This debate misses the entire point. While I thought wrongly there may have been some grounds to fire Sarich, never in my wildest dreams did I think he should be incarcerated. I simply thought he should be asked to leave Wheeler Hall and circulate his notes along with the christians in Sproul Plaza. The protestors said this many times; moreover, they only disrupted the first few minutes of his class before they left, and Sarich never once requested that he be able to begin his lecture. He loved the disruption and laughed out heartily as one of his students, a proud though rather unattractive Indo Aryan man with Madonna CD and Walkman , yelled back at all those darker darkies: You Deserve to Be Colonized. So his free speech was never violated--all future protests were held before and outside the lecture hall.
Also, the question is how the Bell Curve became a bestseller, why it was so well advertised, was lavished with the cover review in prominent places. Would a book entitled Bloodletting and Salem Witch Hunts Vindicated have gotten such attention? Of course there are those who don't think their thesis is that absurd, and I submit that's the real point of contention, including with the criticisms that seem to have taken too *seriously* the thesis of the book.We don't ask whether there really were witches or whether the tests designed to determine so could have been better constructed; we ask how could a society come to believe such an absurd thing as the existence of witches... or cognitively inferior races.
At any rate, as Todd Gitlin the media expert has asked, why did the reviews/tv talk circuits basically pass over the more important critiques--Claude Fisher, et al and Intelligence, Genes and Success: Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve?
By checking the state's powers, we don't ensure any semblance of free, open and rational debate from the topics chosen to the viewpoints entertained.
Wasn't it a waste of the Berkeley sociologists' time that they had to spend two years responding to the Bell Curve because it was so prominently received? They could have been learning biology to study the Human Genome Project (and surprisingly they made no atempt to learn any biology to carry out their critique!) or investigating the new organization of work, etc. Isn't this similar to Marx's sarcastic comment about how productive of economic activity crime is--how it spurs on the economic activity of the locksmithing and security business, etc. The crime here was the Bell Curve, and the published pages of critique (including the Bell Curve Debate Reader small enough to keep right by your bed lamp--pleasant dreams) and the psychotherapy hours and alcohol purchases for those traumatized were all the "productive" activity spurred on thereby. This all showed up as an increase in GDP of the triumphant American economy.
At any rate, we could compare Bourdieu's book on television and Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent to explore the more important questions about substantive free speech and debate in late capitalism.
RB