37.

THE ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE OF THE COLLEGE CAMPUS

People who watch in horror at what has happened on campus are understandably skeptical about expanding these already crippling sensitivities beyond the academy.

WHAT PASSES FOR hate on a college campus does not resemble what most people believe hate speech to be. This perhaps explains why the public has such trouble appreciating the harm it causes. What they see on campus is an image not of real harm, but rather the trivialization of harm—a species of hate that plays well on the campus green but looks ridiculous to people who peer into the college bubble in astonishment. The only true injury is the self-inflicted one to the reputation of the ivory tower.

All across the country there are variations on hate speech codes and other curtailments on speech that are celebrated on college campuses as essential to the educational mission. Most of these deal with protections against offenses and insults or ideas and images that cause discomfort and upset, all of which seems so out of place given the amount of tuition everyone is paying. What is being censored on campus is largely unfamiliar to people in the trenches of public life who have experienced actual harm. A college campus is a world unto its own—with its own set of rules, representative culture, and vocabulary comprised of words and ideas that, apparently, raise all sorts of destabilizing havoc in a student’s life.

The public is growing more accustomed to hearing anecdotes from academia, with its “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and fragile student bodies attached to, apparently, even more brittle brains. These are all new terms of art that describe a sinister form of victimization on campus—a shared misery of verbal afflictions from within the academy that require a much more delicate handling of speech. Caveat emptor has left the Latin lab and now pervades the entire collegiate experience. Institutions of higher learning have become places where the free exchange of ideas is no longer welcome because students are not emotionally rugged enough to hear them. And students, often encouraged by faculty, are not silent about their weakened immune systems. Speakers invited to campus with views out of lockstep with a more progressive agenda are summarily disinvited. Speakers who slip by campus censors are shouted down. Books are removed from syllabi or are given un-kosher warning certifications, all on account of passages, words, or opinions that the “intersectional” thought police have deemed too traumatizing, or personally insulting, for students to read. Intellectual thought and the imperatives of art are being sacrificed to some paternalistic notion that students are better off living in sanitized echo chambers than in more grating but challenging environments.

College was once regarded as the gateway to adulthood. Now, it seems, colleges have become the enablers of arrested development and the infantilizing of an entire generation of prickly Peter Pans.

Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of FIRE, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, have written eloquently and critically about this phenomenon. Their main thesis is that, like many righteous causes that lose their way, here, too, the good intentions of seeking to protect students from ideas that might arouse but also upset them is disastrous for both the state of education and the overall mental health of the student. The former president of the ACLU and now law professor Nadine Strossen argues that “current campus censorship threatens even more speech than the invalidated ‘hate speech’ codes of the past. . . . [T]oday’s capacious understanding of ‘hate speech’ is often understood as encompassing the expression of any idea that some students consider objectionable.”³⁶⁰

This is how bad things have gotten and why there is such handwringing and head-scratching about restrictions on speech. America’s sense of humor on its college campuses has been hijacked by “intersectional” censors wagging fingers at every conceivable faux pas. Affection verboten. Stereotypes unmentionable. Analogies are anathema. Proportion is gone. Harmless ribbing is treated like grand theft ego. No one can seemingly tell the difference between a marching Nazi with murder on his mind and a comedian telling a joke about Asians possessing superior math skills.

Feelings are that raw.

Tenured professors live in fear of unwittingly saying the wrong thing during a lecture, which in this era could devolve into a Title IX action. In 2015, at the ten campuses of the University of California, the deans and department chairs were presented with examples of “microaggressions,” defined as indirect, subtle, and unintentional discriminatory statements directed at marginalized groups, which were to be strictly avoided in classroom discussions. Two of the worst offenders: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” Where is the aggression in that? It is not micro; it is downright invisible! Librarians from Simmons College have graciously done the legwork and created an Anti-Oppression Guide, which outlines a list of verbally hostile, derogatorily negative slights routinely committed against Muslims, which now include such benign phrases as: “God Bless You” and “Merry Christmas.” According to the Guide, these phrases would impart to a Muslim a perceived dominance of Christianity over Islam.³⁶¹

The macroaggression, like genocides, is all but forgotten in this new subculture of finding fault with every magnified slight. The micro is the new macro, and the possibility of overreaction is given no quarter. So fragile are these students that their entire collegiate experience is suddenly being confined to one single “safe space”—a rarefied prophylactic that does not exist in the real world and is as intellectually dishonest as it is suffocating.

At Tufts, a conservative newspaper was singled out for committing “harassment” simply for quoting accurately from the Koran and for publishing facts about the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff humorously observed that Tufts may have set a precedent for “find[ing] someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”³⁶²

Lukianoff and Haidt write that colleges have created an atmosphere where students believe they have a right not to be offended. Worse still, “[a] claim that someone’s words are ‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feelings of being offended. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished.”³⁶³

In a December 2014 report produced by FIRE, more than 55 percent of the 437 colleges and universities in the United States maintain speech codes that infringe upon the free speech rights of students.³⁶⁴ When challenged in court, however, each one was ruled to be unconstitutional.³⁶⁵

Anyone observing from beyond the ivy-covered walls would assume that the First Amendment no longer applies in university life. Universities are now becoming the marketplaces of the least offensive ideas. People who watch in dismay at what has happened on campus are understandably skeptical about expanding these already crippling sensitivities beyond the academy. The contours of the First Amendment have different, often contradictory, meanings depending on whether one is on or off campus. At universities, offenses and insults that force students out of their comfort zones must be quarantined; outside of the campus, separated from the womb of the “safe space” college existence, all bets and gloves are off. Sensitivities are rare sightings in a world of human indignity and assaultive speech. The new look of free speech on campus serves neither the imperatives of a liberal education nor the goals of deliberative democracy.

We are simply not preparing college students for life outside of the academy, and we are confusing everyone else about the true meaning of free speech. Upon graduation, students make their way into new social settings and places of employment where the rules of civility and fair play are different and where they can expect to find no sheltering safe spaces. Universities are under no obligation to protect students from, as columnist Judith Shulevitz craftily wrote, “feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against their dearly and closely held beliefs or generally had their feelings hurt.”³⁶⁶ It used to be that the mandate of institutions of higher learning was to assist evolving minds to confront new ideas and to test settled beliefs.

In April of 2018, at the City College of New York, over twenty students from the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (“SJP”) chose to commemorate the “Nakba,” which translates from the Arabic into “catastrophe” and relates to the creation of the State of Israel, with a public demonstration. During the lunch hour, when everyone was either crossing the campus or milling about the open lawn, the SJP members, after offering some preliminary remarks, decided to chant, “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!”

Intifada is not a call for peace or social justice. It poses neither a political idea nor an inspirational message nor even the hope for national aspirations. The word translates, literally, to “tremor” or “shivering.” By now, most people know that it actually means a violent campaign to kill Jews—most of whom are Israeli civilians. If you are chanting the word “intifada,” you are calling for the murder of Jews. The word has nothing to do with Palestinian rights and everything to do with Jewish annihilation. It is chanted as a means of incitement. Its recitation is purposeful and provocative.

When Jewish students complained to CCNY’s president, Vincent Boudreau, wondering perhaps whether “safe spaces” also applied to them or whether a genocidal macroaggression should be a concern of the university, they were informed that chanting “intifada” on campus, with the specific purpose of influencing the minds of gathering students, is protected speech under the First Amendment.

To openly call for the killing of Jews is a permissible form of political speech? Is that not the very model of incitement to violence that Brandenburg v. Ohio sought to restrict from First Amendment consideration?³⁶⁷

Hurt feelings are treated like crimes against humanity; true threats and intimidation that rise to the level of actual aggression are casually dismissed as the give-and-take of political discourse. Ironically, during the same month in April 2018, a Nazi living in the United Kingdom was sentenced to three years in prison for stirring up racial hatred in two speeches he delivered at alt-right rallies in 2015 and 2016. Among other obscenities, he described Jews as “parasites,” called for them to be “eradicated,” and said that they are the “real enemy” of the British people. The court wrote about the defendant that “[h]e seeks to raise street armies, perpetrate violence against Jewish people and ultimately bring about genocide.”³⁶⁸

In a widely debated essay, Ulrich Baer, a vice provost for faculty arts, humanities, and diversity at New York University, wrote, “Some things are unmentionable and undebatable, but not because they offend sensibilities of the sheltered young. Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal, or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.”³⁶⁹

If speech is to be regulated, a good place to start would be in protecting the dignity of human beings who have been exposed to injurious speech. There is the protection of copyrights, laws against false advertising, libel and defamation, and the deliberate use of fraudulent information in a business transaction. Of course, these particular exceptions to the general rule of free speech disproportionally benefit the privileged and the powerful. False advertising and fraudulent information in business transactions are “high-class problems”—they do not protect vulnerable minorities but rather financial interests.³⁷⁰ Law professors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic wondered why a “black undergraduate subjected to vicious abuse while walking late at night on campus” is not entitled to at least the same consideration as a business transaction.³⁷¹

And as much as students and faculty cannot be allowed to censor ideas that the First Amendment would otherwise protect, professors cannot hide under the mantle of academic freedom when what they are producing is shoddy scholarship that has no relationship to ideas, aesthetics, or the pursuit of truth. This raises yet another misapplication of free speech on college campuses. Ideas deemed as microaggressions are censored; meanwhile, some faculty believe that academic freedom protects almost anything they say—even if it has nothing to do with academia or the search for the truth.

The same liberty that does not protect the shock comic Dieudonné onstage should not be protecting an academic like Steven Salaita on campus.

In 2014, Salaita accepted a tenure track position at the university of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That offer was eventually rescinded as soon as the chancellor of the university received a preview of some of Salaita’s Twitter postings, replete with vile comments wholly unworthy of an academic. He wrote, for instance, after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2014, that “I wish all fucking West Bank settlers would go missing.” There is more. He tweeted that anyone supporting Israel during the last Gaza War was “an awful human being.” And this: “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.” Salaita was unrepentant and fully assumed that the university would stand beside him. Liel Leibovitz, a columnist, wondered how Salaita would have fared at a university if his tweet referred to African-Americans as “transforming ‘racism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1964.”³⁷²

Many did, in fact, rush to Salaita’s defense, on both First Amendment and academic freedom grounds. The University of Illinois is a public institution, after all. His freedom to speak should be constitutionally protected. Yet, why should his tweets merit constitutional protection? They are of a piece with incitement and hatred. While speech may be free, that does not mean that it cannot be critically judged—especially when its quality is as poor as Salaita’s Twitter offerings and has the potential to generate actual physical harm by third parties reading them.

The exercise of free speech is always undertaken at one’s own peril. There is a reason people are advised to keep their mouths shut. What gets said may fall outside the law; it could also elicit a black eye. Caution is warranted. How speech will land, what effect it might have, and what harm it might bring is often unknown. Salaita chose to share his language and quality of mind with the Twitter universe. His employer had every reason to question both his intellectual rigor and his awful judgment. This was not a proper occasion in which to invoke academic freedom, mostly because those tweets showed no affinity for the academy whatsoever.

Writing about the cherished platform that universities provide, Jason Blum wrote: “Worthy speech is both intellectually and morally responsible . . . demonstrating a basic level of respect for one’s interlocutors. We are not required to provide a soapbox for every blowhard with a following on Twitter.”³⁷³

One may have a First Amendment right to speak or write in any form desired, but not without critical review—particularly in an academic setting that places a premium on peer review. The marketplace of ideas must impose an insistence on quality. Barriers to entry must exist. The seriousness of mind is what makes one worthy of inclusion. Having a right to free speech does not guarantee a university platform in which to deliver that speech—for teachers or for invited guests. Colleges and universities render all kinds of judgments regarding what students should read and what gets left off the syllabus. The selection process is not an exercise in censorship. It comes down to the curatorial prerogatives of the academy and the ability to judge excellence. Under the best of circumstances, what gets left off the syllabus and who is refused a platform to speak is a matter of making the grade and earning the right to be read and to speak. There are no other free speech entitlements.³⁷⁴