By Mike Adams
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Despite their feigned interest in tolerance, college
campuses are among the most punitive and stifling environments in the country.
Students are routinely punished for "offenses" ranging from penning
mild satire to holding the wrong opinions on important social and political
issues. One book, Unlearning Liberty, by Greg Lukianoff, documents these abuses
better than any other that has been written since I joined the campus culture
wars over a decade ago. Greg is able to document these things well and for a
simple reason: he has been the president of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education (FIRE) for the last seven years.
The stories Greg tells in his new book are so disturbing
it will be difficult for some to believe that they are all real and all come
from American universities. Unlearning Liberty at times sounds like an account
from some far away land that never valued the kinds of freedoms our constitution
guarantees. For example,
* A student is punished for racial insensitivity for
publicly reading a book that condemns the KKK.
* Students are required to lobby before legislatures for
political bills they disagree with in order to graduate from a public university.
* A student Senate passes a Sedition Act to punish other
students for criticizing them at, of all places, a public university governed
by the First Amendment and funded by their tuition dollars.
However strange these stories seem, they deserve our
undivided attention. The reason is simple: when these students graduate, their
anti-liberty mindset is unleashed on the larger society.
Indeed, after a generation of unlearning liberty, these
things will begin to seem normal if not addressed soon. FIRE co-founder Alan
Charles Kors said it best when he stated that "A nation that does not
educate in liberty will not long preserve it and will not even know when it is
lost."
For over a decade, I have been trying to explain that the
campus free speech war transcends politics and religion. It is a threat to
everyone. That is why I am glad that a book echoing my arguments - but in far
greater depth and with much greater eloquence - was written by someone who disagrees
with me on a broad range of issues. Greg Lukianoff is an atheist, a Democrat, a
supporter of same-sex marriage, and a supporter of abortion rights. We have
worked together for years as allies in the free speech wars because we both
recognize that liberty is a sacred process, not a pre-ordained result.
We also understand that true commitment to liberty is
measured by the conduct of our institutions of higher learning, and not by
their statements about their conduct. For example, Harvard University claims
that "Curtailment of free speech undercuts the intellectual freedom that
defines (Harvard's) purpose." In reality, it fires even presidents who
refuse to bow down to the gods of political correctness and gender sensitivity.
Harvard and other private universities claim to be free
from the technical requirement that they conform to the dictates of the First
Amendment. That much is true. But they are not free from the moral requirement
that they must always be honest about the true state of the marketplace of
ideas in their classrooms and across their campuses.
Truth be known, Harvard has a long record of suppressing
free speech among students, faculty, and, more recently, non conforming
administrators. Given that reality, they should refrain from telling
prospective students that, "The free exchange of ideas is vital for our
primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas."
To the extent that administrators make these patently
false claims, they fraudulently induce students into taking on debt, often in
the realm of six digits. All this, in order to join a marketplace of ideas that
barely exists in an age of administratively mandated and supervised political
correctness.
The best and most accurate measure of the depth of our
constitutional crisis in higher education can be seen in the campus speech
codes of our public university campuses. These codes are a measure of not just
the censoriousness of our public administrators but also their audacity. The
fact that they knowingly enforce them - even with no prospect of winning in
court shows us two things:
1. They know that even when they lose in individual
cases, the presence of the often multiply-layered speech codes will help
maintain orthodoxy by chilling speech that is not politically correct.
2. Due to qualified immunity, they will never have to pay
personal damages and the general public - the same people they seek to censor -
will have to foot the bill for the litigation.
The problem is not just at Harvard and Yale. It is at
other universities - even ones located in conservative areas of the nation. For
example, Texas A&M has a speech code that prohibits violating the
"right" to "respect for personal feelings" and protects
"freedom from indignity of any type."
Of course, many of the smaller liberal arts colleges are
even worse. Davidson College bans "inquiries about dating." So you
can't ask someone on a date at Davidson without violating the speech code. Even
if you could, you would not be able to ask your date to go see Guys and Dolls.
Use of the word "doll" is considered sexual harassment.
The University of Iowa does the best job of combining the
speech code and the sexual harassment policy into a powerful weapon people can
use to destroy just about anyone they don't like: sexual harassment is when
"somebody says or does something sexually related that you don't want them
to say or do, regardless of who it is." Did you get that folks? If you are
a student at Iowa and the girl you like has sex with someone else and you get
jealous then guess what? You've been sexually harassed!
Because the speech code issue is so important and because
this book is so important, I will review it in several installments. In the
meantime, go to this link and order a copy now. Learn about the American values
students are unlearning on campuses all across America today.
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