Fortunately, the fourth property protects speech that "is reasonably designed or intended to contributed to legal or public education, academic inquiry, or reasoned debate on issues of public concern."

But, unfortunately, there is much room for inconsistency in what is judged to be "designed or intended" to contribute to the free exchange of ideas. For example, many Black Nationalist speakers who have toured American campuses often spew vitriolic, intolerant speech that certainly possess the first three properties of prohibited speech. Judging from the bitterness, divisiveness and intimidation that these speakers often spawn on the campuses they visit, one would expect their right to speak to be curtailed. Yet, as far as I know, no college has denied racist speakers like Khalid Mohammad the right to speak, claiming that that right is protected under the aegis of academic freedom.

The reason that racist speakers pose a problem for the proposed guidelines is that these speakers often have, or claim to have, an educational message, even thought it is delivered in words that violate all notions of civility or sensitivity. Such speakers force would-be speech police to choose between interfering with the marketplace of ideas and protecting students from "discriminatory or vilifying speech."

In general, guest speakers are much more likely than any individual students to damage the favorable learning conditions sought by the Law school's guidelines. Such speakers have a much larger audience than one individual usually has. Thus, they have the potential to affect more people. The more people they affect, the more they impact the educational environment. So if the Law School's purpose in adopting speech codes is to protect the educational environment from becoming excessively hostile, intimidating or degrading, it should apply all of its prohibitions it should apply all of its prohibitions to the speech of any speakers who are invited to the Law School.

However, the Guidelines suggest that "public and semi-public speeches are unlikely to be affected by this prohibition." Yet if the Law School were to apply its policy consistently, in pursuit of a more sensitive educational environment, it would have to monitor and sometimes punish the speech of the speakers that come to its campus. This logical and undesirable implication highlights and undesirable implication highlights the dangers of formulating and implementing speech codes. Speech guidelines at an institution of learning are especially worrisome since, in democratic societies, it is the academy which is supposed to serve as the leader and bastion of free speech.

Once the content of speech can be monitored by thought-police who delineate "standards of sensitivity" for speech, there may be no stopping the slippery slope towards intellectual tyranny. What was perhaps the most intellectually alienating feature of the politically correct movement was that, in attempting to define the acceptable vocabulary of political discourse, it led to the negation of discourse. From the Sedition Act of 1798, to the McCarthy era to the PC-movement, to Harvard Law's speech codes, censorship is a dangerous threat to liberty.

One defense of speech codes like the one being instituted by the Law School is that they eliminate only ugly words like "Nigger," "Ho" and "Kike," and that the elimination of such words as acceptable because they have no informative value. But this is false. Such ugly words are very informative. Since it is usually only hateful or intolerant people who use such words, these words communicate to others the character of the people who use them. It is important and useful to know who on campus is intolerant, and speech codes make it that much more difficult to identify those who are intolerant.

There is no need to prohibit with sanctions even the ugliest of words. After all, they are just words. And selfcensorship and discretion normally prevent most intelligent students from uttering hateful words. When they do not, these students usually suffer rebuke and loss of respect from others. In an intellectual environment, perhaps more than anywhere else, an enormous amount of faith must be placed in people's ability to from the free marketplace of ideas and words. The alternative of censorship is ultimately far more sinister and dangerous words that might be spoken in a university without speech codes.

Gil B. Lahav '94 is an editor of The Harvard Review of Philosophy