For many Americans the term “speech code” sends shivers up the spine. Yet these noxious and un-American codes have become commonplace on college campuses across the United States. They are typically so broad that they could include literally anything and are subject to the interpretation of school administrators, who frequently fail to operate as honest brokers. In the hands of the illiberal left, the speech codes are weapons to silence anyone—professors, students, visiting speakers—who expresses a view that deviates from the left’s worldview or ideology. Speech that offends them is redefined as “harassment” or “hate speech” both of which are barred by most campus speech codes. At Colorado College, a private liberal arts college, administrators invented a “violence” policy that was used to punish non-violent speech.22 The consequences of violating a speech code are serious: it can often lead to public shaming, censoring, firings, suspensions, or expulsions, often with no due process.
Many of the incidents sound too absurd to be true. But true they are. Consider, for example, how Yale University put the kibosh on its Freshman Class Council’s T-shirt designed for the Yale-Harvard football game. The problem? The shirt quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line from This Side of Paradise, that, “I think of all Harvard men as sissies.”23 The word “sissy” was deemed offensive to gay people. Or how about the Brandeis professor who was found guilty of racial harassment—with no formal hearing—for explaining, indeed criticizing, the word “wetbacks.”24 Simply saying the word was crime enough. Another professor, this time at the University of Central Florida, was suspended for making a joke in class equating his tough exam questions to a “killing spree.”25 A student reported the joke to the school’s administration. The professor promptly received a letter suspending him from teaching and banning him from campus. He was reinstated after the case went public.26
The vaguely worded campus speech codes proliferating across the country turn every person with the ability to exercise his or her vocal chords into an offender in the making. New York University prohibits “insulting, teasing, mocking, degrading or ridiculing another person or group.”27 The College of the Holy Cross prohibits speech “causing emotional injury through careless or reckless behavior.”28 The University of Connecticut issued a “Policy Statement on Harassment” that bans “actions that intimidate, humiliate, or demean persons or groups, or that undermine their security or self-esteem.”29 Virginia State University’s 2012–13 student handbook bars students from “offend[ing] . . . a member of the University community.”30 But who decides what’s “offensive”? The illiberal left, of course.
The list goes on and on. The University of Wisconsin-Stout at one point had an Information Technology policy prohibiting the distribution of messages that included offensive comments about a list of attributes including hair color.31 Fordham University’s policy prohibited using e-mail to “insult.”32 It gets worse: Lafayette College—a private university—instituted a “Bias Response Team” which exists to “respond to acts of intolerance.” A “bias-related incident” was “any incident in which an action taken by a person or group is perceived to be malicious . . . toward another person or group.”33 Is it really wise to have a policy that depends on the perception of offense by college-aged students?34 Other schools have bias reporting programs encouraging students to report incidents.35
Speech codes create a chilling environment where all it takes is one accusation, true or not, to ruin someone’s academic career. The intent or reputation or integrity of the accused is of little import. If someone “perceives” you have said or acted in a racist way, then the bar for guilt has been met. If a person claims you caused them “harm” by saying something that offended them, case closed.
Harvard raised eyebrows in 2011 by asking incoming students to sign a pledge upholding “civility,” “inclusiveness,” and “kindness.” Signing was voluntary, until you considered that the pledges were hung in the dorms for all to see. So if you didn’t sign the pledge, it would surely be noticed. What’s wrong with asking students to be kind and inclusive? In another era, perhaps nothing. But today, these are loaded terms. Holding anti-abortion, pro-Republican, anti–same-sex marriage, and pro-gun views has been construed as bigoted (non-inclusive) on college campuses. Saying someone caused you “harm” or made you feel “unsafe” used to mean something. As we saw with professor Miller-Young, now these terms are used to describe situations where someone had to hear something with which they disagreed.
In November 2013, more than two dozen graduate students at UCLA entered the classroom of their professor and announced a protest against a “hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color.” The students had been the victims of racial “microaggression,” a term invented in the 1970s that has been recently repurposed as a silencing tactic. A common definition cited is that racial microaggressions “are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults towards people of color.” Like all these new categories, literally anything can be a microaggression.
According to the Facebook page of a Princeton group that tracks microaggressions on campus, “there are no objective definitions to words and phrases. The perspective and lived experiences of each individual contextualizes the world around them and thus places a particular meaning in words based on their distinct subjectivity. What counts as harmless banter to some may be emotionally triggering to others.”36 A frequent complaint posted in these forums transforms polite small talk into a racial attack. Here’s the problem: sometimes white people ask people of color where they are from and they answer “California” or “Iowa” and then the white person says, “Where is your family from originally?” That is a racial microaggression. It’s one I have engaged in more times than I can count. While the speech police believe that I was communicating a “hostile, derogatory, or racial slight” I was actually just interested in hearing about other cultures, and hearing about California or Iowa is decidedly less interesting than hearing about Korea or Egypt. I also frequently ask white people where their family originally came from, and am myself frequently asked that question. (It’s Ireland.)
So what were the racial microaggressions that spawned the interruption of a class at the University of California at Los Angeles? One student alleged that when the professor changed her capitalization of the word “indigenous” to lowercase he was disrespecting her ideological point of view. Another proof point of racial animus was the professor’s insistence that the students use the Chicago Manual of Style for citation format (the protesting students preferred the less formal American Psychological Association manual). After trying to speak with one male student from his class, the kindly seventy-nine-year-old professor was accused of battery for reaching out to touch him. The professor, Val Rust, a widely respected scholar in the field of comparative education, was hung out to dry by the UCLA administration, which treated a professor’s stylistic changes to student papers as a racist attack. The school instructed Rust to stay off the Graduate School of Education and Information Services for one year.37 In response to the various incidents, UCLA also commissioned an “Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.” The report recommended investigations, saying that, “investigations might deter those who would engage in such conduct, even if their actions would likely not constitute a violation of university policy.”38
(HAIR) TRIGGER WARNINGS
College students typically revel in satirical reviews. Not so among the illiberal left, if you choose the wrong target. University of Michigan student Omar Mahmood encountered the humorless speech police after he wrote a satirical column in late 2014 for the independent, student-run publication the Michigan Review. In a funny riff on political correctness on campuses, Mahmood—who describes himself as conservative and libertarian—wrote of his struggles as a man of color, having to face
white privilege everywhere, including the “white snowflakes falling thick upon the autumn leaves, burying their colors.” He wrote sarcastically of the indignities he faced for being left-handed and how his “humanity was reduced to my handydnyss.” Mimicking the language of overwrought victimhood so prevalent among the illiberal left, he complained that, “the University of Michigan does literally nothing to combat the countless instances of violence we encounter every day. Whenever I walk into a classroom, I can hardly find a left-handyd desk to sit in. In big lecture halls, I’m met with countless stares as I walk up the aisle along the left-handyd column. The University cannot claim to be my school while it continues to oppress me.”39
The column seemed to have hit too close to home. Mahmood, who also wrote for the campus newspaper the Michigan Daily, received a call from an editor there after his Michigan Review column ran. The editor informed Mahmood that his column created a “hostile environment” and that someone on the Daily’s editorial staff felt “threatened” by what he40 wrote.41 He was told he could only write for one of the two papers and, as a condition of staying on at the Daily—where they suspended his regular column—he would be required to write a letter of apology. Mahmood refused and FIRE intervened on his behalf. As of February 12, 2015, the paper had failed to reply to FIRE’s inquiries.
Mahmood’s column began with a “trigger warning,” a phrase that is likely meaningless to anyone not schooled in the jargon of lefty university groupthink. He was wryly mocking the illiberal left’s campaign in favor of “trigger warnings” on university syllabi so that students who might be “triggered” by certain content could opt out of completing assignments or attending classes that might upset them.
Oberlin College42 found itself in the midst of a firestorm in 2014 after telling its professors that they should “avoid unnecessary triggers and provide trigger warnings.” They defined a trigger as “something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual.” Professors were urged to educate themselves about “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The administrators explained, “Anything could be a trigger—a smell, song, scene, phrase, place, person, and so on. Some triggers cannot be anticipated, but many can.”
How could any professor be expected to teach in such an environment? More importantly, why should they? Oberlin College administrators asserted that literally any topic could potentially “trigger” a student. The guidance continued, “Sometimes a work is too important to avoid. For example, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.” For such books, the university suggested professors issue a “trigger warning” because it would “show students that you care about their safety.” Some professors had understandably expressed concern that trigger warnings would give away the plot of the assigned books. The university administrators were unmoved, arguing that “even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler.”
Under these guidelines, it would be “unsafe” to assign most any book to most any student. Still, the professors were told to, “strongly consider developing a policy to make triggering material optional or offering students an alternative assignment using different materials. When possible, help students avoid having to choose between their academic success and their own wellbeing.” These suggestions were met with concern and incredulity by many of the professors. Political science professor Marc Blecher told a reporter, “It would have a very chilling effect on what I say in class and on the syllabus.” Meredith Raimondo, an associate dean who oversaw the committee43 told the Associated Press that in response to protests from some faculty, the task force removed the controversial section and “plans to rewrite it with less ‘emphatic-ness.’”
Echoing the concerns of the Oberlin administrators, an editor of George Washington University’s student newspaper, Justin Peligri, wrote a 2014 column arguing for trigger warnings on syllabi as a “preventative measure” because the university “offers many politically-charged classes that explore controversial social issues.”44 Yes, that’s generally the point of a college education. Over at Rutgers, student Philip Wythe asserted in a 2014 column in the campus newspaper that his university should also employ the use of trigger warnings.45 Why? Because, he wrote, “literature courses often examine works with grotesque, disturbing and gruesome imagery within their narratives.”
What kind of works did Wythe think pose a danger to his fellow students’ mental health? He noted that, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s critically acclaimed novel, The Great Gatsby, possesses a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence. Virginia Woolf’s famous cerebral novel, Mrs. Dalloway, paints a disturbing narrative that examines the suicidal inclinations and post-traumatic experiences of an English war veteran. And Junot Díaz’s critically acclaimed work, This is How You Lose Her, observes domestic violence and misogynistic culture in disturbing first-person narrations.”
Thus Wythe helpfully suggested that The Great Gatsby might include the trigger warning: “TW: ‘suicide,’ ‘domestic abuse’ and ‘graphic violence.’”
Is that what you think about when you read The Great Gatsby: suicide, domestic abuse, and graphic violence? Or might this classic novel tackle themes much larger than these bizarre “trigger warnings” suggest?
If a college student is going to be traumatized by The Great Gatsby, then they are going to find day-to-day life unbearable once they step outside the child-care programs that are passing for universities today. Rather than truly educate students, the illiberal left would rather “protect” students from some of the greatest works of American or world literature. Under these “trigger warning” rules, how would professors teach Dante or Shakespeare or just about any great book of literature beyond the narrowest politically correct confines?
In Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel, The Giver, the author portrays an authoritarian society that has eradicated all bad memories from the world. People know nothing of racism, sexism, disease, or anything that might make them feel sad or uncomfortable. The world is left with unthinking robots with human skin. A character in the book explains why the government had to do this: “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.” So, the illiberal left will choose for them.
The University of California-Santa Barbara is blazing the trigger warning trail. In March of 2014—the same month professor Miller-Young told the police officer that she attacked a student because she felt “triggered” by a demonstration46—the student government formally called on the university to mandate that all professors employ trigger warnings. “A Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings” demanded a policy that would require professors to alert students of potential triggering material and “allow . . . students to miss classes containing such material without losing course points.”47
“Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement—a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day,” free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate noted in the Wall Street Journal. “What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine. A whole generation of students soon will have imbibed the warped notions of justice and entitlement now handed down as dogma in the universities.”48
Students at Wellesley College employed the “triggering” concept to object to a statue of an underwear-clad man. One student started a Change.org petition insisting the statue be removed because it was “a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault.”49 Sruthi Narayanan, another offended student, posted a complaint that, “Our safe space—the only safe spa
ce for some of us—is being heavily compromised.”50 By a statue. Okay, a ridiculous statue. But if anything it deserved to be laughed at, not cast as a menacing threat. She lamented the “administration’s decision to put up such a triggering statue without student consent.” Another student, Megan Strait, complained that “not all students consented to this installation” and that due to the location students have no way to “opt out” of seeing the statue.
Do students think that once they graduate they will be able to “opt out” of anything they don’t like? If colleges and universities encourage that attitude, they are not educating students; they are perpetuating their immaturity and fostering intolerance.
One voice of sanity responding to the petition to ban Wellesley’s “Sleepwalker” statue was a student named Fani Ntavelou-Baum. She noted, “Reading this letter and the comments, I find what a student mentioned in one of my classes to be very true: ‘In Wellesley you somehow have a position of power if you are the most offended person in the room.’”
The Silencing Page 10