Neither the right nor left has had a monopoly on censorship in education. In the first half of the twentieth century, Huckleberry Finn was banned from school curricula and libraries because it was thought to be immoral. Later it was excluded because it was said to be racist. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid '60s was a reaction against the administration’s suppression of anti-war literature. But with the increasing influence of former campus radicals in the nations colleges and universities, the effort to suppress speech that is judged offensive to women and minorities was embodied in the proliferation of speech codes. “Such censorship sent a chill across higher education, unfairly ruining many careers in the process.” The recent call for the firing of University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill has sparked new fears of censorship from the right. Again academic freedom appears to be under siege from both sides.
One of the symptoms of overbearing political correctness has been campus speech codes that ban offensive speech, especially that directed at women and minorities. The interpretation of what constitutes offensive speech was often left to the alleged victims. In the notorious water-buffalo remark at the University of Pennsylvania case, this led to misguided accusations of racism because the targets of the remark were unfamiliar with the speaker’s culture. Invariable, it is the speaker who required to be “more sensitive” in these cases.
Several court cases have struck down overly broad speech codes. The U.S. Supreme Court (R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 1992) found speech codes that ban viewpoint discrimination to be unconstitutional, even when “hate speech” was the nominal target of the codes.
Other cases have similarly supported free speech on campus, including Doe v. University of Michigan, 1989 (invalidated speech code for being facially vague and overbroad), the UWM Post, Inc. v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1991 (code struck down as unconstitutional), Silva v. University of New Hampshire 1994 (“…the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom…”), Corry v. Stanford 1995 (found that the Stanford code applied to speech that could cause emotional distress but would not incite an immediate breach of peace nor other clear and present danger). Even if speech is insulting and hurtful, as many found the recent remarks of Ward Churchill on this campus, it is not necessarily unlawful.
Despite the court victories, speech codes are still prevalent on America’s college campuses. This is partly because they have not been challenged in court and partly because they have been restructured so as to be constitutional. Some of the codes are ambiguous at best. For example, the U.H. Student Conduct Code states that “A student may not behave towards another member of the University community, even in the name of conviction or under a claim of academic freedom, in a manner that denies or interferes with that individual's expression of conviction, academic freedom or performance of legitimate duties and functions.”
The resilience of speech codes is thought to be related to a broader politicization of the college experience that derives from a concentration of faculty members on the ideological left. Indeed political college faculties do not exhibit diversity in political affiliation. A 2003 survey of six major professional associations of in the Social Sciences and Humanities found that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 3 to 1 (Economics) and as much as 30 to 1 (Anthropology). Studies of voter registration roles uncovered the following ratios of Democrats to Republicans: Cornell, 24:1; Brown University, 18:1; University of Colorado, 23:1; UCLA, 16:1; University of Maryland, 6:1; Syracuse University, 25:1 (Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, Jan/Feb, 2005). A more comprehensive study was done by matching the faculty lists of Stanford and UC-Berkeley with voter registration roles in surrounding counties (www.NAS.org). Berkeley came in at 445 to 45 (10:1) Democrats to Republicans with Stanford at 276 to 36 (8:1). Among assistant and associate professors, Republicans are outnumbered 31:1.
It has been speculated that this lack of balance is simply because those on the ideological left are disproportionately attracted to academics, not because of any discrimination. Rothman et al. (2005) show, however, that controlling for professional achievements and personal characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats.
The climate of political correctness has several manifestations. The recent faculty censure of Harvard President Larry Summers is indicative. In January, Summers agreed to make some provocative and unofficial remarks at a National Bureau of Economic Research meeting. His topic was the low incidence of women in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions. In addition to the well-known discrimination and socialization hypotheses, Summers provided two more. One was the higher variance (not mean) of scientific and mathematical aptitude among men that leads to a larger pool of men at the highest (and lowest) aptitudes. Moreover, among men and women with the highest aptitudes, Summers noted indications that men were more likely maintain the level of commitment required for high-end jobs. He then indicated the kind of data that might prove useful and noted that further research might well disprove his hypotheses. Judging from the subsequent apologies and the likelihood that Summers will resign and be replaced by a “politician,” it appears that political correctness has won the day.
The curriculum of higher education is alleged to be politicized and guilty of substituting indoctrination for the disciplined pursuit of knowledge. General education requirements have exploded to the point where the core is unrecognizable. Following the lead of Stanford (“Ho Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go”) and other mainland institutions, UH replaced its requirement of Western and Eastern Civilization with “Global and Multicultural Perspectives,” which aims to provide students with “a sense of human development … through the consideration of narratives and artifacts…”
The cost of political correctness is not so much that students become ideologically warped or anti-American for life. Indeed college graduates are marginally more likely to be Republican than Democrat and significantly more likely to be independent. Rather it is the opportunity lost for learning through the disciplined application of reason and evidence. Instead students often focus on gaming the system. Douthat (2005) describes his own experience at Harvard. One of his illustrations concerned the requirement to write a 10-page paper on pair of artifacts from the early American West without doing any research on the cultures represented. Douthat had a dilemma. “How could I eke out ten pages when I knew nothing about the provenance of the weapons or the significance of their markings? The paper was pathetically easy to write – not despite the dearth of information but because of it. Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn’t need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all. [He craftily sprinkled his essay with references to capitalism, violence and male domination.] …the paper got an A.”
At the very least, the climate of political correctness has a chilling effect on academic inquiry. Without political diversity, how can there be diversity of thought? Can we really afford to designate some issues, such as differences by race and gender and Hawaiian sovereignty, as too inflammatory for investigation?
There are signs that the general public is growing suspicious about their tax dollars being used for political ends and demands for more accountability may be inevitable. One particular movement has led to legislation being introduced in 14 States calling for an Academic Bill of Rights that “stresses intellectual diversity, demands balance in reading lists, that recognizes that political partisanship by professors in the classroom is an abuse of students' academic freedom, that the inequity in funding of student organizations and visiting speakers is unacceptable, and that a learning environment hostile to conservatives is unacceptable.” These bills call for balancing the curriculum, oversight regarding tenure and promotion, safeguards against grades being exchanged for political beliefs, guidelines on speaker selection, and an exhortation for organizational neutrality.
The National Organization of Scholars believes that it is possible to promote religious liberty, due process and legal equality, and diversity of thought in higher education without infringing on academic freedom in the way that the Academic Bill of Rights seems to portend (see also http://www.thefire.org/ ). It is repression of speech and thought that is of central concern. The cure is not likely to lie in more rules and arguably more repression. As Judge Learned Hand notes, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” And to paraphrase M. Scott Peck, the road to community passes through verbal chaos. You cannot get to civility and collegiality through repression.
For a revised and footnoted version of this story, go to: http://www.ffeusa.org/html/special_alert_article_rournasset.html
James Roumasset is a professor of economics at the University of Hawaii and serves on the board of scholars of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. He can be reached via email at: mailto:jimr@hawaii.edu
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