Contempt for the First Amendment is a long tradition within the Claremont city limits. In keeping with that stifling tradition, the Claremont Graduate University (CGU) recently hired an attorney to have a YouTube video by a person named Peter Musurlian removed from YouTube's website.
In June, Musurlian came to CGU to attend and videotape a lecture by a Turkish consul general. Musurlian, who is of Armenian-descent, then posted a film he made of the lecture. Musurlian's film depicts some of the concerns the Armenian-American community has with Turkey's denial of the World War I-era genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire.
The film must have ruffled some feathers because a short time after he posted his YouTube video, an attorney representing CGU contacted Musurlian. The attorney informed Musurlian that he no authority to post a film containing the faces of students who attended the lecture. The attorney demanded that the students' faces be blurred, or CGU would have YouTube pull the film from its website.
Musurlian says his video was pulled from YouTube on June 25th but was restored on July 10th after Musurlian responded to YouTube's concerns.
Charles Johnson's post on the Claremont Conservative first alerted us to this matter:
The very fact that CGU's first reaction to seeing a video on YouTube was to call in an attorney who gets a high fee should really bother us. What does it say about a college that their first act was to call the lawyers?
What indeed?
The Daily Bulletin also picked up on the story and carried an article yesterday on the issue:
Musurlian said he had a campus lawyer, identified as Paul S. Berra, tell him to blur student faces or the university would have the video pulled. "He initially said some of the students were being harassed," Musurlian said. But the video doesn't focus in on students and he said he wasn't given a specific reason about the kind of harassment. In a letter claimed to be from Berra posted on Musurlian's Web site, the lawyer wrote " ... I asked you to voluntarily remove your video from YouTube because you had no authority to publish it. I explained that you needed to obtain, for starters, the students' consent before doing so."
Here at the Insider, we've had our own run-in with Claremont censorship, so we can sympathize with Musurlian and his problems with YouTube, which is owned by Google. CGU still hasn't justified its actions, by the way, which happens to be another Claremont strong suit: When in institutional trouble, deny, deny, deny.
It's certainly been a tough year for the First Amendment at the Claremont Colleges. Heck, an entire issue of the Pomona College newspaper The Student Life was pulled from newsstands, something that we might more properly associate with the Stalin-era Soviet Union.
In any case, here is Musurlian's video, in case you're interested. Musurlian also has started a website called "Claremont Genocide University." The Musurlian film runs about six minutes:
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