Politically Correct Death Threats at Georgia Tech
By Peter Collier
03/21/07
FrontPageMagazine.com
This past February, while other Georgia Tech students were exchanging
flirtatious Valentine’s Day notes, Ruth Malhotra received an anonymous
letter whose message was anything but amorous:
This Valentine’s Day, you cannot attack gay marriage. It is about
love and you are about hate.
This Valentine’s Day, you cannot condemn a woman’s choice.
It is about love and you are about hate.
This Valentine’ Day, you cannot protest the Vagina Monologues. It
is about love and you are about hate.
No, this Valentine’s Day, you will be Raped. Sex is about love and
through it you will experience hate. I cannot wait.
To find a rape threat in her mailbox was almost a relief to Malhotra after
months of receiving death threats. (One of the most charitable, from a
fellow student, said, "I really want to choke you, bitch.")
As with all the other letters, she turned the vicious Valentine over to
the campus police, which added it to the "ongoing investigation"
that so far has yielded nothing.
Malhotra can’t help believing that a university that claims to be
more committed to "civility" than any other school in the country
and routinely initiates proceedings against students who commit such offenses
as smoking in the dorms would certainly have immediately sprung heroically
into action if she had been a black, Hispanic, lesbian, or almost any
other woman receiving such messages. But she is a conservative activist
and almost by definition a thorn in Georgia Tech’s side. So the
school’s administration, beginning with president Wayne Clough and
working downward to various assistant deans, has sat on its hands while
Malhotra endures what her attorney David French calls "a persecution."
Presently a graduate student in International Affairs, Malhotra has had
a college career that resembles a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress through
what the campus sensitivity experts like to call a "hostile environment."
An Atlanta native whose family is from India, she choose Georgia Tech
because it seemed the best of the area’s schools, because her father
teaches there in business management, and because she won scholarships
that would cover the tuition.
A committed Christian, she was personally conservative but not particularly
political when she arrived at Tech in 2002. But in the fervid post 9/11
atmosphere on campus, she found herself gradually pulled into the orbit
of the College Republicans and soon galvanized not only by questions of
war and peace but also by issues such as race preferences and abortion.
And on all of these issues, she found, conservative students faced a tilted
playing field. She recalls: "The more I got involved, the more I
saw the obstacles conservative students face in expressing themselves.
The administration put so many more challenges in our way. We didn’t
have the same resources and opportunities that leftist students had. I
expected an open forum for ideas, but the administration was clearly biased."
So were some of her teachers. Malhotra’s first open conflict with
the Tech administration came in the spring of 2004, when she enrolled
in a course called Foundations of Public Policy. The first day of class
she told the professor, a woman named Georgia Persons, that she would
have to miss one class session because of a conference she was attending
in Washington. Persons asked who was holding the conference. When Malhotra
told her it was the Conservative Political Action Committee, the teacher
warned her that she would fail the course. Malhotra thought this might
be more of the in-class hyperbole she’d heard from other liberal
professors. But she did indeed fail the first test. Otherwise a 4.0 student,
she complained about the grade to the Dean’s Office, also claiming
that the professor had made snide remarks in class about Christians and
conservatives that were obviously directed at her. After filing a grievance,
Malhotra brokered a deal in which she was allowed to withdraw from the
class without penalty and the professor would not be allowed to teach
it again.
The case became a cause celebre in the campus newspaper, with coverage spilling over into the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But it wasn’t until the following academic year that Malhotra began to be a marked woman. The fall of 2004, the College Republicans, of which she was now chairman, refused to attend a debate during Gay Pride Coming Out Week. Instead, they sent a letter outlining their opposition to some parts of the gay agenda, including gay marriage. The administration condemned their response as "an expression of intolerance."
The charges of homophobia continued to resonate until the following spring, when the College Republicans protested a campus showing of the Vagina Monologues during Women’s Awareness Week by making placards with some of the lines from the play in large bold faced type along with a banner asking, "Does This Empower You?" In an extravagant display of hypocrisy, the administration, which endorsed a performance of the play, made Malhotra cover up the offensive quotes.
It was about this time that she was called into by a dean who told her that the College Republicans were a "joke" and should cease their activities. Pointing out that her group was merely expressing its opinions the way that the preponderant leftwing groups did, Malhotra was then sent to Tech’s Vice President, who passed her on to President Wayne Clough, who made it clear to her that he found her actions distasteful and not in accord with the "atmosphere of civility" he sought for the campus. When Malhotra pointed out that this atmosphere included—indeed, was defined by—leftist groups violently and often obscenely condemning the President and the war in Iraq, and, for that matter, attacking the faith of conservative Christians like herself—she received a brush off.
By the beginning of her senior year in 2005, Malhotra, who had previously felt that Tech’s political bias could be solved within the institution, now felt that she either had to shut up or seek outside help. She talked with David Horowitz at an event where he was promoting his Academic Bill of Rights. Horowitz advised her to contact attorney David French, head the Alliance Defense Fund’s Center for Academic Freedom. After hearing her history, French decided early in 2006 to file a suit against Georgia Tech for unconstitutional policies used to censor activities such as those Malhotra and the College Republicans had undertaken. His chief target was a speech code that prevented "intolerant" activities, which Malhotra’s experience showed was enforced selectively against conservative students. Also targeted in the suit were three other issues: Tech’s "free speech zone" which was the only approved place on campus for discussing "issues"; the invidious use of student activities fees for "social and cultural" but not "political or religious" speakers and activities (College Republicans were "political" but gay and African American activist groups were "social’ and "cultural"; the Islamic Awareness was not "religious," but Jewish and Christian groups were); and the policy of Tech’s Office of Diversity to endorse certain denominations based on whether or not they were gay friendly. (Buddhists yes; Southern Baptists and Mormons no.)
Already a controversial figure on campus, Malhotra, now chief plaintiff
in the suit filed with fellow student leader Orit Sklar, became Public
Enemy number one for the Georgia Tech left. An ad hoc group called CLAM
(Conservatives and Liberals Against Malhotra) formed on campus with the
sole raison d’etre of harassing her. An anti Malhotra website appeared
calling her "christo-fascist" and showing an unflattering shot
of her face stippled with digitized swastikas. Flyers were posted throughout
the campus denouncing her as a "Twinkie"—an Asian who
was "yellow on the outside and white on the inside."
The charge of ethnic treason was almost laughable: Malhotra’s Indian
descent had given her a dark complexion and she wasn’t Asian according
to the racial taxonomy propounded by campus victim groups, although she
knew that if she had been on the left she would have been accorded "protected
status" as a presumptive minority. Far more disturbing that the mundane
slanders she faced as she completed her course work for her degree were
the messages that now began to appear on her campus email. In one of them,
the writer threatened to throw acid in her face at the upcoming graduations
ceremonies.
Malhotra was accepted by Tech for graduate school in the fall of 2006.
A few months earlier, a judge had heard the first point of French’s
four point suit—the one regarding the speech code—and ordered
mediation between the parties. The university agreed to change the policy,
but almost immediately reneged on its promise. In August, a few weeks
before classes began, the judge heard arguments on the speech code and
then struck it down.
Never acknowledging the constitutional reason for the court decision,
Tech reacted by appropriating $100,000 to bring in speakers (among them,
Maya Angelou at a fee of $22,500) and hold "meaningful discussions"
as part of a campus-wide initiative called "Common Ground" meant
to reaffirm the commitment to "civility" (which the court hearing
had shown was nothing more than officially sanctioned politically correct
speech) in spite of the legal setback it had suffered.
It was during this kumbaya moment that threats against Malhotra reached
a crescendo. "So your not dead yet Ruth Malhotra," one of them
began with uncertain grammar but unmistakable enmity. "But you will
be soon." Another one warned, "Don’t even try to protest
National Coming Out Day. If you do, you will regret it, and don’t
say you were not warned. You are hated on this campus and you should fear
for your life." Yet another said, "For every time a student
is called Nigger on campus—you will receive a bullet to the head."
The campus police defined the threats as "terroristic." But
although some of the letters were brazenly signed by persons on and off
campus, no arrests have been made. And the administration itself, ignoring
the opportunity to strike a blow in behalf of the civility it claims to
prize, has remained mute about the invisible outrage taking place on its
campus. (A public information officer replies to questions about the case
by reading a statement which says that Georgia Tech cannot comment because
of its commitment to protecting its students’ privacy; when it is
pointed out to him that the only student with a privacy issue in this
case, Malhotra herself, is willing to waive this privilege, he says that
he will consult the school’s legal counsel and is never heard from
again.)
Trudging warily through her days on campus, Malhotra is unable to forget
the Kafkaesque situation in which she finds herself: "It is ironic
that the Georgia Tech administration would enforce unlawful speech policies
that silence disagreement with its preferred political agenda, but remains
absolutely silent in the face of threats on a student’s safety."
David French, her lawyer in this case and a longtime litigator in matters
of free speech and student rights, is also stunned by what has happened
to Malhotra: "I’ve never seen anything quite like this. The
tolerant left at Georgia Tech seems to have decided that Ruth must be
destroyed to protect `tolerance.’ The administration sees one of
its own threatened by death and rape and they just sit there. I’ve
seen conservative students suffer a lot of abuse for their beliefs. But
I’ve never seen abuse cross over into threats. And I’ve never
seen an administration sit on its hands while one of its students is threatened
by death and rape. It makes you wonder: have we gone past simple intimidation
to death threats now? Is this sort of thing going to become a standard
part of left’s playbook in intimidating conservative students? How
far will they go?"
This is exactly the question Ruth Malhotra now contemplates: will those
who are threatening her go all the way? Unlike most issues in the sandbox
politics of campus life, this question appears to be a matter of life
and death.