Sohrab Ahmari writing in the WSJ
* * *
* FOLKS... THIS IS FROM THREE FRIGGIN' YEARS AGO; AND THE
AUTHOR'S FEARS, CONTENTIONS, AND PREDICTIONS HAVE TURNED INTO TODAY'S REALITY!
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."
* GIVE... ME... A... FRIGGIN'... BREAK...!!!
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.
* GEEZUS...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
"The people who believe that colleges and
universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won,"
Mr. Lukianoff says.
* AND, AGAIN... THIS IS FROM THREE YEARS AGO!
"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."
(*NOD*)
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."
* FOLKS... YOU NEED TO TALK TO YOUR OWN KIDS ABOUT
THIS... YOUR OWN NIECES... NEPHEWS... GODCHILDREN...
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.
* YEP. IT WAS ALREADY IN FULL SPRING IN THE EARLY AND MID
1980s WHEN I ATTENDED COLLEGE IN BOSTON AND LONDON.
"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."
(*NOD*)
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."
* YEP...
(*SIGH*)
At Western Michigan University, it is considered
harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based attitude."
* MY GOD - I'D BE EXECUTED!
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.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
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."
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
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."
* THAT'S MY ALMA MATER, FOLKS! (AND, "NO," THEY
DON'T GET ANY DONATIONS FROM THIS ALUMNUS!)
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."
* AGAIN... THIS WAS IN 2008!
"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. Donald 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.
* I REMEMBER THAT OP-ED!
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.
(*BANGING MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL*)
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?"
(*BANGING HARDER*)
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.)
* THANKFULLY!
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.
* FOLKS...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD AGAIN*)
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.
(*SNORT*)
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."
* BUT INSTEAD WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING IS THAT THINGS ARE
GETTING WORSE ON CAMPUS... AND... SUCH TACTICS HAVE BEEN ADOPTED BY OUR
MILITARY AND OTHER GOVERNMENTAL UNITS!
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.
AND BEYOND THIS...
Parents and alumni dismiss free-speech restrictions as
something that only happens to conservatives, or that will never affect their
own children.
* YEP...
"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.
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