Perspectives on Campus Free Speech

The most recent edition of Perspectives on Politics has an excellent roundtable on Donald Downs's book, RESTORING FREE SPEECH AND LIBERTY ON CAMPUS. Downs, who originally had thought certain forms of hate speech ought to be banned (see his important work, NAZIS IN SKOKIE), later become a leading opponent of campus restrictions on hate speech. RESTORING FREE SPEECH explains the reasons for his conversion and documents the debates over restrictions at Wisconsin and other universities. While general agreement exists among the participants in the roundtable that campus restrictions, particularly as applied by administrators, were either ineffective or inappropriate, serious debate takes place on other matters. Nancy Hirschmann has a nice short piece suggesting that Professor Downs may have underestimated the extent to which minority speech is still effectively silenced on most campuses, Jeremy Rabkin provides reasons for thinking the system of free expression on campus is both healthier and sicker than commonly thought, and Geoffrey Stone raises some legal issues. Given that all three take significant issue with Downs, the one weakness in presentation is that he does not get a chance to reply.

Several thoughts inspired by the pieces. The first is that at least I seem to be witnessing a general silencing in my classes. When I started as a teaching assistant 25 years ago, I had to work hard containing the affirmative action discussion and work harder to get anyone to talk about the dormant commerce clause. Now I find more and more students willing to talk about the dormant commerce clause, which is safe (no one was ever accused of being insensitive or militant for comments on the state market exception), but students of all persuasions, liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, or whatever, are very quiet on hot button issues. I do not think this is simply a consequence of political correctness on the left or silencing on the right (though no doubt both in different degrees are present). Rather, I have a sense that the students have stopped trying to persuade each other on these matters. Too bad.

The other thoughts concern the notorious "water buffalo" incident at Penn. As presented in the media, the kid was suspended for yelling a generic Hebrew insult (of the sort "may all your teeth but one fall out and may you have a toothache") at an African-American sorority that was having a loud party late at night. The Hirschmann piece, however, provides much evidence suggesting that, in context, the insult was clearly racial and that the student probably understood this. Given the context, I think a very strong apology at the least was clearly owed. On the other hand, while agreeing that campuses should not tolerate racist insults, I've often thought that the incident also demonstrates how college campuses routinely tolerate uncivil behavior. College students who are fond of sleeping at reasonable hours and, often, are required to live in the dorms typically get no support when they complain about loud music blaring every weekend night and sometimes every night. In this sense, I suspect, mutal apologies were owed in the "water buffalo" case. I do think we need to find better ways of talking about our differences and different opinions on campus, but those differences are not simply racial and civility means more than refraining from certain kinds of insults.