The movement to the senate represented the widening of the debate, as the entire campus confronted the question of what to do about the speech code. It was the most publicly anticipated series of senate meetings at Wisconsin in many years. Entering the fourth stage of the movement also meant engaging in a new kind of politics.

Stage 4. On to the Senate

During the fall, both sides finished their reports for the university committee and the senate. Before the first senate debate, scheduled for December 7, Ted Finman and Charles Cohen went to the Wisconsin State Journal in the hope of persuading associate editor Thomas Still to endorse the Majority Report. They did a good job and persuaded Still to at least momentarily question his standard opposition to codes. But Still then called members of the Minority Report and asked them to make an argument for their position. They explained that certain unpopular ideas could still be punished under the Majority Report and that the climate was such that no one should trust the enforcers. (Of course, this argument applied to any code, including that proposed by the minority.) Still and his fellow editor, Sonny Schubert, soon became strong supporters of radical change and eventually wrote several key editorials in support of abolition.

Ironically, three free speech crises that erupted on campus in the fall of 1998 also were turned to the radical faction's advantage as the senate debates loomed.