E. D. Hirsch's valuable initiative to give cultural literacy a place in our educational system is more than a matter of words, terms, and definitions. For years language scholars have pointed out to us the dangers of not controlling the power of the poetry of our language and symbols. Mastering our language helps us to avoid becoming victims of those who would use the language to our detriment. The moral behavior and the ethical values we share influence the way we vote and the products we buy. As values they are more than simply antiseptically clean, rational statements. Yet, despite the effort to bleach out the color of the language, its color persists. The cultural literacy we share is based on shared beauty and fantasy and imagination and hope as well as on phonemes and texts. Protest against the aesthetic power of language is about as apposite as living in New York City and complaining about the traffic and the dirt and the noise. Cognitive complaints about the emotionality of language are intellectually sound at one level and utterly irrelevant at another.

For the average citizen, the legal arguments about the First Amendment often seem to miss the point; for the legal scholar, the truth is to be found in the details.

The campus radio station at C. W. Post College broadcast music that was alleged to include language that violated the then-accepted standards of the Federal Communications Commission. The dean who had been given the oversight of the station intervened, listened to the material that had been broadcast, decided that it was indeed "offensive," and fired the station manager. As president I supported the action of the dean.

The staff of the radio station took control of the building and locked themselves in. In addition to their defense of their station manager, the students insisted that their own academic freedom was at issue. William Kunstler, the flamboyant lawyer, suddenly and dramatically appeared to defend the students and the manager who had been fired. The University hired a more narrowly famous but equally spectacular courtroom lawyer named Emile Zola Berman. Kunstler made a sweeping visit to the campus and denounced me as "a Hitler." During the weeks that followed a campus committee that I had appointed studied the matter. I spent long hours in earnest discussion with student leaders and faculty members about the fascinating issues that had been raised: student's academic rights in extra-curricular or co-curricular settings; the academic freedom of nonfaculty employers who, like the station manager, were also in most respects teachers; the reach of a campus radio station into the community at large; and, of course, the laundry list of issues and precedents having to do with "offensive" language.

At that point in my life I did not think of the campus and its radio station as voluntary associations, or that what we were arguing about had to do with the right of some people to intervene in the lives of others for the public good with no public mandate to do so. The college campus as a "private" entity intruding upon the morals of the "public" beyond the campus was never discussed, in the terms of this book, by me or anyone else at the time.

None of the First Amendment issues mattered, as it turned out. Berman outfoxed Kunstler and the case was settled on jurisdictional grounds. The immediate legal problem was settled: the university's position was upheld and the employee remained fired. The result greatly satisfied the chairman of the university's board of trustees, himself a lawyer, who simply wanted an end to the matter. My concern was that acceptance of such a settlement would forever obscure the lessons that might be learned from all the disruption and expense. The trustees understandably felt more comfortable with the chairman's legal position than with my pedagogical one.

The students who had staged the sit-in were admired by some of their peers and were scorned by some others. The dean remained in the deanship. New guidelines were produced as the academic bureaucracy found reassurance about social order in putting rules on paper. There was nothing for everyone to go into the streets about (for which I was thankful), but this exercise in the law taught us nothing about the meaning of the First Amendment, either.

The lessons I now draw from that experience reinforce my notion that narrowing issues for legal purposes erodes their larger meaning. It is the larger meaning that counts in the long run. Lawyers and judges, who must settle cases, are more prudent, much more willing to settle on narrow technical grounds as long as settlement of some sort is reached and they can go on to other cases. Presumably the appellate system will keep some of the cases alive long enough to let the larger issues emerge.

To the extent that the larger meaning of voluntary action is obscured by legal details and technicalities, the cultural force of the First Amendment is lost. It is instructive to think of that radio station as a voluntary association. It is instructive to think of the limits on the use of the station as inhibiting freedom of expression, especially since all the nonverbal forms of discourse came into play: sit-in, posters, marches, slogans, and rallies. It is instructive to think of the radio station as an advocate of a marginal or socially unacceptable subculture. It is instructive to think of the university as a government trying to maintain internal order and peace with its neighbors. It is instructive to think of the faculty as a legislative body trying to respond to tribal pressures and to the claims of "the good of the college" at the same time.