John Leo, columnist for U.S. News and World Report

Brace yourselves. It’s time to announce the winner of the second annual Sheldon award. As the growing legions of Sheldon fans know, this is the trophy that goes to the college president who did the most during 1998 to look the other way while students stole or burned whole stacks of campus newspapers.

The Sheldon is a statuette that looks something like the Oscar, except that the Oscar shows a man with no face looking straight ahead, while the Sheldon shows a man with no spine looking the other way. The award is named for Sheldon Hackney, former president of the Univ. of Pennsylvania, a legend among backbone-free campus officials who strive to look the other way.

Last year’s winner was Chang-Lin Tien, former chancellor of the University of California–Berkeley. Known to his many admirers as "the Hackney of the West," Chang-Lin Tien effortlessly looked the other way six times in a single academic year—a national record—when thieves stole all or part of the Daily Californian’s 24,000-copy press run, often on days when someone wrote an article opposing affirmative action.

Two vigorous contenders for the new Sheldon, the presidents of Amherst and Northwestern, faded from competition when events overtook their efforts to look the other way. At Amherst, the conservative paper was defunded and then funded again. At Northwestern, the conservative paper was derecognized, in effect making it almost impossible to publish. "Derecognition" is a familiar worldwide process pioneered by Third World juntas, who regard it as the most efficient way of coping with unwanted journalism.

At Northwestern, President Henry Bienen caught the eye of the Sheldon judges last August when he wrote that derecognition of the Northwestern Chronicle was "not a matter of free speech." A nice touch. Alumni, including Charlton Heston, and the campus’s Medill School of Journalism loudly thought otherwise, so Northwestern backed down and Bienen lost the Sheldon award that seemed within his grasp.

Formidable contender. Cornell President Hunter Rawlings III, last year’s runner-up, was once more a formidable contender. In 1997, he looked the other way after two seizures and burnings of the Cornell Review, including one protesting a parody of Ebonics. Judges were impressed by Rawlings’s commencement speech praising campus reaction to the parody as "rapid and robust," though that response included a promise by campus groups to keep stealing the Review and attempts to ban the Review altogether. Some Sheldon judges argued that apparent praise for stealing, burning, and banning papers was too active a stance to qualify as "looking the other way," but they were overruled.

This year Rawlings’s candidacy was harmed somewhat by a brief statement favoring free speech, but Rawlings fans pointed out that it was tepid and somewhat snarly and that the pro-burning atmosphere at Cornell seems to be intact. In his statement, Rawlings implied that the Cornell Review was somehow tied to campus racial incidents and "white power" philosophy.

A similar brief and tepid defense of free expression nearly ruined the ground swell for the Rev. Leo O’Donovan, S. J., president of Georgetown University. About 3,000 copies of the abrasively conservative paper, the Georgetown Academy, were stolen on October 8. O’Donovan’s response was impressively slow and feeble. A one-paragraph comment, which did not mention the Academy or the theft, appeared on October 23, with "background information" saying that the "alleged removal of copies" was being investigated.

After the pressure was turned up (an article in the Washington Times; inquiries from alumni and trustees; complaints from the Student Press Law Center, a conservative press monitoring group), O’Donovan put out a stronger one-paragraph defense, saying the newspapers’ removal was "not acceptable." But this apparently disqualifying act struck the judges as an admirable form of rope-a-dope–doing the least possible until pressure abates. When campus papers failed to print O’Donovan’s free-speech paragraph, no further effort was made to publicize it.

The administration’s attempts to discover who took the 3,000 copies don’t seem to have gotten very far. A student who told Academy editors that he had seen a Georgetown residential assistant taking bundles of Academy issues to his room was not called during the investigation. Academy editors said that one residential assistant told them he would no longer allow copies of the publication to be placed in his dorm. Despite the "free speech" paragraph, pro-O’Donovan judges argued that he hung on in the competition by sheer detachment from what was happening and by the fact that his free-speech paragraph remained unknown to so many on campus.

What finally tipped the Sheldon toward O’Donovan was his silence when the main campus paper, the Hoya, ran an editorial applauding the theft of the Academy’s copies. The citation reads: "For looking otherward when one campus paper loses most of its copies and another campus paper loses most of its principles, the Sheldon goes to the Rev. Leo O’Donovan." Congratulations all around.