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Stanford Daily wrong quotation

	I wasn't planning to send you gentlemen a message until
later in the week about the censorship of rec.humor.funny.  I
wanted to get more reactions from faculty and students first.
However, today's Stanford Daily quotes me wrongly.  What they
quote me directly as saying was copied from the electronic
bulletin board su-etc.  However, the Daily reporter blundered in
reading the computer bulletin board.

The first paragraph was from a computer science graduate student
Liam Peyton and the second was from another CS grad student
Joseph Jacobs.  He also misquoted me as stating CS Department
policy.  The Department hasn't met on the matter.  I acted only
with respect to my own research computer, gang-of-four.  Besides
that he gives a wrong view of the technology involved and the
phenomenon of newsgroups.

I did write the following statement and post it on the su-etc
electronic bulletin board.  It has about 35 signatures
so far.

Besides the statement I will send to the same list a longer
explanation of the affair and of the technology.


Statement of Protest about the AIR Censorship of rec.humor.funny.

Computer scientists and computer users have been involved in
making information resources widely available since the 1960s.
Such resources are analogous to libraries.  The newsgroups
available on various networks are the computer analog of
magazines and partial prototypes of future universal computer
libraries.  These libraries will make available the information
resources of the whole world to anyone's terminal or personal
computer.

Therefore, the criteria for including newsgroups in computer
systems or removing them should be identical to those for
including books in or removing books from libraries.  For this
reason, and since the resource requirements for keeping
newsgroups available are very small, we consider it contrary to
the function of a university to censor the presence of newsgroups in
University computers.  We regard it as analogous to removing a
book from the library.  To be able to read anything subject only
to cost limitations is an essential part of academic freedom.

We therefore think that AIR and SDC should rescind the purge of
rec.humor.funny.
faculty@score
rec.humor.funny
Here is the Gorin and Sack message

To the Stanford community,

In Information Resources, we have been confronted with the existence
of a Usenet (Unix users') bulletin board, rec.humor.funny, that
contains jokes including, among others, jokes based on racial, ethnic,
sexual, religious, and other stereotypes.  Jokes based on such
stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance; they undermine
an important University purpose: our collective search for a better
way, for a truly pluralistic community in which every person is
acknowledged an individual, not a caricature.

We have weighed our love of freedom of expression and the free
exchange of ideas in contrast to our respect for the dignity and
rights of every individual.  In this situation we find: this bulletin
board does not serve a University educational purpose; its content is
offensive; it does not, in itself, provide a forum for the examination
and discussion of intolerance, an exchange of views, or the expression
of views of the members of the University community.

Stanford University has no commitment to maintain our computing
facilities as a generalized forum for outsiders' indiscriminate
purposes.  We are sensitive to the pain caused by racial, religious,
and sexual affronts.  For these reasons, we have decided not to have
that bulletin board file on the computers operated by Information
Resources.

We endorse the continued use of our local, unmoderated computer
bulletin boards by members of the University community for the
discussion of ideas, including those that are unpopular.  In such a
forum, ideas are subject to the thoughtful judgement of others.

Ralph Gorin, Director                  John Sack, Director
Academic Information Resources         Stanford Data Center
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