Why have a Baker information page?

It has sometimes been a bumpy ride maintaining these pages, so why do I bother? I answer this question here, for myself as much as for anyone else that cares to ask.

When Baker was summarily suspended by the University, the event was not covered adequately by the mainstream press. For the first few weeks, it looked like Baker was suspended because he wrote a story that offended an alumnus of the University, because the alumnus complained. This happened at the peak of the politically correct loonyness here on campus. An artist had recently had her work removed from a feminist exhibition because it depicted prostitution. In the Welch case, the University prosecuted a student under the student conduct code with a case that had been thrown out of criminal court because of perjury by a police officer, and the student was not allowed to cross examine witnesses, introduce evidence, or have legal representation. At the time, it seemed that the University was trouncing student rights to score political points. It looked like the Baker case was just another example.

The local papers did not have web editions at the time, so I started posting informational messages to the civil rights newsgroups. The net discussion of the case really took off, to the point that the mainstream media started carrying the story. Information was still hard to come by outside the Detroit area, so I continued my postings to the newsgroups.

As time went on, information about the case was slowly released to the public. It was clear from the newsgroup discussions that people didn't know what they were talking about, so I went about getting copies of the stories in question. In response to a request on the alt.sex.stories newsgroup, several people sent me copies of Baker's stories, which I put on the web page for people to read. It became more difficult to defend free speech when confronted with the content of the stories, and it became more difficult to promote censorship when it was not clear whether the stories constituted a threat.

A few months earlier, there was a violent serial rapist stalking the campus area. The police had been trying to keep it a secret, but after one of the victims was killed the story became public. Hysteria overtook Ann Arbor, to the point that the police were randomly questioning black men and insisting that they provide blood samples to prove their innocence. Campus police searched Baker's dorm room and computer account, and discovered additional stories and email that suggested he might be a threat. The FBI arrested Baker on federal charges, and he was held without bond. The suspected rapist, who was arrested after a failed rape attempt on Christmas Eve, was held with only $50,000 bond. The comparison was obvious, and the Baker case kept getting more interesting. I kept posting information to the web and usenet news, and I began collecting background information that appeared in local papers.

With the federal charges, it became clear that the case could become a precedent on the legal status of the net as well as the more fundamental questions of free speech and privacy rights. I added pages summarizing the various discussions I saw on usenet (What's the Big Deal?) and began publishing biographic information on the people involved in the case, which added still more facets to the case. Philosophy and english composition teachers began emailing me for permission to copy information from my pages for their students to discuss; I added the copyright waiver, but I still occasionally receive a message from someone asking permission. I have also received many messages from serious scholars of law and sociology thanking me for making the information available, since they are studying the legal and social impact of information techology.

I have received a few angry messages from people who didn't like the content of the pages. A few people mistakenly thought I wrote the stories. The funniest was from my dad: "Why in hell do you have that Baker sht on your homepage?" Oddly, no official of the University has ever contacted me or commented on the page. I did receive nastygrams from a student who wasn't offended by the Baker material, but was upset by the Mackinnon bio. She threatened to charge me with who knows what in the kampus kourt because the bio painted Mackinnon as "promoting censorship". The more I checked out Mackinnon's views, the more convinced I was that this was the case. Hey, if the shoe fits, wear it. The last message I got from the student informed me that she was filing charges over this detail. I haven't heard about the charges from the University, so I assume they laughed her right out of the office.