Imagine you’re an anthropology professor with Asperger’s, so you can’t anticipate whether people will find your jokes hilarious or offensive until you tell them. But you get better student course evaluations when you try to be funny. Now your university imposes a new speech code that says, basically, ‘Don’t say anything that people might find offensive.’ You need good course evaluations for promotion and tenure, but your brain can’t anticipate your students’ reactions to your quirky sense of humor.
Imagine you’re an undergrad, but you have bipolar disorder, so sometimes you get into manic states, when you become more outspoken in classes about your non-PC views on sexual politics.
Imagine you’re a university system administrator with Tourette syndrome, so that sometimes in meetings with other IT staff, you can’t help but blurt out words that some consider racially or sexually offensive.
In response to these chilling effects, neurodivergent academics may withdraw from the social and intellectual life of the university. They may avoid lab group meetings, post-colloquium dinners, faculty parties, and conferences, where any tipsy comment, if overheard by anyone with a propensity for moralistic outrage, could threaten their reputation and career. I’ve seen this social withdrawal happen more and more over the last couple of decades. Nerdy, eccentric, and awkward academics who would have been outspoken, hilarious, and joyful in the 1980s are now cautious, somber, and frightened.
This withdrawal from the university’s ‘life of the mind’ is especially heart-breaking to the neurodivergent, who often can’t stand small talk, and whose only real social connections come through vigorous debate about dangerous ideas with their intellectual equals. Speech codes don’t just censor their words; they also decimate their relationships, collaborations, and social networks.
Chilling effects on speech can turn an aspie’s social life into a frozen wasteland. The resulting alienation can exacerbate many mental disorders, leading to a downward spiral of self-censorship, loneliness, despair, and failure. Consider political science professor Will Moore: he had high-functioning autism, and was so tired of accidentally offending colleagues that he killed himself this April; his suicide note is worth reading. If being driven to suicide isn’t disparate impact, what is?
There’s an analogy here between neurodiversity and ideological diversity. Campus speech codes have marginalized both over the last couple of decades. American universities are now dominated by progressive Leftists, registered Democrats, and social justice activists. They are hostile and discriminatory against students, staff, and faculty who are centrist, libertarian, conservative and/or religious. There are real career costs to holding certain political views in academia – even if those views are shared by most Americans.
This problem of ideological diversity is already being addressed by great organizations such as the Heterodox Academy and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, by online magazines such as Quillette, and by free speech advocates such as Alice Dreger, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Laura Kipnis, Scott Lilienfeld, Greg Lukianoff, Camille Paglia, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Bret Weinstein. By contrast, the neurodiversity problem has not been discussed much, although it might be easier to solve through anti-discrimination lawsuits. In principle, speech codes discriminating against certain ideologies is a form of disparate impact, but at the moment, being a Republican or a Neoreactionary is not a ‘protected class’ under federal anti-discrimination law, whereas having a disability such as a mental disorder is.
Conclusion: What to Do About Neurodiversity and Free Speech
Campus speech codes discriminate against neurominorities. They impose unrealistic demands, fears, and stigma on the large proportion of students, staff, and faculty who have common mental disorders, or extremes on the Big Five personality traits, or transient disinhibition due to sleep deprivation or smart drugs. As a practical matter, it is virtually impossible for someone with Asperger’s, bipolar, ADHD, low Agreeableness, low Conscientiousness, extreme fatigue, or Modafinil mania to understand what kinds of speech acts are considered acceptable, and to inhibit the production of such speech 100% of the time, in 100% of educational and social situations.
In a future article, I’ll outline a legal strategy to use the ADA to eliminate campus speech codes that discriminate against neurominorities.
For the moment, just consider this: every campus speech code and restrictive speech norm is a Sword of Damocles dangling above the head of every academic whose brain works a little differently. We feel the sharpness and the weight every day. After every class, meeting, blog, and tweet, we brace for the moral outrage, public shaming, witch hunts, and inquisitions that seem to hit our colleagues so unpredictably and unfairly. Like visitors from a past century or a foreign culture, we don’t understand which concepts are admissible in your Overton window, or which words are acceptable to your ears. We don’t understand your verbal and moral taboos. We can’t make sense of your double standards and logical inconsistencies. We don’t respect your assumption that empathizing should always take precedence over systematizing. Yet we know you have the power to hurt us for things we can’t help. So, we suffer relentless anxiety about our words, our thoughts, our social relationships, our reputations, and our careers.
That era is over. Neurodiversity is finding its voice and its confidence. People with mental disorders and eccentric personalities have rights too, and we will not be intimidated by your stigma and shaming. We will demand our rights under the ADA through the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and in federal district courts. We will educate administrators about the discriminatory side-effects of their bad policies. We will shatter your Swords of Damocles and raise our freak flags to fly over campuses around the world.
For centuries, academia has been a haven for neurodiversity – a true ‘safe space’ for eccentric thought and language, for thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable. We will make it that haven again, and there is nothing that university administrators can do to stop us. Everything is on our side: behavioral science, intellectual history, federal law, public opinion, and liberal academia’s own most sacred values of diversity and inclusivity. Neurodiversity is here to stay, and we will not be silenced any longer.
If the neurodivergent stand up for our free speech rights, campus speech codes will go extinct very quickly. In the future, they will be considered a weird historical curiosity of runaway virtue signaling in early 21st-century American academia. The freedom to think eccentric thoughts and say eccentric things must be protected again. The freedom to be eccentric must be restored. Newton must be welcomed back to academia.
7. The Cultural Diversity Case for Free Speech
My Quillette essay on neurodiversity and free speech was read fairly widely and provoked some strong reactions, mostly positive. Some aspies sent me grateful emails. Some normies said it helped them understand the dangers of runaway virtue signaling given neurodiversity.
(I wrote a follow-up piece for Quillette called ‘Mental disorders as legal superpowers,’ which went into nitty-gritty detail about how aspies can use the Americans with Disabilities Act to fight for their free speech rights in universities and companies. I’m not including that essay in this collection because it’s a long, technical, how-to guide about leveraging a federal civil rights law to defend First Amendment rights.)
After the neurodiversity essay, I thought about other forms of diversity that might be important in our virtue signaling culture, but that are overlooked by mainstream wokeness. I ran across the YouTube video ‘Hey, hey, hey… THIS IS LIBRARY!’ from early 2017, where an Asian student objects to some SJWs loudly protesting something in a college library where he’s trying to study. I thought about how weird the noisy virtue signaling would seem to foreign-born students like him. I thought about my own culture clashes in trying to understand the nuances of foreign ideologies and political norms when I lived in England during most of the 90s, or Germany in 1995, or Australia in 2008.
> I was especially interested in Asian cultures and the experiences of Asian students. I’d studied Japanese in college, and lived in Japan House as a sophomore, where we watched a lot of Kurosawa movies and made a lot of sushi. I’d taken courses on Japanese literature, Japanese film, Chinese art, and Indian art. As a professor, I’d visited India, Taiwan, and Singapore. I didn’t have a deep understanding of Asian cultures, but it was deep enough to appreciate how challenging it might be for an Asian student to navigate through the treacherous straights of American political correctness.
I realized that cultural diversity is, in many ways, just another form of neurodiversity – one that raises many of the same issues about free speech rights in a culture of pervasive virtue signaling. So I wrote this piece for Quillette. The key point is that virtue signaling norms are quite culture-specific, so we can’t expect people from other cultures to virtue signal in ways that we would consider ‘appropriate’ (one of my least favorite words). Instead, we should learn to recognize our virtue signaling culture as just that: one culture, among many, with its own pros, cons, risks, and blind spots. If woke culture wants to truly embrace ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ as moral values, it should start by understanding that its specific virtue signaling culture is not inclusive or welcoming to people from other actual cultures.
Originally published as:
Miller, G. F. (2018). The cultural diversity case for free speech. Quillette, February 16 https://quillette.com/2018/02/16/cultural-diversity-case-free-speech/
American campus speech codes and informal speech norms discriminate against foreign students and faculty, and that’s an important but neglected reason why they should be challenged. Speech codes often claim to protect ‘cultural diversity’ on campuses, but they often do the reverse. They impose narrow American norms of political correctness on foreign grad students, post-docs, and faculty who can’t realistically understand what Americans will find offensive.
From Neurodiversity to Cultural Diversity
In an article for Quillette last year (‘The neurodiversity case for free speech’), I argued that campus speech codes discriminate against ‘neurodivergent’ people who have Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, PTSD, ADHD, or other conditions. These disorders make it hard to understand and follow speech codes that prohibit saying or doing anything that others might find offensive. In a follow-up article (‘Legal superpowers’), I outlined how neurodivergent people could use the Americans with Disabilities Act to challenge such discriminatory speech codes.
These neurodivergent conditions are all heritable, and they make people’s brains different from the ‘neurotypical’ average brain, so they could be called ‘genetic neurodiversity.’ But beyond genetic neurodiversity, there’s ‘cultural neurodiversity:’ different people grew up in different countries and cultures, so they have brains that implement different morals, values, and norms, different political and religious attitudes, and different styles of communication and courtship.
Cultural neurodiversity, like neurodiversity, raises challenging problems for speech codes.
I’m not talking here about ‘cultural diversity’ within the U.S. Students born and raised in America may come from different ethnicities, religions, social classes, and regional subcultures, with distinct value systems and communication norms. But they have all been exposed to a national media/educational culture centered around Left-leaning journalism, diversity-obsessed Hollywood, and politicized public school classes controlled by Democrat-heavy teachers unions.
The American educational/media system indoctrinates students into a normative set of ideological values (for diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism, identity politics, environmentalism, Blank Slate psychology, and Leftist liberalism) and taboos (against any hint of racism, sexism, sexual conservatism, traditional family values, or gratitude for Western Civilization). This shared culture provides common ground when students, staff, and faculty try to anticipate other people’s reactions to anything we say or do, as required by most formal speech codes and informal speech norms on American campuses.
Rather, I’m concerned about a deeper form of cultural diversity: the foreigners who come to America to study and teach. A high proportion of grad students, post-docs, and junior faculty in the U.S. now come from other countries, and they often have very different concepts of what is politically correct versus ‘offensive.’ In 2004, 55% of engineering Ph.D. students were foreign. In 2009, foreign students earned 27% of master’s degrees and 33% in doctorate degrees in science and math in the U.S. In 2011, 28% of grad students in science, engineering, and health were foreign. Overall, about 5% of undergrads and grad students in 2015 were from foreign countries, but that’s up from 3% in 2010, and increasing rapidly. Their most common countries of origin are China, India, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
These foreigners are often attracted to America because we market our country as the bastion of free speech, political liberty, and open sexuality. They expect a promised land of free inquiry very different from the repressive government regimes that they may have left behind. Many countries criminalize various forms of ‘hate speech,’ ‘blasphemy,’ and ‘wrongthink’ – not just ‘repressive’ or ‘corrupt’ countries like China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Nigeria, but also ‘modern liberal democracies’ such as Germany, Australia, and Ireland.
Students and faculty from countries with such speech restrictions might expect that American universities would honor our much-publicized First Amendment. Yet when they come here, they often discover that formal campus speech codes and informal speech norms prove a dizzying mine field, full of intellectual trip wires and hair-trigger taboo-sensors, atop an ever-shifting ideological landscape. At least in China or Saudi Arabia, there were clear and stable expectations about what they couldn’t say. On American campuses, there is no such consistency across issues or across time.
The Challenge of Switching Cultures
I first learned how hard it is to switch cultures when I moved from Stanford University to Britain in 1992, for a post-doc at University of Sussex. I was born and raised in Ohio, and had gone to college and grad school in New York and California. I’d never lived abroad, but I thought I understood British culture from watching Jane Austen movies and Masterpiece Theater on PBS.
I was wrong. The modern British were much more open than Americans about sex, drugs, and drinking, and didn’t have the American obsession with racial politics. But they had plenty of taboos about discussing class, money, the welfare state, and Muslim immigration that took a while to discover. I ended up living in Britain for 9 years, but kept discovering new quirks and sensitivities that were unwritten, unspoken, and unquestioned. When I worked at a Max Planck Institute in Munich in 1995, I had to learn a whole new set of German ideological taboos, centered around fascism and eugenics, construed in the broadest possible terms. Likewise, when I took a sabbatical in Brisbane in 2008, I had to learn the Australian sensitivities around the status of Aboriginal peoples, the history of British colonialism, and East Asian immigration.
For me, every new culture brought new embarrassments, fraught conversations, awkward silences, and social costs. The natives could never clearly articulate what views were permissible versus offensive. Indeed, in most cultures, asking what is taboo is itself taboo, and answering truthfully is even more so.
One was simply expected to know, despite being a stranger in a strange land.
I also witnessed the challenge of switching cultures when my department hired two junior faculty from Europe a few years ago. They lived in my house’s guest quarters for a few years as they settled in. We often discussed the puzzling aspects of American political culture, such as the connotations of ‘undocumented’ versus ‘illegal,’ ‘transgender’ versus ‘transsexual,’ ‘black’ versus ‘African-American,’ and ‘SJW’ versus ‘progressive activist.’ It was especially tricky for them to discern what specific views they were allowed to express when teaching, versus leading small lab gr
oup meetings, versus chatting at faculty parties, versus on social media. I’d been working in controversial areas for decades, and had become involved in the academic free speech movement, so I could offer some guidance on what was PC versus non-PC in modern America. But they kept stumbling upon aspects of PC that I’d never consciously registered, so couldn’t warn them about.
To help my colleagues, I tried to list the implicit ideological norms that faculty hires from abroad would be expected to internalize, but that Americans couldn’t even acknowledge were norms. The list grew so long that I realized the situation was hopeless. Many of our ideological taboos are so taboo that we can’t even list them publicly – much less explain them in new faculty orientations. Yet our universities continue hiring foreign faculty and accepting grad students – without ever giving them clear guidance on how to switch ideological cultures, and what they’re actually allowed to believe, say, and do on American campuses.
The Culture Gap
Consider a foreign grad student who joins an American university after growing up in China, India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, or Brazil. They were raised in a place with very different social, sexual, political, religious, and cultural norms. Their parents, teachers, and journalists may have routinely used speech that Americans would consider ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ or ‘homophobic.’ Their styles of verbal courtship and sexual interaction might not match the American ‘affirmative consent’ model of how men and women should interact. (I’m emphasizing mating norms throughout this article because many campus speech codes are smuggled into ‘sexual misconduct policies,’ rather than labeled as ‘respectful campus policies.’)
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