Penn State feminists stole 6,000 copies of a conservative paper. Dartmouth blacks collected as “litter” a conservative newspaper distributed in dorms. At Penn, Penn State, Dartmouth and elsewhere blacks, feminists, homosexuals and various ethnic groups are asserting a right not to be annoyed or have their feelings hurt by words.
The menace of this “right” is the subject of Jonathan Rauch’s elegant new book, “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought.” The right not to be offended, far from promoting civility on campus, is, he says, provoking acrimonious contests to see who can claim to be most, and most frequently, offended, and to decide which groups’ being offended matters. Special solicitude is shown to “historically oppressed classes”-basically, everyone except white heterosexual males. Being offended has become a political agenda, even a full-time vocation for some people. They are “thought vigilantes,” on the prowl to punish people guilty of thinking proscribed thoughts. So some professors have stopped teaching courses on sensitive subjects (race, ethnicity, sexuality) and some professors tape their classes in case they must defend themselves against a career-threatening charge of “insensitivity.”
Religious fundamentalists try to compel “equal time” in school curricula for creationism and evolution. But they are less of a threat than liberals trying to mandate “fairness” for dotty ideas that make some “victim groups” feel good-ideas such as that Greek culture came from Black Africa, or that Iroquois ideas were important to the making of the Constitution.
Speech codes are wielded by inquisitors sniffing for punishable utterances. But Rauch shows the difficulty of writing a rule to proscribe, say, the word “nigger”: “Persons shall not use the word ’nigger’ in direct conversation with black persons, unless the word is being used demonstratively or illustratively or both parties to the conversation are black or dark-skinned or the intentions are friendly as evinced by signs and gestures attesting to the conversation’s mutual congeniality such as smiles, handshakes or affectionate language … Nothing in these rules shall be interpreted as proscribing Huckleberry Finn except when it is read aloud to a black person or persons in a taunting or confrontational manner, as evinced by undue emphasis on words such as ’nigger,’ ‘slave,’ ‘owner,’ or when it is read in other circumstances which a reasonable person might regard as prejudicial and offensive . .
That is amusing. The following is not.
At the University of Michigan a student was punished for saying in a classroom discussion that homosexuality is a disease treatable with therapy. Expression of that idea supposedly violated the prohibition of speech that “victimizes” people on the basis of “sexual orientation.” At Southern Methodist University a student was sentenced to 30 hours of community service with minority organizations. His crimes included singing “We Shall Overcome” in a sarcastic manner. University of Connecticut rules made punishable “inappropriately directed laughter” and “conspicuous exclusion [of another person] from conversation.” At the University of Wisconsin, a speech code forbade utterances that “demean” anyone’s “race, sex, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry or age,” or which created “an intimidating, hostile or demeaning environment for education.” So a student was suspended for telling an AsianAmerican that “It’s people like you-that’s the reason this country is screwed up.”
Wisconsin’s code was declared unconstitutional, as was Michigan’s, the guidelines for which gave this example of a punishable offense: “A male student makes remarks in a class like ‘Women just aren’t as good in this field as men,’ thus creating a hostile learning atmosphere for female classmates.” The guidelines also said, in Orwellian language, that in order to have “open and vigorous” classroom discussion, students must be protected from “feeling harassed or intimidated.” So people could silence others by announcing that they were “feeling” a hostile environment.
But not all sensibilities are equally protected. UCLA suspended a student editor for a cartoon making fun of affirmative action. Then Cal State Northridge disciplined an editor for criticizing UCLA. No one would have been punished for calling critics of affirmative action Neanderthals. When Hackney was criticized for his invertebrate response to the destruction of 14,000 newspapers, a former university president offered this limp defense of him: “Penn is not a public university and is thus not technically bound by the Bill of Rights.”
Contemporary liberalism’s core value is “compassion.” On campuses that means the prevention of the pain caused to “historically oppressed classes” by words they dislike. Many academics, because of their shrill and loopy politics (which permeates and trivializes their scholarship), are irrelevant to the nation’s political conversation. So they concentrate on turning their campuses into little lagoons of enforced orthodoxy and policed “sensitivity.” They are making much mischief, and many conservatives.
