Flexing Muzzles

Free Speech On Campus Is Being Attacked From An Unlikely Direction–The Left

The Ever-Smiling Jerry Falwell, in closing down the Moral Majority, explained that its work had been accomplished—its values had become part of the American mainstream. He was right, in one respect. For years, the Moral Majority worked zealously to banish "bad speech," targeting "offensive" books in school libraries, as well as "socially harmful" magazines on newsstands.

Now, on American college campuses, there is a new, rapidly growing legion of decency that is also devoted to punishing bad speech. Its list of indefensible words is different from Falwell's. Expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and prejudice against the handicapped are to be outlawed. But the basic principle is precisely that of Falwell: A decent society requires limits to free expression, and if that means diminishing the First Amendment, the will of the majority must rule.

Accordingly, on a number of prestigious campuses, a majority of students and faculty have concluded that censorship must be integral to higher education. As Canetta Ivy—one of the heads of student government at Stanford University—says, "We don't put as many restrictions on freedom of speech as we should."

A quarter of a century after the free-speech movement began at the University of California at Berkeley, helping fuel the antiwar and civil rights campaigns, some of the brightest of today's students are marching in the other direction.

This neoconservatism among liberals and radicals, blacks and feminists, and even a number of law professors, has its roots in the very real racism that does exist on a number of campuses. At Brown, for instance, fliers were distributed reading: "Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom." At Smith, four black women received vicious racist letters. At Yale, the Afro-American Cultural Center's building was emblazoned with a White Power sign and a swastika.

In reaction, black students and many white students have joined to insist on the creation of codes not only of student conduct but also of student speech. Administrators, often enthusiastically, have yielded to those demands.

There are now various codes of forbidden speech at Emory University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California, the University of Buffalo Law School and New York University Law School, among others.

The codes that have been adopted are not limited to epithets. On most campuses, a student can be disciplined—or even expelled—for words that create an intimidating, hostile or demeaning environment for educational pursuits.

Or a student may be put on trial for "racist or discriminatory comment ... or other expressive behavior directed at an individual"—if the speaker "intentionally" set out to "demean the race, sex or religion" of the aggrieved complainant (University of Wisconsin).

These thou-shalt-not-speak codes are so vague and broad that just a disagreement on such issues as affirmative action or an independent Palestinian state can lead to a verdict that a particularly vehement student is guilty of discriminatory harassment against blacks or Jews.

Who will judge the defendants? Administrators will, or a panel of administrators and students. And if they are ideologues and find the controversial political views of the defendant repellent, the student can miss a semester or more for being under the illusion that the university is a place of free inquiry.

While the presidents of the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, among others, have hailed these codes of prohibited speech, Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford, is resisting the notion that students are best taught to think for themselves by being told what they can't say. When you tell people what they can't say, Kennedy has emphasized, they will begin to suppress what they think.

Already, in classrooms at some American colleges where language is monitored—as it is at Czechoslovakian and Chinese colleges—there are students afraid to explore certain lines of thought lest they be considered racist or sexist. At New York University Law School, for example, where heresy hunters abound in the student body, the atmosphere in some classes is like that of the old-time House Un-American Activities Committee. One student describes "a host of watchdog committees and a generally hostile classroom reception regarding any student comment right of center."

At Stanford, the student organizations insistently demanding a code of forbidden language include the Asian Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Association, the Jewish Law Students Association and the Asian-American Students Association. From these groups and from NYU Law School will come some of the judges of the next decades, and maybe even a Supreme Court Justice or two.

The First Amendment is always fragile—witness the frenzy to amend the Bill of Rights after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the First Amendment protected flag burning. But with students at prestigious colleges now intent on limiting speech for a greater social good, the First Amendment will become even more vulnerable to attack in the years ahead.

But shouldn't there be some punishment of especially hurtful, insulting, infuriating words? When he was mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington was asked to punish those responsible for inflammatory language that had gone out over a city radio station. According to his former press secretary, he refused, saying, "If I scratch one word, where do I stop?"

The current college codes began in response to crude racial and sexist scrawls. But now the language being scratched out extends to any words that create a hostile atmosphere or any language that "involves an express or implied threat to an individual's academic efforts"—whatever that may mean.

There is also the damaging effect of these protective regulations on the very people who are insisting they be safeguarded. malcolm X used to talk about the need for young people to learn how language works, how to dissect it, how to use it as both a shield and a sword. Above all, he thought, blacks should not be fearful of language. They should not let it intimidate them but rather should fight back when words are used against them with more powerful words of their own.

If you read malcolm X's collected speeches and listen to his recordings, it's clear that he was an extraordinarily resilient, resourceful, probing master of language. Can you imagine his asking to be protected from somebody else's—anybody else's—words?

I've debated black students about these speech codes. They are highly articulate and quick with polemical counterpoint. And I've asked them why on earth they are running away from language when they can turn a campus into a continuing forum on racism by using the vicious racist language directed at them to illuminate what's going on there.

Moreover, by turning to censorship instead of challenge, these students can well cut off the expression of speech they themselves want to hear.

On ABC-TV's Nightline some time ago, debating Barbara Ransby (a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan and a founder of the United Coalition Against Racism), I posed this quite possible scenario: A group of black students invite Louis Farrakhan to lecture in a political-science class. He comes and says, "I want to explain what I said about Judaism's being a gutter religion. I meant it, but I want to give you the context in which I said it."

There are Jewish students in the class and they claim that—according to the university's code—Farrakhan has created a hostile atmosphere. In my view, Farrakhan ought to be able to speak anywhere he chooses, and certainly on a college campus. As long as the students have the right to question him and argue with him, they'll have something to gain from the experience. But under the speech codes at more and more colleges, Farrakhan—having created a hostile atmosphere—would quite likely not be permitted on campus again.

Is that what the black students pressing for speech codes want? To have black speakers they invite on campus rejected because of what they say and how they say it? Do women students want radical feminist Andrea Dworkin barred because of possible charges that she creates a hostile environment for male students?

Also overlooked by students concerned with artistic expression is that a hostile atmosphere can be created by a painting or a piece of sculpture, because expression can be graphic as well as verbal. When the University of Wisconsin's code was being debated before the state's board of regents, E. David Cronon—then dean of UW-Madison's College of Letters and Science—testified that the code would, indeed, chill students' rights to artistic expression.

For example, some years ago, I was lecturing at the University of Wisconsin when a fierce fight broke out over a student's exhibition of paintings in a university building. Feminists claimed his work was outrageously sexist and demanded (concluded on page 203)Flexing Muzzles (continued from page 120) that the paintings be removed. The administration gingerly upheld the artist and the very core of a university's reason for being: the right to freedom of expression. But under the university's new code of propriety, that exhibition would be scrapped as fast as you can say "Edwin Meese."

Furthermore—and this is a poignant dimension of the rush to virtuous censorship—it won't do a bit of good. Let us suppose these codes were in place on every campus in the country. Would racism go away? No, it would go underground, in the dark, where it's most comfortable.

The language on campus could become as pure as bottled water, but racist attitudes would still fester. The only way to deal with racism is to bring it out into the open—not suppress it.

One approach is to examine particular incidents on a particular campus and get people—and that includes blacks—to talk about their own racist attitudes. This approach won't work wonders, but, depending on the honesty and incisiveness of the faculty and the students leading these probes, whatever happens will be a lot more useful than squashing expression. And it may lead to specific, durable changes on campus, which will also be a lot more productive than quibbling over who created a hostile atmosphere and whether or not it was done intentionally.

But the way the lemmings—administrators as well as students—are going, the anti-free-speech movement may intimidate and harass students for some time to come. And it's scary. As Lee Dembart—a former New York Times reporter who is now a student at Stanford Law School—said in the Times:

"It is distressing that the 'politically correct' view on campus these days seems to favor curtailment of speech. Oddly, defense of the First Amendment is now an antiprogressive view. Yes, speech is sometimes painful. Sometimes it is abusive. That is one of the prices of a free society. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has to be learned over and over again. No victory endures."

Yet Dembart's views are held by only a besieged minority. The voice of the regulatory majority is that of Sharon Gwyn, a 1989 graduate of Stanford who wrote in The New York Times:

"As a black woman attending Stanford University, I feel that no one should be allowed to promote racially derogatory ideas on this campus."

And beginning with that simple preliminary statement, campuses are being caught in a web of such restrictions as these from Emory University:

Forbidden is "discriminatory harassment," which "includes conduct (oral, written, graphic or physical) directed against any person or group of persons because of their race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, handicap or veteran's status and that has the purpose or reasonably foreseeable effect of creating an offensive, demeaning, intimidating or hostile environment for that person or group of persons."

Anything you say can and will be used against you.

As an indication of the degree to which America's colleges have retreated from their reason for being, here is a section from the 1975 Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale (the celebrated C. Vann Woodward report):

"If expression may be prevented, censored or punished because of its content or the motives attributed to those who promote it, then it is no longer free. It will be subordinated to other values that we believe to be of lower priority in a university."

Yale has now reaffirmed the thrust of that report, but it is incomprehensible to too many colleges and universities.

I lecture at colleges and universities around the country every year, and I intend to say what I think about these shameful speech codes. At some schools, I may thereby be creating a hostile atmosphere in lecture halls where there are students who say they crave censorship.

And that is precisely my intention: to create an atmosphere hostile to suppression of speech—for any reason.

Recently, friends of the First Amendment were given reason for hope when a Federal district court in Michigan struck down the University of Michigan's restrictions on student speech as unconstitutional. They are too vague and overbroad, said Judge Avern Cohn, and therefore in violation of the First Amendment. The suit was brought by the A.C.L.U.

This is the first court decision on university suppression of speech, and since it is so clear, it may influence other courts in other parts of the country to remind colleges and universities that they are in the business of free thought, not regulated thought.

"The only way to deal with racism is to bring it out into the open—not suppress it."