When he reported the editor and publishers of a student newspaper to the police, the university rector may have been motivated by genuinely respectable concerns, like the need to uphold the dignity of women and fight against misogyny.
His wife, after all, is a very prominent gynaecologist β my gynaecologist, as it happens. But whatever his motivation, and however decent it might have been, he misjudged the situation sorely. Malta, with its very recent history of oppression, political and religious censorship and strict limitations β through the use of violence and archaic laws β on freedom of expression, is a curious mix. On the one hand, many people remain raw and sensitive to behaviour such as this, and bridle at it.
Mark Camilleri, the year-old history student who edits Realta, the student newspaper in question, has been summoned for interrogation by the police, and was told that he may yet face criminal prosecution. This has led to a flurry of protest and condemnation. I am not at all surprised. I am surprised, too, that neither the rector nor his advisers appear to have understood that the piece is not an opinion column written by a sub-literate, raging, gutter misogynist who treats women like trash.
His very short story is written in the first person, as a brutal man who hates women and who uses sex and rejection as a power game. In that case, yes, the rector would have been legally, and even morally, correct to report the matter for further action, because race-hate speech is against the law.
But even then he would have been ill-advised to do so. Police action against student newspapers, banning student newspapers, is always going to come across really badly, no matter what they publish. Society has a much higher level of tolerance for students doing naughty things than it does for middle-aged or even, as in the case of Lowell, elderly people doing the same thing. The forces of law and order should simply not sit on student newspapers.
