Buffaloed

"Shut up, you water buffalo." Those words, shouted in January by Eden Jacobowitz, an Israeli-born freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, sparked one of the more bizarre incidents in the annals of political correctness. Jacobowitz was reacting to the noise being made by five black sorority sisters outside his dorm room. The women summoned the campus police. And though Jacobowitz, an Orthodox Jew, explained the epithet as a translation for the Hebrew behemah, slang for "fool" or "dummy," he was charged with racial harassment under Penn's hate-speech policy and threatened with suspension. The case became a symbol of correctness run amuck, and Sheldon Hackney, outgoing president of the university (and current head of the National Endowment for the Humanities), was blasted for failing to defend free speech. Eventually, the charges against Jacobowitz were dropped.

Last week the university's interim president, Claire Fagin, attempted to bury the controversy by dumping the code. Under the school's new policy, which will be completed by June, "community standards of conduct" and "informal conflict resolution" will govern disputes. Fagin shrugs off criticism that the new policy remains vague and opens the door for incorrectness. "If everybody thinks you're doing something slightly off in a highly emotional situation like this, then maybe you're doing something exactly right," she says. "In any case, it can't be worse."

Hate-speech regulations, intended to prohibit slurs against minorities, women and gays, have proved nettlesome for other universities. Courts have decreed that the codes at state schools such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin run afoul of the First Amendment. At many schools, hate-speech rules are on the books, but are not enforced.

"Much hate-speech regulation seems designed not to solve a problem but to make a statement," notes Vincent Blasi, a law professor at Columbia. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Jacobowitz, applauded the old code's demise but insisted that the best code is no code at all. Said Deborah Leavy, executive director of the Pennsylvania A.C.L.U.: "The university should stick to what it does best and educate."