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(Enlarge) When school officials decided to stop the showing of an X-rated movie on the University of Maryland, Baltimre County campus in 1981 as part of the school’s annual movie series, the school’s campus newspaper published a poster for the movie on the front page of its Oct. 19 issue. (Photo by Kevin Rector)

When confronted by state legislators opposed to student plans to screen the pornographic film "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge" on the College Park campus in April, University of Maryland officials temporarily canceled the screening despite student protests.

University officials also entered into an agreement with the legislature to produce guidelines for future screenings of X-rated films on all University System of Maryland campuses and other public colleges in the state.

The system's Board of Regents plans to discuss the issue at its Oct. 23 meeting.

The deadline for the guidelines is Dec. 1

In seeking to create such guidelines, university officials said they are in uncharted waters.

They should have looked within the university system itself -- or talked to Arbutus attorney Terry Nolan.

Nolan, now president of the Arbutus Business and Professional Association, said he was at the center of a similar controversy surrounding a student screening of an X-rated film in 1981, when he was president of the Student Government Association at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Nolan said that controversy, which drew national news coverage as the current controversy has, did produce guidelines on showing X-rated films such as "Debbie Does Dallas," the film at the center of the 1981 dispute on UMBC's campus.

The guidelines didn't ban such showings. Instead, the settlement agreement hashed out between Nolan, university administrators, then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Mingle and Barbara Mello, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represented the SGA, established a set of parameters for those hosting the films to follow.

Conversations with Nolan and archival research in the special collections of UMBC's Albin O. Kuhn Library showed striking similarities between the 1981 controversy and the one brewing today.

Setting precedent

When Terry Nolan became UMBC's student government president in May of 1981, the idea of showing X-rated films on the campus was nothing new.

For years, the SGA had hosted an evening film series that included X-rated films.

The films had always been approved by Mary Avara, the senior member of the Maryland Board of Movie Censors.

The board, which even then was an antiquated model of state movie censorship that had ceased to exist anywhere else in the country, monitored "obscenity" in Maryland.

As Nolan prepared to compile the SGA's list of films for that fall, however, it would be without Avara's oversight. The board had been shut down that July after the state Senate refused to renew its funding.

With Avara out of the picture, Nolan had free reign to decide the films for the series. He picked the pornographic film "Debbie Does Dallas" for an Oct. 14 showing on the university campus off Wilkens Avenue.

Soon after, Nolan said he received a call from Capt. Greg Roepke of campus police, who asked to screen the film with him.

According to Nolan, Roepke went straight from the screening to the Wilkens Police Station just off campus and asked the precinct's vice squad for help stopping the screening of the film.

According to Nolan, a sergeant of the vice squad told Roepke that he "didn't care about college kids watching X-rated movies," but would send a vice officer to the screening to give an opinion on whether it was obscene.

Nolan said he believes Roepke then went to the university administration and insinuated that "the Baltimore County Vice Squad is going to raid 'Debbie' with buses and police dogs and arrest all the students" for violation of the state's obscenity code.

Whether Roepke did that or not, then-university Chancellor John Dorsey and his administration did become fearful of legal repercussions for students, and canceled the showing of the film, according to archival records of UMBC's student newspaper, The Retriever.

Nolan, 28 at the time and just out of service as an Army military police officer in Germany, said he had studied First Amendment freedoms in a political science class that spring, and felt the SGA's First Amendment rights had been violated.

He went to the American Civil Liberties Union for help, and the ACLU Board of Directors agreed to take the case.

Shortly thereafter, The Retriever splashed a "Debbie Does Dallas" poster across its Oct. 19 cover with the words "CENSORED BY THE ADMINISTRATION" across it, and the controversy was picked up by The Sun and local television outlets.

A week later, an Oct. 26 Retriever article said the ACLU had taken the case because of the possibility that the blocking of the film was an example of unconstitutional prior restraint under the First Amendment.

The argument, based on legal precedent partially established in the 1931 United States Supreme Court case Near v. Minnesota, was that preemptively blocking the showing of a movie was unconstitutional -- regardless of whether the movie was subsequently deemed obscene.

Nolan also claimed there was a provision in the state's obscenity code allowing X-rated films to be shown for "bonafide educational uses," the article said.

The ACLU threatened the administration with legal action in federal court, and Mingle, acting as counsel to the university, called a Nov. 13 meeting between Nolan, Mello and various university officials, according to Retriever archives.

At that meeting, the university signed an agreement with the ACLU that allowed for the screening of the film and other X-rated films on the campus if the SGA accepted five provisions regulating the showing of all X-rated films on campus from then on, Nolan said.

The issue settled, Nolan and the SGA showed the film in a university lecture hall seven times to 800 students in one subsequent weekend, according to a Nov. 23 article in The Retriever.

Nolan said it was the film series' most popular screening ever -- largely due to the controversy.

Various student groups also protested the screenings. Nolan said a supplemental appropriation of $150 in SGA funds was given to the Women's Union student group to pay for their protest materials.

After the coverage of the screenings and protests, the issue disappeared from the pages of The Retriever until its Feb. 15 issue the following semester, in which a front page headline read, "Cinema UMBC: SGA to book more X-rated films..."

Lesson learned

Today, the status and validity of the UMBC administration's 1981 agreement with the SGA is somewhat unclear.

Nolan said he thinks it is still valid, but isn't sure.

Meredith Curtis, a spokeswoman with ACLU Maryland, said the ACLU doesn't have "the original files" on the agreement, but knows there was "no actual lawsuit" filed.

"There is no legally binding agreement in place, but it was some sort of amicable agreement reached at the time," she said.

Still, "the school did agree to the policy," Curtis said.

"It may not be a legal document, but it was an agreement that the university agreed to follow."

Lisa Akchin, assistant to UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski, said that the university's "commitment to freedom of expression has not changed" since the agreement was negotiated. But, she said, what has changed is that UMBC is now governed by the policies of the University System of Maryland, which was first formed as the University of Maryland System in 1988.

"This means that any policy adopted by the Board of Regents concerning showing adult films would supersede the 1981 guidelines negotiated with the UMBC Student Government Association," Akchin said in an e-mail.

As for the physical whereabouts of the agreement, David Gleason, general counsel to UMBC, said it is "probably in a warehouse, if it was kept at all."

The most vocal opponent to last April's screening of "Pirates II," state Sen. Andrew Harris, a Republican whose district includes parts of Baltimore and Harford counties, along with university students, First Amendment scholars and members of the media, had all said last fall's situation was without precedent.

While the decades-old agreement may not pass legal muster, it does stand as a historic precedent for University System of Maryland officials to consider -- one that Patrick Hogan, the system's vice chancellor for government relations, said he was "very surprised" to learn existed.

Hogan said he would "absolutely" like to consider the decades-old agreement when drafting the new policy.

"It'd be very helpful information," he said.

He noted that Robert O'Neil, a First Amendment scholar and former president of the University of Virginia, has been helping the state's attorney general look for such agreements, but "has found nothing across the country."

Hogan was quoted in an Oct. 7 article in The Baltimore Sun as saying, "To be frank, when this all happened, we thought we could look around the country at other universities, find a policy and tailor it to our needs. To our amazement, we couldn't find one."

Aside from the agreement itself, Nolan's successful challenge to the censorship of "Debbie Does Dallas" on the UMBC campus in 1981 could possibly be referenced by students today if they feel the new guidelines are too broad.

According to David Hudson Jr., a scholar at Vanderbilt University's First Amendment Center in Tennessee who teaches and writes about free speech issues on public college campuses, the principal of prior restraint could possibly be a viable argument against any censoring of films.

"In the college environment, there may be heightened state interest with respect to the college trying to disassociate itself with X-rated films," he said. "On the other hand, you could make a clear argument that (blocking a film) could be prior restraint, and I don't know what the ultimate outcome would be."

Hudson said the United States Supreme Court cases Freedman v. Maryland, which found in 1965 that government censor boards had no power to ban films, and Miller v. California, which established in 1973 a three-pronged obscenity test, could also be relevant to the discussion.

Curtis, with the ACLU, said "whatever the agreement, what's important is that universities not adopt policies of censoring what students or faculty do, because that would raise First Amendment and academic freedom concerns."

Curtis said ACLU Maryland will closely review any proposed set of guidelines established by the Board of Regents "to make sure that it doesn't violate free speech protections or academic freedoms."

Nolan said were he back in the same position as he was in 1981, he would fight the fight again, because college is a place to learn about "isms" -- including "sexism, exhibitionism and exploitationism," he said.

"From the time of Socrates and the Greeks, university has been a place of great learning and ideas," Nolan said.

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