The recent appearance of an underground student newsletter has sparked debate among students and some school administrators over students’ right to free speech.

The anonymous publication, a two-sided, photocopied newsletter called The Juilliard Invective, was distributed throughout the Meredith Willson Residence Hall on the morning of December 18. It used charged language to express concerns about residence life. It also featured a parody of the Residence Hall Reader (a two-page bulletin put out by the Office of Residence Life), and a list of "useful pranks and activities for campus fun" that satirized various Juilliard faculty, administrators, and resident assistants, using language that some students and school officials say they found distasteful.

Within hours of The Invective’s distribution, a group of resident assistants (RAs) had removed nearly all copies from the residence hall. Courtney Blackwell, a fourth-year dance major and one of the RAs who took down The Invective from her floor, said that there was "no organized effort" among the RAs to confiscate copies of the newsletter, and that no order to do so had come from the School’s administration.

But a second issue of The Invective, which appeared on January 24, criticized the Office of Residence Life (O.R.L.) for the alleged censorship of the first issue. It also featured an editorial blaming students for what the column’s writer called Juilliard’s "lifelessness" and described the School as "a factory for the arts." Some of these copies were removed from the residence hall as well. According to Sandy Johnson, a fourth-year bassoonist and a resident assistant, these copies were not removed by resident assistants but by individual students who were offended by The Invective.

Prior to the first issue’s removal, director of residence life Franklin Ricarte conferred with Catherine Charlton, director of student affairs, concerning The Invective. At that time, Charlton said, the official decision was to allow issues of The Invective to remain standing. "I didn’t want to have an institutional response of censorship," she explained.

Ricarte said that the RAs who removed the newsletter from the residence hall were not acting in an official capacity. He said it was a reaction by some student members of the residence life staff who, as students, felt it was not appropriate to leave it up. However, he added, the RAs’ positions did grant them the authority to remove them, since their responsibilities include "maintaining their floor boards and any flyers that are put up."

Student reaction to The Invective has been mixed. "I was offended...," said one. "What they were saying is that Juilliard seems to mass-produce artists. I find it offensive that somebody would make a generalizing statement like that without being able to back it up."

The editors of The Invective, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, claim that allowing the RAs to remove the newsletters is tantamount to censorship. In an interview conducted using an online chat service, the editors said: "The simultaneous removal of all Invective [issues] indicates to us that there was an organizing force be hind the actions of the RAs. If the RAs did act on their own accord, it’s only because they’re an extension of the O.R.L."

Juilliard policy requires that all student postings in the residence hall receive an official stamp from the Office of Residence Life. Ricarte said that this policy is intended to prevent solicitation, not to censor the content of postings. He added that The Invective would have received the stamp had it been submitted for approval.

The newsletter’s editors said that protesting this policy was one of the main purposes their publication. "Approval from the O.R.L. is contrary to all the ideals we presented in our first issue. We believe that the entire idea of a stamp is constricting and unhealthy for the community. Even if they had given us the stamp, we wouldn’t have taken it. How could anybody take a paper that condemns the stamp policy seriously if it wore the ugly red stamp itself?"

Charlton said that she found some of The Invective’s content "troubling." She said, "When anything attacks an individual and their particular faith system or ethnicity, it gives me pause. There’s a fine line that any institution needs to balance-supporting free speech without allowing it to cross over into hate speech."

Stephen Clapp, the dean of Juilliard, was one of the individuals parodied in The Invective. In an interview, the dean said that because The Invective was written anonymously, the content was able to be "outrageous." Since it was "so extreme, it appeared to me that the writers were intending to get a shock reaction rather than to actually communicate information," Dean Clapp said.

He described some of the references to specific members of the Juilliard community as being "in very poor taste." In response to his own caricature in The Invective, he said, "‘Bible-boy Clapp’ is a title that I will gladly accept."

Student reaction to The Invective has been mixed. Mahira Kakkar, a second-year drama student, said that the first issue addressed legitimate concerns about the dining hall and the small size of student rooms. However, she said, "I was offended by the second newsletter. What they were saying is that Juilliard seems to mass-produce artists. I find it offensive that somebody would make a generalizing statement like that without being able to back it up." She added that being at Juilliard is "a privilege that a lot of us have been given. To slander that [without] offering any solutions whatsoever is stupid and offensive."

David Buck, a second-year flute major, shared Kakkar’s reactions, saying that the first issue was more "good-humored" than the second, which, he said, "just went on a tirade" and was a "very biting criticism of Juilliard and its artistic validity. If anyone really has [such a] strong opinion that Juilliard is an ‘anti-artistic’ institution, why not find one that is ‘artistic’ and spend your tuition elsewhere?"

Kakkar said that the removal of The Invective was inappropriate. "I feel they should have left it up to us to decide if it was appropriate. I would like to exercise my freedom of choice."

Although The Invective was published anonymously, both issues provided an e-mail address where the editors can be reached. The newsletter’s editors said, "Having people know who we are would influence their thinking. Anonymity keeps our readership and submissions less biased. We don’t want to get in the way. Remaining anonymous also allows us to be unpestered by the community we wish to observe objectively."

But not everyone agreed with this assessment. When asked his opinion, Buck said, "It’s a stretch to say that they’re ‘objective.’ It seems like a very subjective opinion of the School. If their goal is to effect change, isolating themselves from the rest of the community and commenting on it as if they were separate seems like a strange way to go about improving the Juilliard community."

Ed Klorman is a second-year viola student of Heidi Castleman and Hsin-Yun Huang.