As previously announced, the News Guy is taking an extended Thanksgiving vacation, ending it in a large city south of Vermont, pictured above, watching some play in which (in the words of the most brilliant summary in the history of English letters) “a ghost and a prince meet/and everyone ends in mincemeat.”

Regular posts will resume Wednesday. Check back then. And remember, to keep the News Guy going, keep those donations coming in.

But first a question:

Good that the University of Vermont mens basketball team whipped Rutgers Sunday afternoon, but did the Catamounts really have to stay in the super-luxury Heldrich Hotel in downtown New Brunswick, N.J, where the single room rate starts at just a smidge under $200 a night?

No doubt they got a group rate, and one assumes that the players, at least, doubled up. But that would have been true at the Hyatt Regency just a few blocks away, which is cheaper, if not cheap. Or at any one of three or four perfectly decent (and even less expensive) hotels closer to the arena in suburban Piscataway.

Granted, we’re not talking big bucks here. And maybe there is a good reason for staying at the Heldrich. Still, if all 13 players and all nine coaches made the trip, that’s at least 11 rooms which could easily have cost $50 apiece less at a nearby respectable hostlery. A few hundred bucks here, a few hundred there, it adds up.

Now an announcement:

Like much of America, the News Guy is taking the rest of the week off to participate in the annual rite of gluttony, one of his great talents. In fact, he is taking the rest of this week and the start of next week off. The next post will be on Wednesday, December 2.

After that, expect the regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday postings for the rest of the year except that – on the assumption that effectively nobody will be reading the news those two days – there will be no entries on the last two Fridays, December 25 and December 31.

And after that?

The jury, as they say, remains out. The pace of donations has ebbed and flowed, but in the aggregate it is not quite sufficient to add up to 200 by the end of the year.

That was the goal – one might even say the demand – which will determine whether the News Guy stays in business, as announced in the post of November 4.

To reiterate one of the points made there, the 200 donations are needed less for the money than for the assurance that at least 200 Vermonters think this site is worth something.

What matters, then, is not the amount, but the indication of interest. Though the suggested donation is $24, the Pay Pal click on the site provides a $10 option, and a check can be for less. It will still count as one of the 200.

One $10 check came last week from a woman who said she earns $10 an hour. She had decided to contribute one (pre-tax) hour of her labor because, she said, she depends on the news and analysis in the posts.

It’s for her, and other like her, that I hope to continue.

Over at the Vermont Tiger web site, University of Vermont economics professor Art Woolf had some kind words for the News Guy’s Sept 14 post about possible threats to free speech in UVM’s proposed (and subsequently altered) “solicitations policy” along with an interesting suggestion.

“UVM has some other free speech issues,” Woolf noted, citing a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) which on its green-yellow-red scale rates UVM a yellow, meaning there are some threats to free speech on campus.

But that’s better, from FIRE’s perspective, than Bennington and Middlebury Colleges, both of whom are rated red. Middlebury, in fact, won the organization’s “speech code of the month” rank last May because of its policy on political demonstrations.

As FIRE’s officials acknowledge, no one has lately complained about not being able to speak his or her piece at UVM, Middlebury, or Bennington (the only Vermont schools FIRE deals with). FIRE presents no tangible cases of alleged free speech repression at any of the Vermont campuses.

Neither, it seems, does anybody else. At the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, director Allen Gilbert said that when an anti-harassment law applying to higher education was passed in 2004, “we worried that someday there would be a case that would challenge the constitutionality were the law applied in certain ways.”

But apparently it has not been so applied, at least not so that anybody has complained.

Will Creeley, FIRE’s Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, acknowledged that the ratings are based on “the language in (a college’s) policy, not any application of the policy… (because ) the mere existence of a flawed policy chills speech on campus.”

As assertions go, this can’t be confirmed. But then it can’t be refuted, either, and it seems plausible.

Take the foundation of that May “award” FIRE bestowed on Middlebury. In its policy governing student demonstrations, the College asserts that, “student organizations bear full responsibility for arranging and financing any Department of Public Safety provisions that may be necessary in connection with controversial speakers.”

FIRE claims that this policy “allows fellow students to exercise a ‘heckler’s veto’ over unpopular speech by threatening disruptive protests, thus requiring additional security and, accordingly, additional—and possibly prohibitive—costs.”

On its face, that objection seems reasonable (and Middlebury officials chose not to respond). Suppose a left-wing student organization plans a demonstration. If the conservatives on campus make it known that they intend to be out in force, holding up their own signs and chanting their own slogans, the leftist group would have to put up the money to pay for extra police protection, money it probably does not have. So the demonstration gets called off.

There are also potential problems with the “harassment” policies of the colleges, designed to protect students against racial, ethnic, or gender-based slurs.

The UVM policy defines harassment as any behavior, including “verbal” behavior (meaning speech), “that has the purpose or effect of objectively and substantially undermining and detracting from or interfering with a student’s educational performance or access to school resources or creating an objectively intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

That leaves a lot open to interpretation, even though the last eight words are taken directly from statute and from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. But who “objectively” determines which spoken or written words might create “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

It isn’t that FIRE objects to all college rules. Free speech does not confer the power to hold a loud demonstration all night, or outside the exam room. Colleges, Creeley said, may impose “reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.” And professors can largely set the speech rules for their own classes.

Restrictions against racial, ethnic, and sexual harassment are also broadly acceptable – even desirable – when it is clear that they govern only person-on-person contact. A university may discipline a student who walks up to another and insults him because of his race, abuses her for being female, or maliciously teases him for being gay.

But what about speech that might insult some students even if it is not directed at them? What about speech that offends many students simply because it expresses views the find abhorrent?

According to FIRE, some colleges are clamping down on that kind of speech, too: at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where authorities would not allow conservative students to protest affirmative action or President Obama’s economic policies; at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) where a student employee “was found guilty of racial harassment for merely reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan during his work breaks.”

“When you give administrators wide berth to punish speech merely because it is disagreeable or uncivil, that discretion will be abused,” Creeley said. “It doesn’t matter if it hasn’t happened yet.”

There have been no reports of similar occurrences in Vermont. But it isn’t difficult to envision the possibilities. Suppose that, in class, a student says that the political power of Jewish organizations restrains pubic discussion of the Mideast, or that affirmative action programs lead to accepting unqualified minority students, or that the Abenaki should not get full tribal recognition because that might lead to gambling casinos in Vermont.

Reasonable public policy statements all. But with today’s sometimes supercharged sensitivity, a Jewish, an African-American, or an Abenaki student might complain to the professor that he or she was so offended that his or her “education performance” was undermined, and that the statements established an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”

The professor’s response to the offended student should be: “You’re offended? Then be offended. Living in a free society almost guarantees that we’re all going to be offended from time to time. Deal with it” But some professors, especially those still un-tenured, might wonder whether higher-ups would support this response.

That doesn’t happen, said Tom Gustafson, UVM’s Vice President for Student and Campus Life. The complaints that come to university authorities, he said, are more likely to occur when a professor “has been singling out a student who might be African-American, saying, ‘we need the African-American perspective,’ and after awhile the student says, ‘come on, I’m just here as a student.’”

But Creeley argued that the harassment rules can stifle student expression before it is expressed.

“When students are left to guess whether their speech is running afoul (of the rules) it’s rational for them to self-censor rather than risk punishment,” he said.

In the view of some students and faculty, the real “harassment” comes in the form of continual rule changes that seem designed to deter free expression.

“It’s not so much overt restriction as much as the passage of policies that require one to officially schedule space, indoors and outdoors, for setting up a table, holding a speak-out etc.,” wrote UVM English professor Nancy Welch in an email.

Only a “recognized organization” can schedule space, she said, so if I was part of (an unofficial) faculty group…and we wanted to have a table in the Davis Center or outside the library, we could not.”

The intricate rules and regulations imposed by Vermont’s colleges and universities to enhance civility seem to be breeding as much resentment, and perhaps stifling speech. Not to mention that they present examples of the kind of pretentious, turgid prose that (one assumes) the better teachers in the English Department strive to prevent.

Perhaps the state’s institutions of higher learning would be better off with a short, simple, statement banning overt, one-on-one incivility of all kinds, and then simply depending on the old rule that the best (and perhaps the only Constitutional) remedy for narrow-minded, hateful, and ignorant speech is…more speech.