CARNAL NATION

Last April, the University of Maryland inadvertently found itself at the center of a debate about free speech, academic freedom, and pornography when a student group on the College Park campus tried to screen the award-winning adult film Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge. Predictably, conservatives in the state Senate were outraged by the idea that porn was being shown on a state campus and forced University President C.D. Mote to cancel the viewing under threat of losing state funding. One result of the controversy was that the Senate passed a resolution demanding that state-funded schools create policies covering "the displaying of obscene films and materials" by December 1. On Wednesday, after months of debate, the University of Maryland defied the Senate's order, concluding that it was impossible to craft a policy that was enforceable and didn't violate federal free speech protections.

University of Maryland Chancellor William E. Kirwan prepared a report for the Board of Regents which concluded that any policy "would put the universities in an untenable position and subject [them] to legal challenges" which would "almost certainly go to the Supreme Court." Part of the difficulty lay in the ever-present difficulty in defining what's obscene. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is famous for saying that he himself couldn't define pornography, but that he knew it when he saw it. That's as close to a definition as even the finest legal minds have ever gotten. As Kirwan's report observed, "there are few, if any films that have been declared obscene by any court," making it impossible to narrowly target adult films. If the University of Maryland were to create a policy as required by the Senate, it would become the first state university system to do so, a fact that the report said "speaks volumes."

Regent Patricia Florestano, who originally intended to support the legisature's resolution, said that she was swayed by the discovery that there was no precedent for such a policy in any other state. "This is not particularly an area where I wish for us to be precedent-setters," she told the Baltimore Sun. State Senator Nancy Jacobs, a Republican, promised that the Regents' refusal would be answered by the legislature: "They are not following the will of the legislature," she said. "And the legislature gives them an awful lot of money, and these are tough economic times. I would think they would be spending their time on academics and on funding academics than this sort of thing." Her fellow Republican, House Minority Whip Christopher B. Shank, however, seemed to think that it was lawmakers who needed to reassess their priorities. "I don't want to see pornography displayed on campuses; that's certainly not why parents send their kids to college," he said. "But at the same time, I think it was politicized in the Senate and became a distraction, and we certainly have a lot of other issues to deal with."