Students For Academic Freedom

The State of Campus Speech · 11 July 2004

By Erin O'Connor--Critical Mass, 07/12/04

Reason's Cathy Young has written a piece detailing some of the more egregious recent efforts to suppress and punish politically incorrect campus speech. Exhibits A and B are the new--patently unconstitutional--speech code at Oklahoma State, and a controversial student column in the Oregon State paper that became the occasion not for reaffirming the importance of a free press, but for shaming the paper's staff into conformity with campus norms on what constitutes acceptable expression:

In April, for instance, the faculty council of Oklahoma State University approved a "racial and sexual harassment policy" that amounts to a far-reaching speech code. According to a report in The Daily O'Collegian, the policy's definition of harassment includes "a hostile environment that unreasonably interferes with the work or academic performance of those of a particular race, color, ethnicity or national origin," even if such "interference" is "unintentional." It covers "verbal and nonverbal harassment, as well as print and electronic harassment."

The policy does purport to exempt any "presentation or inquiry falling within justifiable academic standards covering course contents and pedagogy." But justifiable is a nebulous term, and the policy as a whole is so broad and so vague that it would surely chill the legitimate exchange of ideas, particularly outside the classroom -- in student papers, for instance.

Some recent incidents involving student journalism bolster these concerns. Around the same time that Oklahoma State approved its harassment policy, a controversy erupted at Oregon State University after the student paper, The Daily Barometer, ran an article by staff columnist David Williams titled "A message from a white male to the African American community." Williams argued that one reason for the social ills disproportionately afflicting blacks is that character and accountability in the black community are undermined by a tendency to rally around prominent African-Americans behaving badly, from O.J. Simpson to singer R. Kelly, currently facing child pornography charges on the basis of a videotape allegedly showing him having sex with an underage girl.

Williams went out of his way to qualify his message, saying he realized his article could be seen as "picking on the worst" of the African-American community and that his judgment on the issue might be suspect because he is not black. "I have never been the victim of racism," he wrote. "I am a white male. This all is very easy for me to say." Williams nonetheless concluded that blacks "need to grow beyond the automatic reaction of defending someone because he or she shares the same skin color and is in a dilemma."

Maybe it was a good column making a necessary point, and maybe it was tired and condescending. But the reaction went far beyond criticism of Williams' arguments or tone. Following a protest rally, The Daily Barometer ran a groveling editorial that repeatedly apologized for printing the column and called its publication "an inexcusable mistake." Williams was fired from his position as columnist. At a campus forum held a few days later, university president Ed Gray called the incident a "teachable moment" -- the teaching in question, of course, being about diversity and institutional racism, not about freedom of the press. The Barometer's Forum editor, Christina Stewart, offered yet another apology for letting the offending article appear. (In a twist, it was subsequently revealed that Williams' column had been inspired by an article on a similar subject by the Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., who is black.)

Young's examples point to the two principal ways speech is managed on campus these days: shaming the offending party into voluntary submission to expressive campus norms, and forcing an unrepentant violator of expressive campus norms to undergo the mandatory shaming of being punished for expressing his or her views.

Young's use of the word "groveling" in the Oregon State anecdote announces that this is an example of the first shaming principle: It speaks to the manner in which the OSU student journalists allowed their emotions--their very human desire not to be mocked, attacked, humiliated--to override their integrity as journalists. Christina Stewart, et al, were shamed into apologizing for publishing the unpopular opinions of a fellow student; worse, rather than defending their editorial prerogatives as well as the expressive rights of the offending columnist, they fired the columnist (when it comes to groups, ritual humiliation is never complete without a purge). The Barometer isn't likely to repeat the "mistake" of printing columns that question or challenge the political orthodoxies that prevail on the OSU campus; the staff there has learned its lesson, has caved publicly and abjectly to the pressure of public opinion, and will be actively engaged in self-censorship from here on out. So much for fearless reporting and engaged, challenging editorial pages that reflect a diversity of viewpoints.

Campus speech codes exist for the cases when individuals or groups refuse to be shamed into submission. They are institutionally ratified shaming devices that not only make it acceptable to punish students for saying things that offend others, but that use shame as the punitive weapon of choice. Sensitivity training, a common "sentence" meted out to those found guilt of violating campus speech codes, is a shaming device, a mechanism meant to make people repudiate their own consciences and accept instead an externally imposed set of rules about what kinds of beliefs and behaviors regarding race, sex, and sexuality are acceptable (Jane Elliot's Blue Eyed workshops on racial sensitivity are classics in this genre). Forced apology, another signal feature of the punishments meted out under campus speech codes, is entirely about shame, about compelling an individual who is by definition unrepentant, unwilling to apologize, to do so anyway, and to do so in a manner that is convincing to administrators and the offended parties. That such a punishment makes a mockery of the principles it is intended to uphold--sensitivity to difference, tolerance of that which is not like oneself--seems to be lost on those who so piously dole the punishments out.

Granted, harassment exists; granted threats and incitements are not free speech; and granted that even the freest of free expression should observe reasonable restrictions on time, place, and manner. But campus speech codes that attempt to restrict expression based on content, and that give the emotional response of others priority over a speaker's right to express himself, go way too far. They are designed to get inside people's heads and hearts, and they reserve the right not only to punish people for what they find there, but to try to reform their personalities along more "acceptable" lines.

The sick logic of the speech code, when it is used as a means of punishment, is thus that of invasion of conscience: When faced with a choice between apologizing for speaking your mind and being expelled, a student is forced to decide whether his principles matter more to him than his record, whether he is willing to risk his future for the sake of his ideals. There is indeed a great deal of shame in that. But it should be felt by the people who enforce and endorse the codes, not by those the codes attack.

Hat tip: Fred Ray

—