In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

The thesis of the author is that political correctness on university campuses is still alive and well, despite the fact that campus speech codes have been defeated in every legal challenge brought against them between 1989 and 1995.

Apparently some US universities have “free speech zones” where students can freely speak their minds. Other universities have codes which prevent speech which is hurtful, embarrassing or disrespectful.

Students who support gun use have been prevented from speaking at some universities. Now, I do not support gun use or concealed carry or anything of the like. Emphatically not. However, I would not prevent a person from speaking who did support these matters. The fact of the matter is that there are usually positives and negatives to every position (yes, it’s that pesky lawyer looking at both sides of the story again). For my part, I tend to think the negatives of allowing unrestrained gun use outweigh the positives by far, but that doesn’t entitle me to stop others from expressing an opposing view.

Complaining about “political correctness” is typically seen as a right-wing past time, but Lukianoff cautions against this stereotyping:

Because America’s universities tend to tilt left, and because many targets of P.C. censorship are socially conservative, campus censorship has too often come to be understood as a niche issue for the conservative media and blogosphere. This is a bizarre development, not only because free speech was once a central liberal cause but because liberals are by no means immune from campus censorship. Hindley, the Brandeis professor who was punished for his instructional use of wetback, is a liberal. Sampson, the student who read a book about the Klan, is an Obama voter, and some of the most vocal students opposing the Delaware residence program were liberals. This strange pigeonholing may explain why cases like that of Elizabeth Ito, who lost her job at Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina after criticizing the war in Iraq, or the students at the University of Texas who last year were threatened with expulsion for having an Obama poster in their window, struggled to find a receptive audience in the media.

The perception that free speech on campus is primarily a conservative issue ultimately enables campus censors. Free speech zones, for example, are often tiny, out-of-the-way areas where some campuses quarantine protest activities. Obtaining permission to use even these limited spaces often involves waiting periods and registration requirements. In my experience the zones disproportionately affect left-wing protests. In November, for example, three professors were banned from campus at Southwestern College in California after they supported students whose protest against budget cuts took place outside—I am not making this up—the “free speech patio.” Nevertheless, the conservative website CampusReform.org has listed a free speech zone as a “leftist” campus abuse. While the site commendably wants to bring attention to these speech cages, such labeling helps campus bureaucrats brush off criticism as the hobbyhorse of a disfavored political minority, rather than an expression of concern over policies that affect all students.

The reason for P.C. censorship often has nothing to do with left or right. Sensitivity is often a cynical excuse to squelch speech that administrators don’t like for purely self-interested reasons. In late 2002, for example, the administration at Harvard Business School threatened a student newspaper editor because he ran a cartoon mocking the I.T. department for the failure of its computer system during interview week. The dean claimed the cartoon violated “community standards” because it was not “respectful discourse,” but ultimately the rationale was one that FIRE frequently sees from campus administrators: I believe in free speech and all, but I draw the line at making fun of me.

Hayden Barnes was expelled from Valdosta State University in Georgia in 2007 for posting a collage on Facebook that critiqued a planned parking garage because of its effect on the environment. The school’s rationale? Barnes, a decorated paramedic, posed a “clear and present danger” because the collage was labeled the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage.” Ronald Zaccari was the president of the college; the collage’s title was a joking reference to the president’s assertion that the garage would be part of his “legacy.” The school clearly did not seriously believe that Barnes was the next Virginia Tech gunman, as the expulsion note was simply slipped under his door along with a copy of the collage.

Bans on free speech are not just a beat up by “right-wingers” or a “leftist conspiracy” against people who don’t agree with them.

Personally, I don’t like to discuss issues in ways that might hurt or offend people. But sometimes, it’s unavoidable. Sometimes people are particularly thin-skinned, or take your point in the wrong way. Sometimes you have to raise unpalatable truths to discuss an issue fully.  Sometimes you have to challenge the way people think by shocking them.

Sometimes you just can’t help offending people by the very nature of your opinion. For example, if an atheist tells a very religious person very forcefully that he does not believe in God and tries to say exactly why he does not believe, the very religious person may get upset. Conversely, if the very religious person starts to try and convert the atheist and tries to say exactly why she does believe, the atheist may get upset. Mind you, I’ve had interesting discussions with people with all kinds of beliefs where they haven’t been offended by my views nor I by theirs, but I can see situations where people could be offended.

As I’ve just discussed in my recent post on law and regulating society, sometimes it’s hard to work out how to make people behave properly. If a student racially abuses another student, I can see why one would want to prevent such conduct from occurring if possible. I can understand the impulse to regulate against it, but as I also discussed in the post in regulation, I think that sometimes regulation can backfire. The law is a blunt instrument, and it’s difficult to specify exactly what conduct you want to prevent without going too far. Your original aim might be to stop racists or gun lobbyists or whoever, but you also give the regulator the capacity to silence a whole range of other people because of the vague and broad way these codes are written. You might even silence yourself.

For example, the code at one university mentioned in the article tries to regulate and prevent students from making “[e]mbarrassing, degrading or damaging information, assumptions, implications, remarks.” What is an embarrassing remark? Does it cover telling someone they have a piece of spinach between their teeth? (Seriously, does it?) What if someone assumes you’ve said something degrading but you certainly didn’t mean to?

The law isn’t the best instrument for regulating embarrassing or derogatory comments, anyway. Simple manners would do it. I wrote a post a year and a half ago about the decline of manners in society. As I said then, I think the important aspect of “good manners” are those informal rules which involve respecting other people as human beings. By being polite, you are essentially saying, “Yes, your personhood, comfort and needs are important to me, and I respect them. I recognise that you are a person of equal worth to myself.” Manners are also about not being selfish and purely wrapped up in one’s own needs. A polite person would try not to say something rude or derogatory, or if she was told she did say something which hurt someone’s feelings, she’d apologise. But good manners are something which are more appropriately inculcated into us by our parents than by the law.

Ultimately, it’s important that students have the freedom to question the status quo. It’s important that students be able to read a book about the Ku Klux Klan without being accused of being racist. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is possible to regulate away offence, either.

But it is possible to have polite and respectful discourse and still disagree with one another. Indeed, I hope that this blog is an exemplar in that regard. It is this attitude that should be promoted in universities.

Update:

Sometimes I’m amazed at my capacity to capture the zeitgeist (if I do say so myself). Via The Australian, I learn that the Brumby government in my home State of Victoria is instituting a “respect agenda” (borrowed wholesale from Tony Blair’s policies).

Read my lips: you can’t force people to respect one another.

Such an initiative is a typical instance of a government instituting a policy just so it can be seen to be doing something. I suspect this is in part a response to the recent deplorable incidents of violence against Indian students, but “respect ambassadors” aren’t going to stop the violence happening, particularly in the short term. Greater police presence on the street, and doing something about the thugs who perpetrate the violence might help, on the other hand.