Muzzling the speech cops

Reversing the speech code craze on campus, the University of
Wisconsin has called off the speech police by becoming the first major
university in the nation at which a faculty vote abolished all campus
harassment codes.

It was chancellor Donna Shalala who established Wisconsin’s stringent
speech regulations a decade ago, setting limits on expression and
punishments for any who dared to stray too far from the current
orthodoxies of the Left. “American society is racist and sexist,” she
proclaimed at the time. “In the 1960s, we were frustrated about all
this. But now, we are in a position to do something about it.” In a
position, too, to bludgeon anyone who’s right-of-center into silence.

Wisconsin’s students succeeded in getting Shalala’s speech code
declared unconstitutional in 1991. The school’s “content-based
restrictions on speech has the effect of limiting the diversity of ideas
among students, thereby preventing the ‘robust exchange of ideas’ which
intellectually diverse
campuses provide,” ruled Federal District Judge Robert Warren.
“Suppression of speech,” he concluded, “even where the speech’s content
appears to have little value and great costs, amounts to governmental
thought control.”

Left intact by Warren’s decision was a separate faculty speech code,
now voided, that imposed punishment on professors who created an
“intimidating or demeaning” environment, a statute covering “all
expression, teaching materials, student assignments, lectures and
instructional techniques” that anyone of a particular “gender, race,
cultural background, ethnicity, sexual
orientation or handicap” might find “objectionable.”

As a footnote, it’s the same Donna Shalala, now Bill Clinton’s
Secretary of Health and Human Services, who recently lost a unanimous
decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals, “United Seniors USA vs. Shalala.”
The court ruled that the 1997 federal regulation that prevented doctors
from treating any Medicare patients for two years if they contracted
privately for medical services with any Medicare patient, free from any
cost to the taxpayers, imposed an unconstitutional harm on seniors by
denying them control over their own health care and private spending. As
at Wisconsin, Shalala’s
I-know-what’s-good-for-you central planning paradigm was judged to be in
direct violation of fundamental American rights and principles.

Shalala, unfortunately, was hardly the only true-believer in academe
who sought to create unhostile environments and insure common decency
through thought control, coerced sensitivity, mandatory sensitivity
training sessions that smacked of political re-education camps, and the
suppression of free
speech. Across the nation, said Jeane Kirkpatrick, American universities
were turning into “islands of repression in a sea of freedom.” Choosing
censorship and shunning over counter-speech and free thought, the
“neo-McCarthyites of the righteous Left,” in Nat Hentoff’s phrase, had
become wholly fearful of lively debate and fully allergic to contentious
places.

“The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society
today exist on our campuses,” said Yale University president Benno
Schmidt. “On many campuses around the country, perhaps most, there is
little resistance to growing pressure to suppress and to punish, rather
than to answer, speech that offends notions of civility and community.
Offensive speech cannot be suppressed under open-ended standards without
letting loose an engine of censorship that cannot be controlled. To
stifle expression is, apart from an invasion of the rights of others, a
disastrous reflection on the idea of a university. A university is a
place where people have to have the right to speak the unspeakable and
think the unthinkable and challenge the unchallengeable.”

At Stanford, a rigid speech code prohibited all expression that
“constitutes harassment,” i.e., words “intended to insult or
stigmatize,” words that might by their “very utterance inflict injury or
tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Stanford law professor
Charles Lawrence argued that the First Amendment “presupposes a world
characterized by equal opportunity and the absence of societally created
and culturally ingrained and internalized racism, sexism and
homophobia.” Gag rules apply, in short, on all those whose views might
fall outside the range of acceptable Left orthodoxy until we all set
foot in utopia. In Houston, a Faculty Human Relations Committee voted to
banish Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the library of the Mark
Twain Intermediate School. With penalties ranging from official
reprimand to expulsion, the University of Connecticut outlawed acts of
“conspicuous exclusion from conversation” and “misdirected laughter.”

On the politically correct sliding scale of free expression, of
course, some were permitted more free speech than others. “Freedom of
speech should belong mainly to the powerless rather than those in
power,” explained a Stanford law professor. While most students and
faculty dared not question in public the fairness or consequences of
affirmative action quotas, seeing such candid commentary as not worth
being sent to the Gulag, the Left felt entirely free to launch ad
hominem offensives of politically correct intolerances at the entire
“bourgeois superstructure” — Western values, imperialism, Eurocentric
“Anglos,” militarism, democratic traditions, materialism, academic
standards, capitalism, etc., etc. — expelling Aristotle, Shakespeare
and other “dead white males” from required reading lists and purging
“patriarchal hegemony” and “malecentered science” from the
curriculum.

In his book “Illiberal Education,” Dinesh D’Souza writes of being
confronted by a self-described “sensitivity coalition,” some fully
outfitted in the rattling chains of slavery, during a speech at Tufts.
Before D’Souza took the podium in an auditorium protected by armed
police, professor Donald Klein, acting on university instructions,
warned student activists to abstain from throwing things at the speaker,
or shouting him down. After his speech, D’Souza was approached by an
outraged Afro-American Studies professor who accused him of both
“logocentrism” (the “white man’s obsession with big words”) and of
having a “white perspective” (a preference for “rationality” and “sexual
restraint”).

Standing alone, D’Souza’s campus account of his encounter with the
folly of ethnic tribalism and mindless groupthink is sufficient to
underline why last week’s Wisconsin faculty vote is so notable, so
overdue.

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Ralph R. Reiland, an Associate Professor of Economics at Robert
Morris College in Pittsburgh, is co-author with Sarah J. McCarthy of
“Mom & Pop vs. the Dreambusters: The Small Business Revolt Against Big
Government,” available at 800-262-4729, ISBN#0072347740. He can be
reached by e-mail.