University administrators may find the plain language of the First Amendment beyond their comprehension, but they can easily comprehend the relevance to their own pocketbooks of the words ``personally liable'' in a judge's ruling. At the University of New Hampshire, they have agreed to settle a suit brought by English instructor J. Donald Silva, giving him $60,000 in back pay and damages and $170,000 in attorney's fees and costs. Silva sued the university for violating his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights after it suspended him without pay for alleged ``sexual harassment'' and ordered him to undergo psychological counseling. The harassment charges were based on a couple of innocuous remarks Silva made in a writing course, whipped up into -- quite literally -- a federal case by the university's sexual harassment policy, which was so broad and vague that it clearly infringed on professors' academic freedom. In September, Judge Shane Devine of the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire granted Silva a preliminary injunction, ordering the university to reinstate him immediately, and allowing his suit to proceed to trial. In his suit, Silva named as defendants not only the university as a whole, but a number of individuals: its then- president, Dale Nitzschke; Brian Giles, director of the Thompson School of Applied Science, where Silva taught; Neil Lubow, associate vice president for academic affairs; three faculty members who were members of the Appeals Board that adjudicated Silva's case; and two student members of the Appeals Board. Devine rejected, emphatically, the defendants' claim that they enjoyed immunity from personal liability because they were carrying out their official duties. He cited a numerous decisions establishing that officials can claim immunity only when their conduct does not violate ``clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known'' (Harlow vs. Fitzgerald, 1982). The law governing Silva's First Amendment claims, Devine wrote, ``was clearly established at the time of defendants' conduct and that a reasonable University official would not have believed his or her actions, in disciplining plaintiff because of his classroom statements, were lawful in light of this clearly established law.'' The ruling should send shock waves throughout the smug world of higher education. Most universities and colleges have adopted these oppressive speech codes, which are opposed by civil libertarians because of their chilling effect on free speech in the classroom. It's an icy drenching in reality for those who have imposed and enforced the codes to find out that they, personally, can be held accountable for violating a professor's constituional rights. Even those who merely agree to serve on the quasi-judicial bodies who hear these cases are vulnerable, as they should be if they lend their presence to politically correct show trials that make a mockery of due process, as happened in Silva's case. Universities need to have harassment policies, of course, but they also need the backbone to tell complainants, gently but firmly, when they don't have a case. You may be wondering, if you don't follow the academic follies closely, what Silva said in class that landed him in front of a harassment appeaals board with his 30-year career in jeopardy. On Feb. 24, 1992, Silva told his technical writing class, ``I will put focus in terms of sex, so you can better understand it. Focus is like sex. You seek a target. You zero in on your subject. You move from side to side. You close in on the subject. You bracket the subject and center on it. Focus connects experience and language. You and the subject become one.'' That's not obscene. It's not vulgar. It's not sexually explicit, derogatory, or directed at any individual. It's not even original with Silva, who noted in his affidavit that the comparison has been used by many writers, including Ernest Hemingway and Ray Bradbury. Two days later, Silva gave as an example of metaphor the comparison of belly dancing to ``jello on a plate with a vibrator under the plate,'' made by the dancer Little Egypt. Half a dozen women got together and decided they were distressed and offended. With the encouragement of another faculty member, they submitted complaints -- of dismaying illiteracy, it must be said. ``When Mr. Silva started talking in a sexual manner which I thought was very inappropriated (sic) and also very affending (sic),'' one student wrote, not untypically. The judge noted at several places in his opinion that the student complaints were in error as to matters of fact. ``Such errors,'' he said, ``were the inadvertent result of the group discussions which preceded the writing of the complaints.'' Nonetheless, the university rushed to judgment. Before they had even talked to Silva about the student complaints, administrators had decided that he could not be left in the classroom and they were looking for replacements to teach his class. If you're wondering why a university, of all places, would have a policy that in effect guarantees students the right never to be offended, it's because universities, like all other employers, are between a rock and a very hard place -- the federal government. The wording of most harassment policies is based on language originated by federal regulators in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If a student's harassment complaint isn't aggressively pursued, no matter how far-fetched it is, the university is likely to find itself not only sued by the student but the target of a nightmarish EEOC investigation. That threat has pushed universities much too far in the direction of chilling academic freedom. If fear of personal libability now starts pushing administrators back the other way, it's none too soon.