“More than two centuries after freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that right is very much in the news. Campus speech codes, disinvited commencement speakers, jailed performance artists, exiled leakers, a blogger condemned to a thousand lashes by one of our closest allies, and the massacre of French cartoonists have forced the democratic world to examine the roots of its commitment to free speech…The answer is that free speech is indeed fundamental. It’s important to remind ourselves why, and to have the reasons at our fingertips when that right is called into question.”
-Steven Pinker, “Why Free Speech is Fundamental,” The Boston Globe, January 27, 2015
In recent years, the rise of “safe spaces,” “free speech zones,” “trigger warnings,” and the move to ban so-called “micro aggressions” on college campuses has presented what many see as a serious threat to free speech rights. Furthermore, if an “infraction” occurs, university disciplinary proceedings are often held in “kangaroo courts,” where “universities and colleges routinely deny students the right to legal counsel, the right to confront witnesses against them, the right to a public trial, the right to make a record of the proceedings in order to assure an adequate record for subsequent review, and the right to an impartial judge or jury.”
Interestingly, an intellectually diverse group of writers, journalists, and scholars have voiced grave concerns about these trends on campuses. It’s an issue that both liberals and conservatives find troubling, and many seek to counteract with thoughtful essays exploring the sociology and ideology rooted in these developments, and what can be done to remedy it (see more in additional resources, below). USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers calls this anti-free speech faction of the political spectrum “the illiberal left.”
Source: Flickr
What’s Happening On Campuses?
The popularity of political correctness, victimhood culture, and social justice activism among academics has contributed greatly to the current landscape on college campuses in America. It’s not only faculty members and university officials who are guilty of infringing upon free speech, either. Millennial students often play a role in advocating for university measures that have a chilling effect on free speech, demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” in the classroom – and sometimes it’s faculty members who are censored or sanctioned after students complain about how a professor’s lecture, comment, or email has negatively impacted the student’s “emotional state.”
“The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice,” writes liberal professor Edward Schlosser.
Unfortunately, some of these trends on college campuses are also occurring in public discourse. Here are a few of the terms that you might hear having to do with this phenomenon:
Microaggressions
Microaggressions are defined as “small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American ‘Where were you born?,’ because this implies that he or she is not a real American.” A real life example is student activists at Harvard University in 2014 demanding the removal of SodaStream dispensers in the dining hall, claiming that SodaStream’s ties to Israel constituted a microaggression against Palestine and supporters of Palestinians.
Trigger Warnings
These are “alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might ‘trigger’ a recurrence of past trauma.”
Speech Codes
Speech codes are university implemented restrictions of free speech that would otherwise be protected under the First Amendment, usually against language or viewpoints that are deemed “offensive.”
For example, “Missouri law students passed a speech code that Above the Law called Orwellian. Amherst students called for a speech code so broad that it would’ve sanctioned students for making an ‘All Lives Matter’ poster,” writes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.
Safe Spaces
The practice of creating “safe spaces” during campus debates was perhaps best captured by the New York Times in March 2015, in a story titled, “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas.” The article details a student- organized debate on campus sexual assault at Brown University. Jessica Valenti, founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, were to debate the topic. A student member of Brown’s Sexual Assault Task Force feared that the possibility that McElroy “was likely to criticize the term ‘rape culture'” would be “damaging” to students. So she created a “safe space” for students who would be “troubled” or “triggered” by the discussion. The space “was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Do, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.”
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was recently booed at University of Michigan for criticizing safe space culture in his address to the 2016 graduating class.
Recommended Reading and Resources
For more reading on this topic:
“I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” Edward Schlosser, Vox, June 2015
“The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, September 2015
“The Rise of Victimhood Culture,” Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, September 2015
“‘Safe Spaces’ Defeat the Whole Point of College,” Michael Bloomberg, New York Post, May 2016
FIRE – The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education works “to protect fundamental rights on campus in four areas: freedom of speech and expression; religious liberty and freedom of association; freedom of conscience; and due process and legal equality on campus.” You can browse FIRE’s latest “Spotlight on Speech Codes: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses” report.