ two most important student publications — the one you’re reading and the embattled Oregon Commentator. As of Tuesday night’s PFC meeting, when PFC Vice Chair Mason Quiroz resigned, the
funding row still hadn’t been resolved.
But tangent to this inflamed narrative of a free press, student dollars and the committee’s dubious analytical skills, resides a quieter but equally illustrative drama. The butt of many one-liners (and also the subject of a mean-spirited entry in the Commentator’s “Faces to Avoid” feature), outspoken senator Toby Hill-Meyer has leveled against the publication the obviously serious charges of “hate speech” and the creation of a hostile environment on campus, and has filed a grievance with the ASUO. (Staff members of the Commentator argue the tabling of the Commentator’s budget was motivated not by concerns about the compliance of its longstanding mission statement but by Hill-Meyer’s quarrel with the journal.)
Hill-Meyer’s recent guest commentary in the Emerald (“It’s about hate, not conservatism,” Jan. 31) rightfully contends that the conflict isn’t chiefly about clashing political orientations. Painting it as such obscures the deeper, nonpartisan points of free speech, ostensible harassment, and what exactly you can and can’t (and should and shouldn’t) say and when. Oh, and there’s the complication that the contested expression is published with
student dollars, too.
Some of the Commentator’s jokes in question are indisputably tasteless, conjuring images of genital mutilation (“jokes” are the journal’s characterization, and one which Hill-Meyer seems to agree upon provisionally). But Hill-Meyer interprets these jokes — which take the form of obviously satirical false quotes attributed to him in the journal’s regular feature, “The OC Asks” — as implying something graver: “The implication here being that trans people ought to be dealt with through the (violent) removal of their genitalia, and that to do so with a gun would somehow be better, perhaps more macho.” How he comes to this conclusion is unimaginable: The red herring about machismo aside, the Commentator’s content in question alludes to Hill-Meyer inflicting bodily damage himself. None of it, however, can be reasonably construed to mean that “trans people” ought to be “dealt with,” in whatever sense he means.
Hill-Meyer correctly suggests that “the issue is not whether groups on campus are allowed to make hate speech,” but incorrectly argues that it is about “whether the campus is going to sponsor hate speech with roughly $15,000 a year.” The latter issue is moot: While it may be lurid, insensitive and nonsensical (as the Commentator’s writers are no doubt aware), the content in question, as well as depictions of violent sex to which Hill-Meyer has also objected, do not constitute “hate speech” of any reasonable definition. Moreover, there’s no evidence that anyone has acted on the content, or that it has turned the campus into a hostile or unsafe environment for Hill-Meyer or anyone else. (Even if someone had acted on the content, the Commentator’s words are so far from inciting action that it couldn’t be reasonably held liable in terms of student incidental fee dollars.) In a word, Hill-Meyer’s approach is overreaching (not to mention constitutionally suspect).
That said, he has wisely criticized the Commentator (at least publicly) only for a few bits of content: In particular, the Commentator’s jokes at his expense and loose descriptions of violent acts. But these represent the least useful and interesting parts of the publication. At its best, the Commentator is incisive, smart, plainspoken, and rouses discussion about important issues in the world at large, and particularly on campus. It offers features (like extensive interview transcripts) outside the scope of traditional newspapers, and, as a journal of opinion, includes in-depth commentaries far longer than, say, the Emerald’s format allows.
As a reader of the Commentator, I find the latter sort of feature much more compelling and thought-provoking than the sort of content to which Hill-Meyer explicitly objected. From the piece he mentioned unrelated to his faux quotes: “I want to murder someone. I want to smash a chair on someone’s head and bite their lips off. I want to beat someone to death as they scream for mercy. I want to break a bone in my hand while breaking someone else’s nose. Either that or I want to hate f— some girl. But preferably both at once.” This content evidently distracts from the Commentator’s finer points. And it would be a superior publication if it shifted its content accordingly.
But this call for an adjustment of tenor from a reader is only that. Given that its speech is legal and that the journal is advantageous to students’ cultural development (as it presently is), the Commentator’s content must be dictated by its staff, not by the sensibilities of its readers — Hill-Meyer’s and my own included.

[email protected]