The More Things Change . . .

When I saw the headline of the Reuters story, "College bars students from posing for Playboy," I almost didn't need to click on it to know what it was about. When I did click through, I got exactly what I expected. Playboy is planning a spread on Girls of the Big 12, and Baylor University, as a member of that conference, would be natural to be included. But Baylor, the world's largest Baptist university, has banned its students from appearing.

This apparently happens every few years. The first time it happened was more than 25 years ago when I was a student there. Playboy was planning a Girls of the Southwest Conference layout back when there still was a Southwest Conference. The Baylor administration, of course, wanted nothing to do with Playboy, but the student newspaper, The Lariat, editorialized that students are adults and should be able to do what they wanted to. University President Abner McCall begged to differ, and a crisis of sorts broke out. The Lariat staff cited the First Amendment and stood by its position, but the administration held an interpretation of the First Amendment that I've never forgotten--freedom of the press means freedom for the owner of that press. Freedom for the publisher, not the writer or the editor. That's the kind of real-world lesson you don't usually learn in college but have to wait to discover while on the job. In keeping with that interpretation, the Lariat's editor in chief and some of his staff were told to get their own damn press if they wanted freedom and were summarily fired. The Lariat itself did a retrospective on that story when Playboy returned in 2002. (They'd apparently already been back in 1996.) Somehow it's comforting to know that, even in this age of Internets and iPods, some things don't change. I'm sure Playboy will return to Baylor in years to come to entice more students to pose for the magazine, and the university administration will discipline those that do. There really are constants in life.

To put this in the context of other recent posts (here and here), I think this understanding of money and access being necessary for free speech is part of the reason I feel so strongly about net neutrality. If we allow the Internet to be commandeered by telecom giants interested in pursuing their own agendas, our access to pages such as this or any other blog--not to mention entrepreneurial start-ups like Google, YouTube, and whatever else is in the pipeline that we don't know about yet--will be endangered. Even if the telecom corporate agendas appear to be innocuous, unless we specifically protect equal access, it could easily slip away as an unintended consequence of technological advances that leave no room for smaller sites that don't have money to back them up. We don't need to have a concerted campaign to undermine the Internet as we know it to lose what we have.