March 12, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
Over the last 18 segments of the series on Socialism, we have learned a couple of things about acquiring new knowledge. Specifically, from my perspective:
With this in mind, I decided that the last segment of excerpts for this series should focus on learning in the U.S. College and University systems. In doing so, I researched current impediments within those systems and found that the major impediments are restrictions on student liberties that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The book I turned to for the research is Unlearning Liberty – Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Greg Lukianoff (2014). Greg is an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). His writings on campus free speech have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post. A regular columnist for the Huffington Post, he is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and has made numerous television appearances. He received the 2008 Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. Lukianoff if a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. In his book he states, “One thing that makes this book a little different than one might expect is that I am not your stereotypical social-conservative critic of ‘political correctness run amok.’ I am a lifelong Democrat and something of a liberal pedigree. I have never voted for a Republican, nor do I plan to. I believe passionately in gay marriage, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, and universal health care. I have been a regular blogger for the Huffington Post since 2007.”
In the book, I identified 14 impediments to learning (by my definition) on most U.S. Campuses today. They include: Censorship, Poor Understanding of Civics, Selective Relativism, Speech Codes, Speech Zones, Bureaucracy & Hyperregulation (reportedly the number of administrators now exceed the number of faculty members on most college campuses), Forgoing Due Process, Limiting Criticism, Forcing Conformity, Mandatory Assumptions, Expression of Outrage, and Hate Speech rules. All of the fourteen are covered. The existence of such impediments pushes students directionally toward socialism and away from capitalism in my view.
Next:
In the syllabus that came out on November 1 of last year, I indicated that as this series covers so much ground there would be a need to summarize it – pull it altogether. My attempt to do so follows in the next segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Over the last 18 segments of the series on Socialism, we have learned a couple of things about acquiring new knowledge. Specifically, from my perspective:
- Socialism attempts to maintain the status quo, emphasizing collectivism versus individuality, redistribution of wealth, and centralized control. This requires society to restrict learning.
- The key to capitalism is learning. Learning leads to knowledge, understanding and experimentation which is essential to innovation. Innovation is key for technology development which leads to successful capitalism resulting in the advancement of standards of living. Learning is the essence of the creativity one needs to innovate, figuring out things you don’t know, understanding and solving the barriers, all of which are necessary to developing the creativity surprise. The surprise is usually accompanied with a monetary reward. The individual is at the heart of this process – collectivism doesn’t produce innovation. So, the key to wealth and advancing the standard of living is knowledge and the growth of knowledge is learning.
With this in mind, I decided that the last segment of excerpts for this series should focus on learning in the U.S. College and University systems. In doing so, I researched current impediments within those systems and found that the major impediments are restrictions on student liberties that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The book I turned to for the research is Unlearning Liberty – Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Greg Lukianoff (2014). Greg is an attorney and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). His writings on campus free speech have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post. A regular columnist for the Huffington Post, he is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and has made numerous television appearances. He received the 2008 Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. Lukianoff if a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. In his book he states, “One thing that makes this book a little different than one might expect is that I am not your stereotypical social-conservative critic of ‘political correctness run amok.’ I am a lifelong Democrat and something of a liberal pedigree. I have never voted for a Republican, nor do I plan to. I believe passionately in gay marriage, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, and universal health care. I have been a regular blogger for the Huffington Post since 2007.”
In the book, I identified 14 impediments to learning (by my definition) on most U.S. Campuses today. They include: Censorship, Poor Understanding of Civics, Selective Relativism, Speech Codes, Speech Zones, Bureaucracy & Hyperregulation (reportedly the number of administrators now exceed the number of faculty members on most college campuses), Forgoing Due Process, Limiting Criticism, Forcing Conformity, Mandatory Assumptions, Expression of Outrage, and Hate Speech rules. All of the fourteen are covered. The existence of such impediments pushes students directionally toward socialism and away from capitalism in my view.
Next:
In the syllabus that came out on November 1 of last year, I indicated that as this series covers so much ground there would be a need to summarize it – pull it altogether. My attempt to do so follows in the next segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 19
IMPEDIMENTS TO LEARNING ON U.S. COLLEGE CAMPUSES -- EXCERPTS
NOTE: All excerpts in this segment are from Unlearning Liberty by Greg Lukianoff
CENSORSHIP: For decades, our universities have been teaching students that speech with a chance of offending someone would be immediately silenced; but the slope for offensiveness has proven remarkably slippery, and the concept of hurtful speech is often invoked by campus administrators in the most self-serving of ways. The press has gotten so used to such cases that they are often shrugged off as the same old “political correctness” on campus. But the problem is much more serious than that dismissive definition. When students risk punishment for speaking their minds, something has gone very wrong in the college environment. A study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only around 30% of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that “it is safe to have unpopular views on campus.” (The numbers are even worse for faculty, people who know campus best: only 16.7% of them strongly agreed with the statement.) As a result, our society is effectively unlearning liberty. If too few citizens understand or believe in free speech, it is only a matter of time before politicians, activists, lawyer, and judges begin to curtail and restrict it, while other citizens quietly go along. A nation that does not educate in liberty will not long preserve it and will not even know when it is lost.
POOR UNDERSTANDING OF CIVICS: A recent large-scale study rated less than a quarter of twelfth graders as having a decent understanding of our system of government. The result is that students show up at college with little idea of what their rights are and even a little unsure if this freedom is a good thing. By keeping students in the dark about their rights and about why they have those rights in the first place, schools are failing to prepare them for the rigors of being educated citizens in a diverse, dynamic, and powerful democracy.
SELECTIVE RELATIVISM: “Selective relativism” is a convenient tactic that educated people use over and over again to shut down debate and discussion, from the classroom to the cocktail party. An organizing principle says that all opinions have equal claim to respect, but the opinions of “historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.” There is also the “humanitarian principle,” with the caveat that the first priority is to “cause no hurt.” Both are commonly used to silence the very discussion a society most urgently needs. Colleges too often call upon some form of the humanitarian principle to justify speech codes that are then used to punish mild speech that simply annoys the administration. In this way, they manipulate students into supporting their own censorship.
If we want our universities to produce the best ideas, we must do more than just protect diversity of opinion; we must train and habituate students to seek out disagreement, seek out facts that might prove them wrong, and be a touch skeptical whenever they find a little too much agreement on an issue. Campuses are often doing the precise opposite: rewarding groupthink, punishing devil’s advocates, and shutting down discussion on some of the most important topics of the day.
SPEECH CODES: Colleges and universities across the country were at the vanguard of the PC movement. Many schools began proudly and publicly passing “speech codes” as a way of demonstrating their commitment to diversity and tolerance. Speech regulations came in a variety of forms, but their purpose was the same: to prohibit speech that might be offensive on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or an ever-increasing list of other characteristics. Speech codes are harmful in and of themselves, because they miseducate students about free speech, their rights, the rights of others, and what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. It is therefore inexcusable that institutions of higher education, through their unconstitutional speech codes, are teaching students the exact opposite of the lesson they are supposed to be learning about democracy, pluralism, and expression. The Association of American Colleges and Universities unveiled a massive study of 24,000 students about their feeling and views concerning diverse viewpoints on campus. One question asked whether the student thought it was “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” Among the college seniors in the survey, only 30.3% answered that they strongly agreed. Even more alarming, the study showed that students’ sense of the safety of expressing unpopular views steadily declines from freshman year (starting at 40.3%) to senior year. Faculty members, who are often the longest-serving members of the college community scored the lowest of any group – a miserable 16.7%.
SPEECH ZONES: At one point during your indoctrination tour, you pass a twenty-foot-wide gazebo. Your guide laughs. “Ah, the infamous free speech gazebo.” He says, “it’s the only place on campus designed for “free speech activities,” and you have to reserve it days in advance.” You laugh but then pause. He isn’t serious, is he? FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has had great success defeating free speech zones by pointing out to the public that “there is nothing reasonable about transforming 99% of a public campus into a censorship zone.” But while campaigns against speech zones are usually successful, the zones persist for a simple reason: while everyone claims to love free speech, we are quick to leap on any exception pliable enough to target opinions we dislike. One predictable result of working so hard to prevent offence is that students quickly learn that claiming to be offended is the ultimate trump card in any argument. Being offended is an emotional state, not a substantive argument; we cannot afford to give it the power to stifle debate.
Universities are also afraid of being sued even for frivolous claims of harassment and discrimination by students or employees. Currently, the logic seems to be that a free speech lawsuit is comparatively rare and will not cost much in court, while lawsuits for harassment and discrimination are far more common and costly. Therefore, university attorneys conclude that it is best to have broad speech restrictive policies that you can point to during litigation to show you were proactive against “offensive speech,” and that protecting speech must be secondary.
BUREAUCRACY AND HYPERREGULATION: From the 1981-1982 to the 2011-2012 school year, the cost of tuition and fees at private, nonprofit four-year colleges almost tripled. During the same period, the cost of attending a four-year public college almost quadrupled. A primary reason: the dizzying growth of the administrative class at universities, the usurpation of powers that once belonged strictly to the faculty, the surprising lack of qualifications of many administrators, the unseemly rise in the salaries of administrators (especially university presidents), and how a burgeoning bureaucracy jacks up costs while diluting educational quality. This ever-expanding bureaucracy has primary responsibility for writing and enforcing speech codes, creating speech zones, and policing students’ lives in ways that students from the 1960s would never have accepted.
DISORIENTATION: Mandatory orientation programs that presume to tell students not only what they mustn’t say but also what they must say and think in order to be decent people are in violation of the law, and they put the leaders of these programs in the position of all-knowing arbiters of moral truth. Programs that do this are aggressive promotors of lazy thinking, unwarranted certainty, and manipulative tactics for shutting down discussion.
CAMPUS IDEOLOGY for some colleges: The more I learned about the ideology behind the University of Delaware program, the more I realized that the idea behind it could never promote understanding of tolerance. It relied on gross oversimplifications of serious societal tensions around race, class, and gender that are often used to justify aggressive attempts to silence indoctrinated students. For example, the mandatory training session. The materials for the presentation included this definition.
FORGOING DUE PROCESS: “Due process” and “fair procedure” represent two essential democratic concepts. First is what is call procedural due process; that is, we put in place procedures to help us fairly and accurately adjudicate the guilt or innocence of the accused. These include the right to cross-examine, the presumption of innocence, and the right to know who is charging you and why. Second is substantive due process, which refers to the fairness of the substance of the rules themselves. The premises underlying the need for due process are in many regards the same premises that undergird the principle of freedom of speech. The idea is that no one is omniscient, so we need procedures that prevent us from throwing someone in jail just because our gut tells us we should. Due process is why we have concepts like “innocent until proven guilty” and standards of proof like “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Over the decades, however, campus judiciaries have been pressured to lower due process standards for those accused of sexual assault and to broaden the definition of sexual misconduct. Given that occurrences like date rape can be difficult to prove, I do not blame advocates for their frustration. No one wants a rapist to go free. But the crucial problem with lowering due process protections to make it easier to find someone guilty of sexual assault is that it impairs the accuracy of the justice system. Due process exists not simply to protect the innocent, but also to accurately identify the guilty. Once too much subjectivity is allowed into the system, guilt or innocence determinations are unduly influenced by less rational factors, like whether or not the administrator in charge likes or dislikes the accused. Due process is not a problem that must be done away with to make administrator’s work easier; it is a crucial prerequisite to justice.
The Federal Government isn’t helping. First, it required universities to lower their standard of evidence for those accused of harassment to a “preponderance of evidence.” This standard is the lowest judicial standard available. If you find the accuser’s story just barely more credible that that of the accused, you are required to find the accused guilty. Supporters of using this low standard to determine whether a student is guilty of sexual assault – one of the most heinous possible crimes – claim that we need the low standard because sexual assault on campuses is such a serious problem and such a serious offense. Generally, the rule in English and American law has been that the graver the offense or charge, the greater the due process needs to be, but the federal government has apparently decided that sexual assault is such a serious problem that we need to mandate that universities should be less careful about whom they find guilty. The second objectionable part from a due process standpoint is that it requires universities to offer the accuser the right to appeal if they provide that right to the accused. That sounds fair until you realize what it means for the judicial process. If the student has been found innocent of rape by the hearing body tasked to evaluate the evidence, he can nevertheless be found guilty by whoever’s in charge of the appeal – often an intermediate dean, or some other midlevel official at the college. In the criminal justice system, allowing accusers the chance to appeal a properly reached finding of innocence is called “double jeopardy” and the Fifth Amendment prohibits it.
LIMITING CRITICISM: It should come as no surprise that administrators have gone from acting as political correctness police to punishing students and faculty who criticize them. Punishing students for questioning authority is probably also the starkest example of how students unlearn liberty. Empowering students to question everything, even the administration, may make administrators’ lives harder, but it’s what you need to do if you want to educate a free people.
CONFORMITY: Today’s universities are purposefully building a culture of conformity – an echo chamber in which students learn that there is only one “right way” of thinking, and that expression that deviated from it should be kept between you and your clique.
MANDATORY ASSUMPTIONS: In a 2010 Internet search, I found mandatory ideological ground rules for discussion for five major U.S. universities. A 2004 version of the guidelines included that student must, “Acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.” For me, it is not the role of professor to tell students what assumptions they must have in order to take a class.
OUTRAGE: Outrage is a weapon of choice that is widely used and legitimized on college campuses. Students are learning that a claim of outrage can get whichever professor you dislike punished whichever cause you dislike silenced, or just let you take the moral high ground in an argument you were losing. We should not be surprised that students bring this useful tool with them into the real world or that our national discussion suffers for it.
HATE SPEECH: Identifying something as “hate speech” has become an irresistible rhetorical tool precisely because evoking “hate” is so effective at shutting down painful or difficult campus debates. It plays on the guilt and compassion of those who hear the accusation and casts suspicion on anyone who should question it. Once you dub something hate speech, defending it implies that you love hate. The fact that students still use the term “hate speech,” is a public relations victory for the advocates of collegiate censorship. A quick review of student editorials demonstrates that many students believe hate speech is not protected speech. Perhaps it is the vagueness of the concept that explains its popularity as an emotional cudgel to delegitimize ideas that someone dislikes.
CONCLUSION: While free speech certainly does not mean the end of ignorance, biases, or prejudices, it does mean that you are empowered – not controlled by paternalistic authority figures with biases, ignorance, and prejudices of their own – to navigate your own way through life, understanding that even an ignorant argument is an opportunity to increase your knowledge of the world, your fellow human beings, and yourself. We must stop apologizing for believing in free speech and embrace it as the best tool we have yet devised for the growth of knowledge and understanding.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
IMPEDIMENTS TO LEARNING ON U.S. COLLEGE CAMPUSES -- EXCERPTS
NOTE: All excerpts in this segment are from Unlearning Liberty by Greg Lukianoff
CENSORSHIP: For decades, our universities have been teaching students that speech with a chance of offending someone would be immediately silenced; but the slope for offensiveness has proven remarkably slippery, and the concept of hurtful speech is often invoked by campus administrators in the most self-serving of ways. The press has gotten so used to such cases that they are often shrugged off as the same old “political correctness” on campus. But the problem is much more serious than that dismissive definition. When students risk punishment for speaking their minds, something has gone very wrong in the college environment. A study of 24,000 students conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2010 revealed that only around 30% of college seniors strongly agreed with the statement that “it is safe to have unpopular views on campus.” (The numbers are even worse for faculty, people who know campus best: only 16.7% of them strongly agreed with the statement.) As a result, our society is effectively unlearning liberty. If too few citizens understand or believe in free speech, it is only a matter of time before politicians, activists, lawyer, and judges begin to curtail and restrict it, while other citizens quietly go along. A nation that does not educate in liberty will not long preserve it and will not even know when it is lost.
POOR UNDERSTANDING OF CIVICS: A recent large-scale study rated less than a quarter of twelfth graders as having a decent understanding of our system of government. The result is that students show up at college with little idea of what their rights are and even a little unsure if this freedom is a good thing. By keeping students in the dark about their rights and about why they have those rights in the first place, schools are failing to prepare them for the rigors of being educated citizens in a diverse, dynamic, and powerful democracy.
SELECTIVE RELATIVISM: “Selective relativism” is a convenient tactic that educated people use over and over again to shut down debate and discussion, from the classroom to the cocktail party. An organizing principle says that all opinions have equal claim to respect, but the opinions of “historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.” There is also the “humanitarian principle,” with the caveat that the first priority is to “cause no hurt.” Both are commonly used to silence the very discussion a society most urgently needs. Colleges too often call upon some form of the humanitarian principle to justify speech codes that are then used to punish mild speech that simply annoys the administration. In this way, they manipulate students into supporting their own censorship.
If we want our universities to produce the best ideas, we must do more than just protect diversity of opinion; we must train and habituate students to seek out disagreement, seek out facts that might prove them wrong, and be a touch skeptical whenever they find a little too much agreement on an issue. Campuses are often doing the precise opposite: rewarding groupthink, punishing devil’s advocates, and shutting down discussion on some of the most important topics of the day.
SPEECH CODES: Colleges and universities across the country were at the vanguard of the PC movement. Many schools began proudly and publicly passing “speech codes” as a way of demonstrating their commitment to diversity and tolerance. Speech regulations came in a variety of forms, but their purpose was the same: to prohibit speech that might be offensive on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or an ever-increasing list of other characteristics. Speech codes are harmful in and of themselves, because they miseducate students about free speech, their rights, the rights of others, and what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. It is therefore inexcusable that institutions of higher education, through their unconstitutional speech codes, are teaching students the exact opposite of the lesson they are supposed to be learning about democracy, pluralism, and expression. The Association of American Colleges and Universities unveiled a massive study of 24,000 students about their feeling and views concerning diverse viewpoints on campus. One question asked whether the student thought it was “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” Among the college seniors in the survey, only 30.3% answered that they strongly agreed. Even more alarming, the study showed that students’ sense of the safety of expressing unpopular views steadily declines from freshman year (starting at 40.3%) to senior year. Faculty members, who are often the longest-serving members of the college community scored the lowest of any group – a miserable 16.7%.
SPEECH ZONES: At one point during your indoctrination tour, you pass a twenty-foot-wide gazebo. Your guide laughs. “Ah, the infamous free speech gazebo.” He says, “it’s the only place on campus designed for “free speech activities,” and you have to reserve it days in advance.” You laugh but then pause. He isn’t serious, is he? FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has had great success defeating free speech zones by pointing out to the public that “there is nothing reasonable about transforming 99% of a public campus into a censorship zone.” But while campaigns against speech zones are usually successful, the zones persist for a simple reason: while everyone claims to love free speech, we are quick to leap on any exception pliable enough to target opinions we dislike. One predictable result of working so hard to prevent offence is that students quickly learn that claiming to be offended is the ultimate trump card in any argument. Being offended is an emotional state, not a substantive argument; we cannot afford to give it the power to stifle debate.
Universities are also afraid of being sued even for frivolous claims of harassment and discrimination by students or employees. Currently, the logic seems to be that a free speech lawsuit is comparatively rare and will not cost much in court, while lawsuits for harassment and discrimination are far more common and costly. Therefore, university attorneys conclude that it is best to have broad speech restrictive policies that you can point to during litigation to show you were proactive against “offensive speech,” and that protecting speech must be secondary.
BUREAUCRACY AND HYPERREGULATION: From the 1981-1982 to the 2011-2012 school year, the cost of tuition and fees at private, nonprofit four-year colleges almost tripled. During the same period, the cost of attending a four-year public college almost quadrupled. A primary reason: the dizzying growth of the administrative class at universities, the usurpation of powers that once belonged strictly to the faculty, the surprising lack of qualifications of many administrators, the unseemly rise in the salaries of administrators (especially university presidents), and how a burgeoning bureaucracy jacks up costs while diluting educational quality. This ever-expanding bureaucracy has primary responsibility for writing and enforcing speech codes, creating speech zones, and policing students’ lives in ways that students from the 1960s would never have accepted.
DISORIENTATION: Mandatory orientation programs that presume to tell students not only what they mustn’t say but also what they must say and think in order to be decent people are in violation of the law, and they put the leaders of these programs in the position of all-knowing arbiters of moral truth. Programs that do this are aggressive promotors of lazy thinking, unwarranted certainty, and manipulative tactics for shutting down discussion.
CAMPUS IDEOLOGY for some colleges: The more I learned about the ideology behind the University of Delaware program, the more I realized that the idea behind it could never promote understanding of tolerance. It relied on gross oversimplifications of serious societal tensions around race, class, and gender that are often used to justify aggressive attempts to silence indoctrinated students. For example, the mandatory training session. The materials for the presentation included this definition.
- A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e. people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as people within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination.
- REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term “reverse racism” to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give “preferential treatment” to people of color over whites. In the U.S. there is no such thing as “reverse racism.”
FORGOING DUE PROCESS: “Due process” and “fair procedure” represent two essential democratic concepts. First is what is call procedural due process; that is, we put in place procedures to help us fairly and accurately adjudicate the guilt or innocence of the accused. These include the right to cross-examine, the presumption of innocence, and the right to know who is charging you and why. Second is substantive due process, which refers to the fairness of the substance of the rules themselves. The premises underlying the need for due process are in many regards the same premises that undergird the principle of freedom of speech. The idea is that no one is omniscient, so we need procedures that prevent us from throwing someone in jail just because our gut tells us we should. Due process is why we have concepts like “innocent until proven guilty” and standards of proof like “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Over the decades, however, campus judiciaries have been pressured to lower due process standards for those accused of sexual assault and to broaden the definition of sexual misconduct. Given that occurrences like date rape can be difficult to prove, I do not blame advocates for their frustration. No one wants a rapist to go free. But the crucial problem with lowering due process protections to make it easier to find someone guilty of sexual assault is that it impairs the accuracy of the justice system. Due process exists not simply to protect the innocent, but also to accurately identify the guilty. Once too much subjectivity is allowed into the system, guilt or innocence determinations are unduly influenced by less rational factors, like whether or not the administrator in charge likes or dislikes the accused. Due process is not a problem that must be done away with to make administrator’s work easier; it is a crucial prerequisite to justice.
The Federal Government isn’t helping. First, it required universities to lower their standard of evidence for those accused of harassment to a “preponderance of evidence.” This standard is the lowest judicial standard available. If you find the accuser’s story just barely more credible that that of the accused, you are required to find the accused guilty. Supporters of using this low standard to determine whether a student is guilty of sexual assault – one of the most heinous possible crimes – claim that we need the low standard because sexual assault on campuses is such a serious problem and such a serious offense. Generally, the rule in English and American law has been that the graver the offense or charge, the greater the due process needs to be, but the federal government has apparently decided that sexual assault is such a serious problem that we need to mandate that universities should be less careful about whom they find guilty. The second objectionable part from a due process standpoint is that it requires universities to offer the accuser the right to appeal if they provide that right to the accused. That sounds fair until you realize what it means for the judicial process. If the student has been found innocent of rape by the hearing body tasked to evaluate the evidence, he can nevertheless be found guilty by whoever’s in charge of the appeal – often an intermediate dean, or some other midlevel official at the college. In the criminal justice system, allowing accusers the chance to appeal a properly reached finding of innocence is called “double jeopardy” and the Fifth Amendment prohibits it.
LIMITING CRITICISM: It should come as no surprise that administrators have gone from acting as political correctness police to punishing students and faculty who criticize them. Punishing students for questioning authority is probably also the starkest example of how students unlearn liberty. Empowering students to question everything, even the administration, may make administrators’ lives harder, but it’s what you need to do if you want to educate a free people.
CONFORMITY: Today’s universities are purposefully building a culture of conformity – an echo chamber in which students learn that there is only one “right way” of thinking, and that expression that deviated from it should be kept between you and your clique.
MANDATORY ASSUMPTIONS: In a 2010 Internet search, I found mandatory ideological ground rules for discussion for five major U.S. universities. A 2004 version of the guidelines included that student must, “Acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.” For me, it is not the role of professor to tell students what assumptions they must have in order to take a class.
OUTRAGE: Outrage is a weapon of choice that is widely used and legitimized on college campuses. Students are learning that a claim of outrage can get whichever professor you dislike punished whichever cause you dislike silenced, or just let you take the moral high ground in an argument you were losing. We should not be surprised that students bring this useful tool with them into the real world or that our national discussion suffers for it.
HATE SPEECH: Identifying something as “hate speech” has become an irresistible rhetorical tool precisely because evoking “hate” is so effective at shutting down painful or difficult campus debates. It plays on the guilt and compassion of those who hear the accusation and casts suspicion on anyone who should question it. Once you dub something hate speech, defending it implies that you love hate. The fact that students still use the term “hate speech,” is a public relations victory for the advocates of collegiate censorship. A quick review of student editorials demonstrates that many students believe hate speech is not protected speech. Perhaps it is the vagueness of the concept that explains its popularity as an emotional cudgel to delegitimize ideas that someone dislikes.
CONCLUSION: While free speech certainly does not mean the end of ignorance, biases, or prejudices, it does mean that you are empowered – not controlled by paternalistic authority figures with biases, ignorance, and prejudices of their own – to navigate your own way through life, understanding that even an ignorant argument is an opportunity to increase your knowledge of the world, your fellow human beings, and yourself. We must stop apologizing for believing in free speech and embrace it as the best tool we have yet devised for the growth of knowledge and understanding.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 19_soc_long_impediments_to_learning.pdf |