082387 IL

01/08/97 01:38PM 3776 characters 71 lines EDITOR NOTES AP Photo CX101< ** The Associated Press (c). All rights reserved.
** BY SARAH NORDGREN ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) - Exiled to a dusty office in an obscure corner of Northwestern University's engineering school, professor Arthur Butz has been an academic pariah for two decades for declaring the Holocaust didn't happen.

Now he's found a forum - Northwestern's site on the World Wide Web - to reach millions of people with theories that historians find absurd.

With a few keystrokes, computer users can find Butz's argument that the Nazi genocide of more than 6 million Jews is "a widespread but erroneous belief," and that typhus and other factors were responsible for the deaths.

Northwestern, while repudiating Butz's beliefs, won't interfere with his right to express them on the Internet through the university.

"I believe his views are monstrous," said university President Henry Bienen. "But I don't want to set myself up as a censor of his views. Who decides what's distasteful? Do you make general law around bad cases?"

Butz's posting has infuriated any number of groups, who argue the school has no reason to give the tenured professor what amounts to a free billboard.

But the issue has also been muddied by the university's decision not to rehire another teacher who was so outraged by Butz's views that he taught a lesson on the Holocaust in an engineering class.

The teacher, Sheldon Epstein, was told last fall that his contract would not be renewed, at least in part because he strayed from the course material in assigning students to research and write about the Holocaust.

"I read his Web page and said this stuff doesn't belong on Northwestern's site," said Epstein, who polled his students and found that many knew little or nothing about the Holocaust. "I owed it to my students."

Butz was trained in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota. His area of expertise includes arcane fields such as digital signal processing.

Among students of the Holocaust, though, he is notorious. Although he has no formal training in history, he is the author of a 1976 book, "The Hoax of the 20th Century," has published his arguments in the student newspaper, and is prominent among Holocaust deniers.

Butz, a soft-spoken man with thick glasses, defends his right to his Web page. "As long as the university has this server available for personal use, then it's perfectly appropriate for me to have this," Butz said.

"The question is whether the university has the right to say, 'We're not comfortable having that promoted under the aegis of Northwestern University,"' countered Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is devoted to study of the Holocaust.

Legal experts said that, as a private institution, the university could place limits on what is posted on its Internet server.

"Whether they should is a more difficult question," said Cass Sunstein, a First Amendment expert at University of Chicago's law school. "It's not simple to say when private institutions should regulate deplorable political speech."

Some schools, including Cornell University, have gone that route, devising guidelines for what is and is not acceptable to put on the university's Internet server.

Abraham Haddad, chairman of the electrical engineering department, said the difference between Epstein and Butz is that Butz keeps his opinions out of the classroom. A university source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the school is seeking to buy out Butz to get him to leave the university. Butz and Bienen both refused to comment.

In any case, Haddad said the department hopes Butz, 62, will leave soon. "He's marginal. He teaches his classes, that's about it," Haddad said. "We give him an office where no one can find him."

-AP-CS-01-08-97 1438EST<