To celebrate diversity of opinion, this article recounts some of the battles for free speech that have occurred around the United States during the past several years. Free speech allows for diversity of opinion in that it ensures that all opinions have equal opportunity to prove themselves in the market of ideas, an institution vital to the protection of liberty. If you have been skeptical of the assault on free speech allegedly occurring on American campuses, I hope this article brings the urgency of this issue to your attention.
Speech codes on college campuses are policies that limit or ban expression that would otherwise be protected under the first amendment of the United States Constitution. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 54 percent of public and 59 percent of private universities implement some kind of speech codes on their students; furthermore, Department of Education guidelines make it so many more universities may implement speech codes in the coming years. The effects of these expression regulations are devastating to students’ freedom of speech, as the following examples from FIRE illustrate.
Since 2009, there has been a surge in disinvitation attempts made by faculty and students to prevent certain speakers with unwanted opinions from coming to their campuses: such speakers have included former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; feminist and critic of Islam, Hirsi Ali; and Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde. To this extent, speakers more conservative than the three mentioned above are rarely even invited to speak anymore, because it is much more likely they will be protested and/or disinvited. While these types of actions are not a violation of free speech and are in fact an exercise of it, they reveal a culture in which people would much rather avoid, silence and remove ideological opposition than engage in open debate.
A 2014 New York Times article cited a Rutgers student requesting trigger warnings for “The Great Gatsby” because of scenes that reference abusive, misogynistic violence. In another book-related incident at Purdue University, Indianapolis, an employee was found guilty of racial harassment because of the cover art on the book he was reading aloud: “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan,” which was available in the school’s library. Essentially, this employee was accused and found guilty of being a racist for reading a book, which celebrated the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan, on the grounds that the cover art was offensive. The university has since apologized, but it’s too little too late.
At the University of Delaware in 2007, students were required to undergo ideological reeducation as part of the student-organized, university-mandated freshman orientation program. The program was described as treatment for students with incorrect attitudes or beliefs. Students were taught to adopt specific, approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism. They were also required to attend one-on-one meetings with their resident advisers in which they were asked personal questions such as, “When did you discover your sexual identity?” If George Orwell were still alive, I’d think the administration at the University of Delaware had hired him to write its 2007-2008 policy handbook.
Several years ago, Drexel University banned inappropriately directed laughter before revising the policy under pressure, and quite a few universities have confined unregulated expression to small “free speech zones.” At the University of Central Arkansas in 2013, students were subject to disciplinary actions for “annoying” speech until FIRE forced them to remove that language from their policy.
Colleges everywhere have begun to teach students they have a right not to be offended or uncomfortable. Unfortunately, being exposed to diverse opinions that cause you to critically reevaluate your own opinions may cause some offense and discomfort. If you do not wish to grow as a person or develop intellectual maturity, it is your choice to avoid these uncomfortable situations; however, don’t impose your own academic encumbrance upon your fellow students because, in my opinion, it’s inhumane to restrict another person’s opportunities to exercise their own capacity for self-determination and rational thought. Intellectual comfort isn’t intellectual at all, and college, as a market of ideas, should always allow for free speech, uncensored and unrestricted.