Unlearning Liberty

Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, by Greg Lukianoff, draws on the files of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to document the infringement of free speech at American colleges. It's an exhaustive catalog -- at least I hope it is exhaustive; I'd hate to think that misguided administrators somewhere could come up with any forms of censorship beyond those enumerated. It's also a very readable account, with chapters on freshman orientation, student groups, the campus judiciary, and so on, each illustrated by examples. A large number of the case studies are such blatant abuses that they would be silly if they were not so sad: Rules outlawing "offensive" or "hurtful" speech, or even worse, speech that is perceived as offensive or hurtful. The only way a speaker could be sure not to violate such a standard would b not to speak at all! Really, some of the prohibitions are so remarkably stupid that there were times as I started to read the book that I wondered whether the subject was worth an entire book. For example, Lukianoff points out that a prohibition of speech that would offend any religion, or be considered blasphemous, would send any latter day Martin Luther off campus to post his 95 theses. Don't the people who draft and promulgate such rules see how inconsistent that is with the basic idea of a university, where ideas can be freely stated and discussed? But Lukianoff does not stop with the laugh lines. He takes us through the real problems with these tendencies, and they are not ultimately about political correctness or the suppression of conservative ideas, for example, though that is what one most often hears from critics of campus speech codes and the like. The book's analysis has two special merits. First, Lukianoff manages to avoid making the right wing the source of all the complaints. A number of cases are politically neutral, and many are simply confused, where both left and right have tied themselves in protective knots in which they find themselves trapped. And second, Lukianoff takes the time to go back to first principles. The reason free speech is important is because debate is important, and the reason debate is important is that it is the key tool of deliberative democracies. If we don't train our students to argue with each other, without crying foul every time one side hurts the other's feelings, we will wind up with … a dysfunctional Congress, maybe? So the book's mission is fundamentally civic, and I applaud it for that reason. Let's hope that university administrators will remember that our form of government relies on an educated citizenry. If everyone simply votes their immediate self-interests, we won't survive as an enlightened, prosperous nation. All the great figures in American politics, from Jefferson on down, seem to have understood this in ways it is very hard to find today, when education is seen mostly as a tool for economic advancement. (See my Harvard Magazine piece with Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Renewing Civic Education.) The root cause Lukianoff identifies a root cause of campus censorship, a particular way in which good intentions have gone completely out of control. It is the growth of the student-service bureaucracy, the large number of non-academic staff whose job it is to make students feel good about attending their institution. Multiculturalism, feminism, and so on often get the blame, but, like them or not, these cultural forces were not the problem in themselves. What happened was that as colleges diversified their student bodies, the faculty did not bear the burden of deciding what concomitant changes needed to happen. The administrative fix was to staff up with experts: People who allegedly knew what black students needed, what women needed, what gay students needed, and so on. These folks, many of them fine people, are not for the most part academic professionals, and do not instinctively think of academic freedom or the civic function of debate as core to their jobs. It is perfectly natural for student service deans to conclude that a key to making students feel comfortable on campus is to discourage their fellow students from saying things that will make them uncomfortable. We are going through the same cycle now with social class and income level as the parameter. A second force supporting the creation of a student-service bureaucracy whose values are not primarily academic or civic is the shift of colleges toward competitive entities vying for students as consumers. The costs of this trend in rock climbing walls and lavish student centers has been well documented, but it also means the creation of offices and deans and subdeans for "student life." That never used to be a concept at Harvard---student life used to mean the Houses ("a social device for a moral purpose," as Lowell called them) and student organizations (about which the College itself used to be,