Codes of Silence

Who's silencing free speech on campus--and why.

Alan Charles Kors & Harvey Silverglate from the November 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

The whole notion of individual liberty becomes subordinated to redressing historical wrongs against groups. Codes dismiss free speech rights in favor of a predetermined notion of historical moral responsibility, commanding students and faculty to censor themselves and one another in the paramount interests of the educational community and historical justice. Restrictions on speech are justified by the assertion of a compelling need to promote freedom for some by limiting freedom for others. To the code writers, as to Marcuse, freedom is a zero-sum game.

Many in the academy insist that the phenomenon labeled "political correctness" is a fabrication by opponents of "progressive" change. They argue that political correctness does not exist as a systematic, coercive, repressive force on American campuses. They claim that critics of universities have questionable motives and offer merely recycled anecdotes, not hard evidence, of abuses of power.

Such views seem odd to those--students, faculty, and close observers--who dissent from prevailing campus orthodoxies and experience the unremitting reality of speech codes, of ideological litmus tests, and of sensitivity and diversity "training" that undertakes the involuntary thought reform of free, young minds. One charge of verbal harassment casts a pall over everyone's "thought crimes," producing systemic self-censorship. Yet defenders of the current academic regimes list that charge merely as "one" instance of what may be, in their view, constraint. A climate of repression succeeds not by statistical frequency but by sapping the courage, autonomy, and conscience of individuals who otherwise might remember or revive what liberty could be. The claim that McCarthyism was a myth, and that a small number of anecdotes have been recycled to create the appearance of systematic repression, would be met with incredulous (and justifiable) outrage by the left.

Human history teaches that those who wield power rarely see their own abuse of it. This failing pervades the entire ideological, political, cultural, and historical spectrum. It is an issue not of left and right but of human ethical incapacity. Those who exercise power, in any domain, tend to compare their actual power to their ultimate goals, usually concluding that they have barely any power at all and, certainly, that they are not abusing what little they have.

Further, most of us sadly develop the capacity to treat the suffering, oppression, or legal inequality of individuals or groups whom we see as obstacles to our own goals or visions--or even with whom we merely feel little affinity--as abstractions or exaggerations without concrete human immediacy. By the same token, most of us experience the suffering, oppression, or legal inequality of individuals or groups with whom we identify, or to whom our own causes are linked, as vivid, intolerable, personal realities. It is precisely to neutralize this grievous tendency of human nature that societies establish formal law, equal justice, and the prohibition of double standards.

Our colleges and universities do not offer the protection of fair rules, equal justice, and consistent standards to the generation that finds itself on our campuses. They encourage students to bring charges of harassment against those whose opinions or expressions "offend" them. At almost every college and university, students deemed members of "historically oppressed groups"--above all, women, blacks, gays, and Hispanics--are informed during orientation that their campuses are teeming with illegal or intolerable violations of their "right" not to be offended. Judging from these warnings, there is a racial or sexual bigot, to borrow the mocking phrase of McCarthy's critics, "under every bed." At almost every college and university, students are presented with lists of places to which they should submit charges of verbal "harassment," and they are promised "victim support," "confidentiality," and sympathetic understanding when they file such complaints.

What an astonishing expectation (and power) to give to students: the belief that, if they belong to a protected category, they have a right to four years of never being offended. What an extraordinary power to give to administrators and tribunals: the prerogative to punish the free speech and expression of people to whom they choose to assign the stains and guilt of historical oppression, while being free, themselves, to use whatever rhetoric they wish against the bearers of such stains. While the world looks mainly at issues of curriculum and scholarship to analyze and evaluate American colleges and universities, it is the silencing and punishment of belief, expression, and individuality that ought to most concern those who care about what universities are and could be.

Despite the profound importance, symbolic and substantive, of speech codes, we should not view their presence or absence as the yardstick of freedom. Freedom dies in the heart and will before it dies in the law. Speech codes merely formalize the will to censor and to devalue liberty of thought and speech. Even without invoking codes, universities have found ways to silence or chill freedom of opinion and expression.

Supporters of free speech at colleges and universities become tarred by the sorts of speech they must defend if they wish to defend freedom in general. No one who defends trial by jury over popular justice in a murder trial is called a defender of murder; such a person is seen, by all, as a defender of trial by jury. The defender of free speech on American campuses, however, is forever being told that he or she is seeking, specifically, to make the campus safe for "racism," "sexism," or "homophobia." That is true if what one means is that the defender of free speech seeks to make the campus safe for the expression of all views, and for the clash of visions, ideas, and passions. At the time of McCarthy, many were intimidated into silence by the question "Why would you want to protect the speech of a Red if you are not a Red?" The issue, then and now, is not the protection of this or that person's rights by our subjective criteria of who deserves freedom but the protection of freedom itself.

Protection of free speech is not needed for inoffensive, popular speech with which all or most members of a community agree. Such speech is not threatened. Freedom is required precisely for unpopular speech, the toleration of which is one of the marks of a free society. What is popular speech in one time and place, of course, becomes unpopular in another. That is why, morally and practically, none of us enjoys more freedom of speech than is accorded the least popular speaker.

John Stuart Mill said it best. In On Liberty (1859), Mill noted that everyone claims to believe in freedom of expression, but everyone draws his or her own boundaries at the obviously worthless, dangerous, and wrong. Why should we tolerate speech that offends our sense of essential value, security, and truth?

To that question, Mill replied that there were four compelling reasons: 1) the opinion might be true, and "to deny this is to assume our own infallibility"; 2) the opinion, though erroneous, might--indeed, most probably would--"contain a portion of truth," and because prevailing opinion is rarely, if ever, the whole truth, censorship denies us that possible "remainder of the truth" that might be gained only by "the collision of adverse opinions"; 3) even if prevailing opinion were the whole truth, if it were not permitted to be "vigorously and earnestly contested," it would be believed by most people not because of "its rational grounds" but only "in the manner of a prejudice"; and 4) if we were not obliged to defend our belief, it would stand "in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct," becoming a formula repeated by rote, ``inefficacious for good,...and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience."

Mill also addressed the argument that even if one conceded these points, one could fairly insist that debate "be temperate, and...not pass the bounds of fair discussion." He noted that such "boundaries" are impossible to define objectively, and would be drawn by all in a manner favorable to themselves. If one took the notion of "temperate" and "fair discussion" seriously, Mill observed, what ought to be banned would be arguments that stigmatized one's opponents "as bad and immoral men." Indeed, he argued presciently, "With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality [ad hominem attacks], and the like, the denunciation of those weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion."

Ultimately, Mill concluded, it should be left to public opinion, not to "law and authority," to determine "in whose mode of advocacy either want of candor, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves." In short, it was "imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve." The struggle for liberty on American campuses is, in its essence, the struggle between Herbert Marcuse and John Stuart Mill.

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