The campus is buzzing more than usual. I passed a group of students congregating around a table; I decided to stop and find out what, if anything, was going on. "There's a group of skin-heads renting a booth at the fair this year", said one of the students. Not at my school! I couldn't believe my ears. A racist group was going to participate in a fair at my school.
             But, doesn't everyone have a right to free speech? Yes, but it is the responsibility of my school's administration to insure that students and faculty are not subjected to physical or verbal abuse. One can say that these are totally different actions, however, they are both painful. Domestic violence, being called a nigger. The only difference is that one has visible bruises and other doesn't; they both hurt like hell! In any case, the skin-heads have a right to be at the fair and display their materials just as anyone else-according to our Constitution. Yet, they are trying to convince others that certain races do not have that right. How does that work?
             In Nat Hentoff's essay he quotes Oliver Wendell Homes as saying that one of the most important principals of the Constitution that we should adhere to is free thought. I agree, everyone should be free to think and speak; but , not when those verbalized thoughts are publicly offending someone else. Even though that which is offensive to one may not be offensive to another, it still offends someone. Profanity is not allowed in the class room--or many other places for that matter--because it is vulgar and offensive; there hasn't been any controversy concerning free speech related to that. We know what is offensive and what is not.
             Hentoff also implies that Chancellor Sheila Kaplan, who had white supremacist hate literature removed from her campus, was deciding what speech could be read and heard by the students. What if that lit
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