Newsletter

January 2013

How free speech died on campus

Sohrab Ahmari

At Yale University, you
can be prevented from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on your T-shirt. At
Tufts, you can be censured for quoting certain passages from the Quran. Welcome
to the most authoritarian institution in America: the modern university—"a
bizarre, parallel dimension," as Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education, calls it.

Mr. Lukianoff, a
38-year-old Stanford Law grad, has spent the past decade fighting free-speech
battles on college campuses. The latest was last week at Fordham University,
where President Joseph McShane scolded College Republicans for the sin of
inviting Ann Coulter to speak.

"To say that I am
disappointed with the judgment and maturity of the College Republicans . . .
would be a tremendous understatement," Mr. McShane said in a Nov. 9 statement
condemning the club’s invitation to the caustic conservative pundit. He vowed to
"hold out great contempt for anyone who would intentionally inflict pain on
another human being because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or
creed."

To be clear, Mr.
McShane didn’t block Ms. Coulter’s speech, but he said that her presence
would serve as a "test" for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms.
Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken "responsibility for
their decisions" and expressing "their regrets sincerely and eloquently."

Mr. Lukianoff says that
the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level: "This was the
longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I’ve ever seen in which a
university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of
speech."

I caught up with Mr.
Lukianoff at New York University in downtown Manhattan, where he was once
targeted by the same speech restrictions that he has built a career exposing.
Six years ago, a student group at the university invited him to participate in a
panel discussion about the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that
had sparked violent rioting by Muslims across the world.

When Muslim students
protested the event, NYU threatened to close the panel to the public if the
offending cartoons were displayed. The discussion went on—without the cartoons.
Instead, the student hosts displayed a blank easel, registering their own
protest.

"The people who believe
that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech
have won," Mr. Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater
freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to
give campus communities the expectation that if someone’s feelings are hurt by
something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you
allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and
everything can be punished."

You might say Greg
Lukianoff was born to fight college censorship. With his unruly red hair and a
voice given to booming, he certainly looks and sounds the part. His ethnically
Irish, British-born mother moved to America during the 1960s British-nanny fad,
while his Russian father came from Yugoslavia to study at the University of
Wisconsin. Russian history, Mr. Lukianoff says, "taught me about the worst
things that can happen with good intentions."

Growing up in an
immigrant neighborhood in Danbury Conn., sharpened his views. When "you had so
many people from so many different backgrounds, free speech made intuitive
sense," Mr. Lukianoff recalls. "In every genuinely diverse community I’ve ever
lived in, freedom of speech had to be the rule. . . . I find it deeply ironic
that on college campuses diversity is used as an argument against unbridled
freedom of speech."

After graduating from
Stanford, where he specialized in First Amendment law, he joined the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, an organization co-founded in 1999 by
civil-rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, a history
professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to counter the growing but often
hidden threats to free speech in academia. FIRE’s tactics include waging
publicity campaigns intended to embarrass college administrators into dropping
speech-related disciplinary charges against individual students, or reversing
speech-restricting policies. When that fails, FIRE often takes its cases to
court, where it tends to prevail.

In his new book,
"Unlearning Liberty," Mr. Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember
the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still
some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer
exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and
liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors
committed to political agendas.

"What’s disappointing
and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very
professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to
advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and ’90s."

Today, university
bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de
facto speech codes. FIRE maintains a database of such policies on its website,
and Mr. Lukianoff’s book offers an eye-opening sampling. What they share is a
view of "harassment" so broad and so removed from its legal definition that, Mr. Lukianoff says, "literally every student on campus is already guilty."

At Western Michigan
University, it is considered harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based
attitude." That just about sums up the line "I think of all Harvard men as
sissies" (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel "This Side of Paradise"), a
quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt. Tufts
University in Boston proscribes the holding of "sexist attitudes," and a student
newspaper there was found guilty of harassment in 2007 for printing violent
passages from the Quran and facts about the status of women in Saudi Arabia
during the school’s "Islamic Awareness Week."

At California State
University in Chico, it was prohibited until recently to engage in "continual
use of generic masculine terms such as to refer to people of both sexes or
references to both men and women as necessarily heterosexual." Luckily, there is
no need to try to figure out what the school was talking about—the prohibition
was removed earlier this year after FIRE named it as one of its two "Speech
Codes of the Year" in 2011.

At Northeastern
University, where I went to law school, it is a violation of the Internet-usage
policy to transmit any message "which in the sole judgment" of administrators is
"annoying."

Conservatives and
libertarians are especially vulnerable to such charges of harassment. Even
though Mr. Lukianoff’s efforts might aid those censorship victims, he hardly
counts himself as one of them: He says that he is a lifelong Democrat and a
"passionate believer" in gay marriage and abortion rights. And free speech. "If
you’re going to get in trouble for an opinion on campus, it’s more likely for a
socially conservative opinion."

Consider the two
students at Colorado College who were punished in 2008 for satirizing a
gender-studies newsletter. The newsletter had included boisterous references to
"male castration," "feminist porn" and other unprintable matters. The satire,
published by the "Coalition of Some Dudes," tamely discussed "chainsaw
etiquette" ("your chainsaw is not an indoor toy") and offered quotations from
Teddy Roosevelt and menshealth.com. The college found the student satirists
guilty of "the juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality."

"Even when we win our
cases," says Mr. Lukianoff, "the universities almost never apologize to the
students they hurt or the faculty they drag through the mud." Brandeis
University has yet to withdraw a 2007 finding of racial harassment against Prof.
Paul Hindley for explaining the origins of "wetback" in a Latin-American Studies
course. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis apologized to a
janitor found guilty of harassment—for reading a book celebrating the defeat of
the Ku Klux Klan in the presence of two black colleagues—but only after protests
by FIRE and an op-ed in these pages by
Dorothy Rabinowitz.

What motivates college
administrators to act so viciously? "It’s both self-interest and ideological
commitment," Mr. Lukianoff says. On the ideological front, "it’s almost like you
flip a switch, and these administrators, who talk so much about treating every
student with dignity and compassion, suddenly come to see one student as a
caricature of societal evil."

Administrative
self-interest is also at work. "There’s been this huge expansion in the
bureaucratic class at universities," Mr. Lukianoff explains. "They passed the
number of people involved in instruction sometime around 2006. So you get this
ever-renewing crop of administrators, and their jobs aren’t instruction but to
police student behavior. In the worst cases, they see it as their duty to
intervene on students’ deepest beliefs."

Consider the University
of Delaware, which in fall 2007 instituted an ideological orientation for
freshmen. The "treatment," as the administrators called it, included personal
interviews that probed students’ private lives with such questions as: "When did
you discover your sexual identity?" Students were taught in group sessions that
the term racist "applies to all white people" while "people of color cannot be
racists." Once FIRE spotlighted it, the university dismantled the program.

Yet in March 2012,
Kathleen Kerr, the architect of the Delaware program, was elected vice president
of the American College Personnel Association, the professional group of
university administrators.

A 2010 survey by the
American Association of Colleges and Universities found that of 24,000 college
students, only 35.6% strongly agreed that "it is safe to hold unpopular views on
campus." When the question was asked of 9,000 campus professionals—who are more
familiar with the enforcement end of the censorship rules—only 18.8% strongly
agreed.

Mr. Lukianoff thinks all
of this should alarm students, parents and alumni enough to demand change: "If
just a handful more students came in knowing what administrators are doing at
orientation programs, with harassment codes, or free-speech zones—if students
knew this was wrong—we could really change things."

The trouble is that
students are usually intimidated into submission. "The startling majority of
students don’t bother. They’re too concerned about their careers, too concerned
about their grades, to bother fighting back," he says. Parents and alumni
dismiss free-speech restrictions as something that only happens to
conservatives, or that will never affect their own children.

"I make the point that
this is happening, and even if it’s happening to people you don’t like, it’s a
fundamental violation of what the university means," says Mr. Lukianoff. "Free
speech is about protecting minority rights. Free speech is about admitting you
don’t know everything. Free speech is about protecting oddballs. It means
protecting dissenters."

It even means letting
Ann Coulter speak.

Mr. Ahmari is an
assistant books editor at the Journal.

The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2012.