Wendy Kaminer is not a fan of legislation introduced in the Senate that addresses bullyign on school campuses:
There's no dearth of important issues for Congress to address in the lame-duck session, but New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg has introduced an entirely gratuitously anti-harassment bill anyway--The Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act of 2010. (Congressman Rush Holt introduced the same bill in the House.) Federal civil rights law has long prohibited harassment in schools receiving federal funds; Tyler Clementi was not the victim of harassment or any absence of rules against it: his suicide followed a gross and apparently criminal violation of privacy--the secret taping and broadcast of his sexual encounter with another male. So, there's no need for this bill and no sense in naming it after Clementi--unless you're intent on emotionally blackmailing people into supporting it. Naming legislation after a victim cuts off debate, daring opponents to risk appearing insensitive to the sufferings of survivors.
But this bill is not simply redundant; it's repressive, proposing a subjective definition of harassment that's more restrictive of speech and more likely to be applied arbitrarily than the definition formulated by the Supreme Court some 10 years ago. You can find a concise critique of the bill at thefire.org, which stresses that "the bill removes the requirement that the (alleged harassment) be objectively offensive... The bill also fails to define what constitutes a "hostile or abusive" educational environment, leaving that determination to college administrators"--administrators who have proven themselves oblivious or hostile to free speech, as a lamentably long list of FIRE's cases show.
