If a student at Harvard wants to be homophobic or sexist or racist he or she should have the right to express those views.

Those views exist out there. They'redespicable, but we should have confidence in ourability to defeat them in the marketplace of ideasand not resort to censorship. What appalls me inmature students who demand that they be treatedindependently when it comes to their sexuality,when it comes to their drinking or any aspect oftheir personal lives, run to mommy and daddy deanor president and demand to be protected fromoffensive speech.

For example, a woman flew a Confederate Flagoutside her dorm room. What a wonderfulopportunity to educate. And I thought that theUniversity blew it, including President Bok.

And then some idiot student put up a Nazi flag.To do what? To show that she can be as outrageousand offensive? And another student said she couldnot study knowing that there was a Confederateflag out there.

My answer to her is that she is in the wrongplace. If you can't study with a Confederate flagout there then you ought not to be at Harvard.This is a diverse institution and we acceptNortherners and Southerners and we accept peoplefrom every different background. You better learnhow to study.

Harvard's explanation of what you callspeech codes is that they don't regulate speech,that they only regulate behavior when itconstitutes harassment.

I think they cross the line. What constitutesharassment is in the eye of the beholder. I'llgive you an example. At the Dartmouth Review, afew students were disciplined for "vexatious,aggressive and confrontational speech." Now, Icouldn't think of a better advertisement for mybook than "vexatious, aggressive andconfrontational." I think those are very positivewords. It's in-your-face kind of speech and I likein-your-face kind of speech, that's my style.

I'm very concerned even about Harvard LawSchool's proposed sexual harassment code becauseit could conceivably have an impact on the contentof ideas expressed in class.

I have to tell you that when I express my viewsabout date rape in class, I offend some students.And I think that's good teaching. Some peoplemight disagree. But offending people is a way ofgetting their attention. And as long as you are anequal opportunity offender and it's notphysical...You know, when you go to court you'regoing to be offended by what the judges say.

I'm trying to teach my students to be excellentlawyers and I don't want to have to worry aboutsome kind of speech code or some kind ofharassment rule giving people power to censor oreven making me have to think twice about what Isay. I think spontaneity is essential in teaching.There are ways of defining harassment. Again,time, manner and place ways of definingharassment. Repeated phone calls in the middle ofthe night--things like that--but it never shouldbe done in terms of content alone.

I think we're seeing many on the left using theexcuse of harassment to try to get at content. Forexample, one of our professors at Harvard arguesthat the Revue, which was just a document, a pieceof paper, constituted sexual harassment. Thattells me a lot about how sexual harassment codescan be used. So I want to err on the side of morespeech and not less speech.

We have such short memories. When I went tocollege in the '50s there were speech codes andthere was political correctness. But it was fromthe Right. It was called McCarthyism. There's adifference. To day speech codes don't have thesupport of government so they aren't nearly asdangerous.

I'm also appalled that the reactionaries oncampus tend to be the big defenders of freespeech. I think it's a lot of hypocrisy. A lot ofthem wouldn't defend free speech unless it wasdirected at them and unless they were the victimsof censorship. At any given time at a universitythere are only going to be a few handfuls ofpeople who genuinely believe in neutral freespeech for everybody. Mostly, as Nat Hentoff putit so well in the title of his book, its FreeSpeech for Me--Not for Thee.

The notion McCarthyism has become a powerfultool of censorship itself, though, hasn't it? Whatis defined as political correctness has become sobroad as a condemnation and encompasses so manydifferent ideas...

I understand that. I only apply McCarthyismwhen people want to censor. If people want toevaluate people in terms of their own politicalcorrectness, that kind of intellectualmasturbation, I have no problem.