Free speech dying on local campuses

23 March 2001

When Brown University students last week tried to shut down the college newspaper because they didn't like what it was printing, their behavior seemed a bizarre aberration.

It wasn't. Rather, it was the logical consequence of a disturbing effort by colleges and universities around the country to police their students using so-called "codes of conduct" that are breathtaking in their reach and severity.

About 15 years ago, colleges and universities began to adopt codes that in various guises prohibited or restricted behavior or speech that the schools deemed offensive or harassing. Students violating those rules could be suspended or expelled.

Over time, the codes have become increasingly prevalent and onerous. The schools have argued that the rules were necessary to make their campuses into civil havens where learning could flourish. But the real effect has been to discourage dissent and enforce conformity and group thinking. The result has been to make students more politically correct and less tolerant of divergent views, especially when those views involve hot-button issues such as race, gender, sexuality or, for that matter, being a member of the Republican Party.

Two years ago, a number of concerned civil liberties advocates banded together to challenge the codes. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is based in Boston and Philadelphia. Its founders and advisers include local luminaries such as civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who defended Harvard anti-war protesters in the 1960s, talk show host David Brudnoy and author Wendy Kaminer, a fellow at Radcliffe College.

In a room together, those three would probably disagree about a lot, and they would do so in blunt terms. But they each cherish their right to express those views. The puzzling question is, why don't colleges and universities?

It's understandable, albeit disappointing, that some students are willing to acquiesce in the schools' efforts to deprive them of their liberties. College students are in a transition to adulthood. As children, their parents and teachers filled their heads with verities: things were always right or wrong, two and two always equaled four. Many are simply unused to seeing the world as complex shades of gray. They are unaccustomed to the notion that those with widely different views of the world can't just be told to shut up and go to their rooms without supper.

But the same excuse isn't available to the adults in these situations. School administrators have been imposing their codes with seemingly little regard for values such as free speech and due process. Why? FIRE's Silverglate speculates: "They are careerists. They don't want bad publicity, sit-ins or trouble on their watch. They don't want to be called racists, sexists and homophobes."

In its short life, FIRE has been involved in over 200 cases at 150 schools. Some, at places such as Brandeis and Harvard, involved situations where students accused of crimes have been deprived of basic due process and tried by kangaroo courts that would embarrass a tin-pot dictator. At many others, such as the University of Massachusetts and Tufts, FIRE has been resisting efforts to broaden already egregious speech codes.

Tufts last year tried to impose rules that banned speech, such as jokes, at which anyone might take offense. Even worse, if the joke- teller then asserted that the offended listener was being "oversensitive," that itself would have been banned speech.

It may seem silly, and most of it is, but it matters a lot. "Students are not being educated in liberty," Silverglate says. Indeed, they're being taught the opposite: that it's OK to silence those with whom we disagree. That's the lesson Brown's rampaging students learned well: If schools could silence their speech, then they in turn could silence the speech of others.

Yet a robust society depends on free thought and free speech. And inevitably, the best kind of speech - the kind that makes someone think - will be offensive. Examples? There were whites who were outraged when blacks marched and demonstrated against segregation. The sensibilities of many in Massachusetts were affronted when Bill Baird pushed to legalize contraception and abortion in the '60s. Veterans groups were livid when protesters denounced the Vietnam War as immoral.

And speech that is just as offensive today might include the debate over reparations for African-Americans, which so offended the students at Brown.

FIRE is fighting battles that it should never have had to fight. Why should there be have to be special codes at all? Why should students be subject to rules any different than those that govern the rest of us?

The colleges and universities are to blame here. In their zeal for an orderly campus, they are betraying their own ideals. If they encouraged liberty rather than repressed dissent, perhaps college students would see that, while two and two may equal four, from a different perspective, it could be 22.