Campus speech codes have been discredited in recent years, and talk about political correctness has waned, but self-righteous intolerance of dissent remains distressingly common among supposedly progressive students on liberal campuses. It surfaced most recently in efforts to prevent student newspapers from disseminating a now notorious political ad by right wing provocateur David Horowitz denouncing reparations for slavery. At Brown University, what The Boston Globe described as a "mob of students," seized the entire press run of The Brown Daily Herald and demanded formal apologies and financial compensation from Herald staffers for accepting Horowitz's ad.
The young journalists, denounced as "student opportunists and careerists," held their ground, quite literally (they barricaded the door of the pressroom). At the University of Wisconsin, journalists at the Badger-Herald resisted a censorious mob with equal resolve. But student journalists on other campuses have shown little commitment to free speech. At University of California at Berkeley, once home to the free speech movement, editors of The Daily Californian apologized for accepting the Horowitz ad, after unruly protests by offended students (who "threw a paper-tearing tantrum in the newsroom," according to the Globe.) A reported 18 college newspapers, including the oddly exalted Harvard Crimson, refused even to publish the anti-reparations ad, and at least four papers that did run the ad subsequently apologized for doing so.
It's important to note that the Horowitz ad, while ideologically offensive to many, is a model of civil political discourse. It does not involve the use of threats or racial epithets, and whatever political value resides in Horowitz's speech is not diminished by the fact that it appears as an ad and not an editorial. It was an advertisement that helped shape modern libel protections for the press. New York Times. v Sullivan, in which the Supreme Court held that public officials could not prevail in libel actions against the press unless false statements about them reflected "actual malice," involved a 1960 New York Times ad that reported the abuse of civil rights protesters in Alabama. In trying to suppress Horowitz's newspaper ad, student protesters who consider themselves defenders of racial equality are following the lead of civil rights opponents in mid-century Alabama.
You won't encounter many white supremacists on liberal campuses today, but you will find a distressing number of young authoritarians. Seizures of unpopular newspapers or flyers are hardly unprecedented on campus, where the right to speak freely is liable to be subordinated to the sensibilities of "oppressed" groups. Who's oppressed? Just about everyone except white heterosexual males who don't claim to be disabled. Never mind that you're at Harvard; if you're non-Caucasian or female, then, like a woman in Afghanistan, you can claim to be oppressed.
The battle against "oppression" has obliterated due process as well as speech rights on many campuses. At Columbia University, controversial new disciplinary policies deny students accused of sexual misconduct their most basic rights, including the right to be present during the testimony of the accuser and the right to cross-examine witnesses or be represented by an attorney. Rights like these that help protect innocent people from false accusations are dismissed by student supporters of Columbia's sexual misconduct code as "red tape." Police state tactics like this are practically routine on American campuses, especially in cases involving charges of sexual misconduct. All that's unusual about the Columbia case is the amount of publicity it has received. (For a chilling account of repression on college campuses, read The Shadow University, by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors. One proposed title for this book was Mein Kampus.)
What is the future of civil liberties when "progressive" students at elite colleges and universities display an ignorance of basic American values that you might expect from junior high school kids who've never had a civics course? "There's a fine line between free speech and being disrespectful and distasteful," one Brown student protesting the Horowitz ad confidently asserts. Why does he imagine we need a First Amendment if not to protect speech that many people find distasteful, disrespectful, or downright heretical? First Amendment law does sometimes distinguish between protected and unprotected speech: There's a fine line between advocacy of violence and incitement to violence (the latter is not constitutionally protected). But there's no constitutional line between tasteful and distasteful speech. It's a Bill of Rights, not a Code of Etiquette.
Liberty has not been entirely abandoned on campus, as student journalists who've defended their speech rights have shown. At Brown, the student ACLU chapter also rallied against the campus book burners, and the administration issued a statement condemning the seizure of The Brown Daily Herald by protesters and calling for argument, not the silencing of offensive views. But these days the defenders of civil liberty on campus are more likely to be found on the right than the left, because with left-leaning administrators in power at many campuses, defining what's politically correct, right wing views are more likely to be suppressed. Right and left, people discover the First Amendment when the speech they like is threatened.
I suppose we could blame human nature for intolerance of dissent. Or we could blame particular human beings, like those left wing academics who've taught students perversely that neutral legal rules, like protections of free speech, are mere instruments of power. (Civil liberties matter most to people out of power.) We could blame the therapeutic culture for exaggerating our psychic vulnerabilities and the dangers of "distasteful" speech. We could point to the example set by politicians from both parties who rush to censor "harmful" speech, especially when they believe it threatens minors. All things considered, we shouldn't be surprised when putatively liberal college students show no regard for rights of speech. But surely we cannot be resigned to it.
