As an American, I have the right to call someone a jerk. As an American college student whose mantra is no longer the First Amendment but the more finely tuned promise of Academic Freedom, I'm not so sure. Although advertised as a refuge from academic orthodoxies, college authorities use an iron fist in maintaining sensitivity and political correctness. In the past year alone, the on-campus deployment of the thought/speech/press police has caused enough judicial flare-ups for a juicy John Grisham novel. The provocation, if not always the response, is sometimes justified, judging by Brandeis' own Dusty Baker incident. Other times, the shakiness of the legal and logical grounds for indicting students of discrimination or insensitivity seem more like a Kafkaesque nightmare than an American trial. The American public was made aware of the ideological stronghold on college campuses by the 1993 water buffalo incident at the University of Pennsylvania. This stretched the definition of racial harassment beyond legal and reasonable standards. When freshman Eden Jacobowitz snipped at a boisterous group of black sorority girls carousing underneath his window by yelling, "shut up, you water buffalo," he became involved in a national scandal.

The university threatened him with expulsion based on the allegation by the sorority girls that "water buffalo" was a racial slur. This was despite the fact that it was a loose translation of a Hebrew word for "idiot," that no black scholar had ever heard it used as a pejorative and that water buffalo don't even exist in Africa. Under the watchful eye of the American media the charges were finally dropped.

The absurdity factor may have diminished or disappeared entirely in subsequent scandals, but the thought police continue to roam college campuses, staying close to the most powerful disseminator of ideas: the University press. Devoted to satire and social commentary, editorial cartoons are the most common targets of PC filtration. Last March, the University of Delaware rallied against their school paper, the Diamondback, in response to a cartoon that mocked the death of a pro-Palestinian activist. The activist, who was killed while averting the Israeli Army from razing a house in Gaza, was depicted sitting on a bulldozer under the definition of "stupidity."

Despite the flurry of demands, threats and thousands of angry e-mails from all around the country, the editor in chief denied any legal or moral wrongdoing based on the very simple tenet of the First Amendment. A staff editorial written in the aftermath likened the paper's right to publish the cartoon with the students' right to protest it. The matter subsided without authoritative intervention, save for a published slap on the wrist by the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

In October, the University of Florida's paper, the Alligator, took a crack at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in an editorial cartoon, this one with supposedly anti-Semitic overtones. Sparking international outtrage, one of the two consecutive political cartoons in question depicted a Palestinian and a Jew flinging ludicrous allegations at one another, and intended to poke fun at the futile bickering between the respective ethnic groups on campus. In the torrent of e-mails and letters to the editor, some students accused the paper of propagating the belief that Jews killed Jesus and others inoked Nazi comparisons. Many made personal attacks on the board, calling them everything from racist to homophobic, according to Editor in Chief Joe Black. While he apologized for the unintended message of the cartoon, Black did not apologize as a journalist, evoking the constitutional right of expression that, according to the outcome of all three aforementioned incidents, no college walls can stifle.

In the Alligator's unique case, its financial independence from the University nullified possible legal repercussions. But other student editors involved in last year's outpouring of controversies haven't been as lucky. Closer to home at Harvard University, after pressure from the administration, an editor of a student paper resigned over a cartoon that called employees of the career services department "incompetent morons" for a scheduling mishap.

The ever-so-popular allegation of racism ousted two student editors from Reed College after poking fun at a black professor, among others, in a spoof article titled "Academic or not?" But last year's most dazzling display of administrative muscle and expression-management occurred at Florida's Stetson University, where the entire student newspaper staff was fired over an allegedly racist and sexist April Fool's edition of the Reporter, which featured a satirically misogynistic sex-advice column written in Ebonics.

Punishing the public, albeit humorous, promotion of violence toward women, is a far cry from persecuting a boy for shouting out "water buffalo," which is possibly the most harmless oath ever to be heard on a college campus. But between the ridiculous and the justified, there rests a slew of prosecuted student indiscretions that limit the margins of acceptable speech with each victory of the administration.