September 2013
In
September 2011 the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Roger Clegg,
addressed a press conference at a hotel near the Madison campus of the
University of Wisconsin. Knowing that Clegg was a critic of racial preferences
in university admissions, UW-Madison’s "vice-provost for diversity and climate"
had publicly denounced his plan to speak as "a threat to our diversity efforts."
At a meeting the vice-provost urged students to "mobilize" in response.
Apparently as a result of this incitement, a student mob invaded the hotel,
assaulted some of its staff, chased Clegg into an elevator, and tried to prevent
the elevator doors from closing. Only through efforts by hotel staff did the
speaker make his escape. Though it had arrived as the press conference was
ending, too late to prevent supposedly dangerous thoughts from being expressed,
the vice-provost was evidently pleased by what he regarded as the mob’s good
intentions. Instead of deploring their violence, he praised the participating
students as "awesome"!
This outrageous incident is only one of many attacks on free expression
described in the book under review, the author of which is president of the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). Lukianoff
places blame on students and student governments as well as on faculty members,
butstill more on what he calls the "ever-growing army of administrators."
Lukianoff tells us that the process of "unlearning liberty" begins even before
students arrive on campus. They emerge from high school already accustomed to
censorship, and with little grasp of constitutional rights. Since censorship
protects them from the need to defend their beliefs by rational argument, they
do not acquire the ability to do so. Thus students often see freedom of
expression not as creating opportunities for presenting a case in debate, but
rather as an obstacle to the "progress" they have been taught to desire. They
feel justified in disrupting meetings, shouting down speakers, or stealing all
copies of a campus newspaper in order to suppress unwelcome ideas. Student
governments deny funding to groups whose opinions displease them, while granting
it to others, even though such "viewpoint" discrimination is illegal.
Some professors demand that false assumptions (about "racism," for instance) be
accepted as undebatably true, and even require that their students try to
influence politicians in the interests of "progressive" causes. In certain
departments — especially education and social work — academics attempt to
impose on students an ideological commitment to "social justice," though (as the
author points out) choosing any one definition of "social justice" as the
indisputable truth is to risk placing dissenters in the category of "heretics
who deserve ostracism, if not outright expulsion from the community." Against
accusations of intolerable heresy, having science on your side may be no
protection. "It is now commonly accepted that genetics plays a role in many
human traits," Lukianoff writes, "yet this concept is often received with horror
on campus." If inequalities among individuals and groups arise (at least to a
significant degree) from inherited genetic differences, the dream of achieving
an egalitarian "social justice" through political indoctrination and activism is
fatally flawed — an unthinkable conclusion.
Students may seek to silence students, and professors may persecute both
students and dissident colleagues, but students and faculty alike are vulnerable
to persecution by expanding campus bureaucracies armed with absurdly vague
"speech codes" and rules of conduct. In prohibitions of "harassment" (sexual,
racial, religious or whatever), the term is often defined so broadly that almost
everybody can be considered technically guilty of some infraction. Merely to
"offend" somebody may be enough. At the University of Iowa, sexual "harassment"
is said to occur "when somebody says or does something sexually related that you
don’t want them to say or do, regardless of who it is." When regulations expose
virtually everybody to the risk of disciplinary action, selective enforcement is
inevitable, and thus the bias of campus officials in favour of the "historically
disadvantaged" becomes decisive. It is clearly safer to make an uncomplimentary
remark about Christianity than about Islam, and safer to accuse a white of
"racism" than to make the same accusation against a black. Whites and Christians
do not enjoy an equal right to be "offended."
Instead of confining themselves to enforcement of negative prohibitions,
however sweeping, some campus bureaucracies have imposed mandatory ideological
re-education under the guise of "orientation." Students in residence are
especially vulnerable to "thought reform" extending far beyond any normal
orientation period. One especially ambitious effort to transform students into
activists for left-wing causes made the University of Delaware sufficiently
notorious that the program was suspended, but somewhat similar schemes survived
elsewhere.
Broad restrictions on free speech in state institutions are unconstitutional, as
federal courts have ruled whenever a specific case has been brought before them.
In 2003, under the second President Bush, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of
the U.S. Department of Education warned that OCR’s anti-"harassment" regulations
should not be interpreted as requiring infringement of "rights protected under
the First Amendment," but neither this warning nor court decisions have carried
much weight with typical academic administrators.
Though Lukianoff identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, he sees Bush’s OCR as
more respectful of individual rights than the "newly assertive" one under
President Obama. In 2011 the OCR proclaimed a policy requiring that in cases of
alleged sexual harassment or assault, campus authorities find the accused guilty
without insisting on real proof, merely if it appears slightly more likely than
not that the accusation is well-founded. The author fears that the combination
of ridiculous definitions and this astonishing decree will prove to be "a
formula for due process disaster." He cites the misfortune of a student expelled
from the University of North Dakota on a charge of sexual assault before the
police completed their investigation and charged the accuser with filing a false
report.
It
is not unreasonable to suspect that Lukianoff’s portrayal of campus repression
may exaggerate the reality. In his position at FIRE he naturally learns more
about outrages than about occasions when wisdom and justice prevail. But the
outrages seem numerous enough to form a pattern. In the preface to his major
book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (published in 2006), Dr. Mark
Moyar comments on the "very harmful trend at American universities whereby
haughty derision and ostracism are used against those whose work calls into
question the reigning ideological orthodoxy, stifling debate and leading to
defects and gaps in scholarship . . ." If talented scholars can be subjected to
such informal pressures to conform, without need for any alleged violation of
rules, one must suppose that the pressures on students to conform may be even
greater than formal rules suggest. Being so often unconstitutional as well as
conspicuously inconsistent with liberty, the rules are easier to fight, whether
in court or in the media. FIRE has relied primarily on publicity, with
considerable success, but it clearly has much more to do.
Kenneth H.W. Hilborn, a professor emeritus of history at the
University of Western Ontario, is a former member of the University Senate and
of the SAFS Board of Directors.
New York and London: Encounter Books, 2012
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