Early salvos in the speech wars

Everything old is still old again.

Sorry for the lack of material here lately: the broken hand has made it very difficult for me to type at length, and text-to-speech holds a sit-in and demands to be unionized whenever I try one of my more complex sentences out on it.

So I’ll continue to join in the current debates by way of having already done so retroactively.

Today, let’s take a look at the “diversity” problem. Resolved: leftist attacks on speech may have intensified in recent years, but they aren’t new. And in fact, it was the upper-tier universities who were setting the precedents for today’s speech codes.

I just received the following press release from FIRE’s Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, Samantha Harris, which details how institutions of higher learning use threats of reprisal to chill student speech.  In this case, the University in question is one of my alma maters, Johns Hopkins—heightening my outrage:

[…] Johns Hopkins University has suspended a student for an entire year for posting Halloween party invitations that some students found offensive on Facebook.com. After the university found 18-year-old junior Justin Park guilty of failing to respect the rights of others, harassment, and intimidation, among other charges, Park sought help from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

‘Jeopardizing a student’s entire academic career because some students were offended by a joke is not just unfair, it’s cruel,’ FIRE Director of Legal and Public Advocacy Samantha Harris said. ‘Hopkins should teach its students that the way we deal with speech we dislike in a free society is with more speech, not with severe and life-altering punishment.’

The Halloween controversy at Hopkins began on October 26, when Park, the social chair of the Sigma Chi fraternity chapter, posted an advertisement for the fraternity’s ‘Halloween in the Hood’ party on Facebook.com. Director of Greek Affairs Robert Turning asked Park to remove the invitation because some students found it offensive. Park removed the advertisement on October 27. After receiving inquiries into whether the party would still take place, Park posted a different advertisement and Sigma Chi hosted the party on October 28.

On November 6, Associate Dean of Students Dorothy Sheppard sent Park a letter stating that the two Facebook.com advertisements ‘contained offensive racial stereotyping’ and that ‘there were offensive decorations at the party.’ Sheppard’s letter informed Park that he was charged with ‘failing to respect the rights of others and to refrain from behavior that impairs the university’s purpose or its reputation in the community, violating the ‘university’s anti-harassment policy, failure to comply with the directions of a university administrator, conduct or a pattern of conduct that harasses a person or a group, and intimidation.’

On November 9, the Student Conduct Board held a hearing to discuss the charges against Park, and on November 20, Park received another letter from Sheppard stating that he had been found ‘responsible for all charges.’ As the letter explains, Park currently faces suspension from the university until January 2008, during which time he cannot even set foot on campus; completion of 300 hours of community service; an assignment to read 12 books and write a reflection paper on each; and mandatory attendance at a workshop on diversity and race relations. Park filed an appeal of the university’s decision on November 27.

On November 28, FIRE wrote a letter to Johns Hopkins President William Brody to emphasize that Hopkins’ severe treatment of Park is inconsistent with its Undergraduate Student Conduct Code requirement that students must ‘protect the university as a forum for the free expression of ideas.’ FIRE has requested a response to that letter by Tuesday, December 5.

‘Hopkins’ unconscionable treatment of Justin Park should shock anyone who values free speech,’ Harris said. ‘Johns Hopkins must not be allowed to promise free speech to its students and then deliver heavy-handed repression. FIRE will keep fighting until Justin Park’s rights are restored and the rights of all Hopkins students are secure.’ […]

I’ve told this story before, but while I was teaching, a friend of mine was hauled before a review board because one of his Black students found Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” both “offensive” and “harassing”— specifically, its use of the word “nigger.”

No sanctions were leveled against my buddy, but the very fact that he was required to put on a suit and tie and go present a defense reveals all one need know about the contemporary academy:  no longer a place for the free exchange of ideas so much as a place where, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, the “correct” ideas, framed in the “proper” language, are celebrated, reiterated, and reinforced.

Like a church, almost.

The plight of Lawrence Summers at Harvard was simply the most high profile example of how entrenched “truths” aren’t to be challenged, even when the challenges go to the very heart of an assertion’s claim to truth—the irony being that many of these now ossified truths (eg. gender trumps sex, race is socially constructed, authenticity grants one absolute moral and intellectual authority, etc.) were born in the wake of the linguistic turn, where Truth itself was reduced to a mere consensus that had become institutionalized and repeated. 

In the current case, this student is, in effect, being forcibly re-educated by the Hopkins administration; and the reason for this is that nowadays, instead of teaching students how to think, universities are more and more concerned with making sure students know what to think.  And to that end, they are too often willing to resort to intellectual totalitarianism to fend off any potential opportunity for giving “offense,” including restrictive preemptive speech codes.

Such, naturally, has the very practical effect of stifling debate and winnowing down “acceptable” intellectual positions that may otherwise find fertile ground in discussions.  And without those perspectives, mere assertions, by dint of going unchallenged, become articles of secular faith.

In short, we have reached the point where we have sacrificed inquiry at the altar of appearances, polishing and re-polishing the sham veneer of utopian order that tops the entire cheap edifice.  Which is funny, because I’d bet that many of the 60s leftists who brought about the transformation of education by introducing postmodern sensibilities into the academy would never have imagined themselves to be the second coming of the Victorians.

This post was published Dec 1, 2006 to proteinwisdom.com

Some follow-up information on the case can be found here.