racial minorities, and women. But the justification for campus speech codes and the reality of campus censorship are entirely different things.
Defenders of speech codes will invoke nightmare scenarios of students being chased off campus by mobs of bigots shouting racial epithets. These hypothetical examples usually involve speech that is not constitutionally protected, such as true threats, stalking, or vandalism. In reality, the way speech codes are implemented often bears no resemblance to such horror stories; many cases involve nothing more serious than mockery of the university or the administration. Conjuring up scary scenarios to justify speech codes allows administrators to manipulate the emotions of goodhearted students, professors, and other administrators to support speech limitations that often have nothing to do with “hate speech.”
While I was speaking at a conference of administrators several years ago, one of them angrily asked me, “So there is nothing that can be done to prevent a student from calling another the n-word?” This administrator actually saw anything short of punishment as doing nothing. My response was that political correctness as a cultural phenomenon has been incredibly successful; even back when I graduated from Stanford in 2000, anyone who used a racial epithet would have been rightly vilified as a bigot (and, notably, I can’t think of a single incident where anyone did). And that is how change should come about in a free society—through cultural shifts, not coercion or enforced silence.
As for the idea of “underrepresented groups” that need special protection from offense, it is based on an outdated concept of a dominant campus majority. It has been a long time since white Protestant males have dominated college campuses. Women now constitute the majority at most colleges. Since 2000, women have represented around 57 percent of college enrollments, and in some colleges they make up as much as two-thirds of students.22 In my own city, Hunter College and Lehman College, both CUNY schools, hover at around 70 percent women.23 Much of the rhetoric around free speech issues seems oblivious to this seismic campus shift.
Nevertheless, PC ideology with its focus on “underrepresented groups” still endures, in part because it invokes values like politeness, fairness, tolerance, and respect. Simply put, political correctness seems “nice.” In practice, though, it often promotes intolerance, often for those who are culturally right of center, or for anything that mocks or satirizes a university itself. Most troublingly, it provides a convenient excuse for those in authority to marginalize criticism and nonconformity.
One predictable result of working so hard to prevent offense is that students quickly learn that claiming to be offended is the ultimate trump card in any argument. After all, if you knew you could immediately win an argument by calling the other person’s position offensive, wouldn’t you be tempted to use that tactic? Jonathan Rauch refers to this as an “offendedness sweepstakes.” Being offended is an emotional state, not a substantive argument; we cannot afford to give it the power to stifle debate.
LIABILITY: This is the least known and least understood factor in the expansion of campus speech policies into the lives of students. Universities are afraid of being sued even for frivolous claims of harassment and discrimination by students or employees. Currently, the logic seems to be that a free speech lawsuit is comparatively rare and will not cost much in court, while lawsuits for harassment and discrimination are far more common and costly. Therefore, university attorneys conclude that it is best to have broad speech-restrictive policies that you can point to during litigation to show you were proactive against “offensive speech,” and that protecting speech must be secondary.
Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus examined universities’ fear of liability and the link between legal fees and out-of-control tuition in their book Higher Education? (2010). They concluded that “[a] big slice of the tuition pie ends up with lawyers and their clients. After hospitals, colleges may be our society’s most sued institutions.”24 While some legal threats to universities are valid (say, a lawsuit for the denial of free speech), many others contribute to an overly cautious, overly regulated atmosphere that’s hostile to free speech.
BUREAUCRACY: The dramatic expansion of the administrative class on campus may be the most important factor in the growth of campus intrusions into free speech and thought. While FIRE has long been concerned about the harmful results of swelling campus bureaucracy, Professor Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University made the case in detail in his stinging 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.25 Ginsberg exposed the dizzying growth of the administrative class at universities, the usurpation of powers that once belonged strictly to the faculty, the surprising lack of qualifications of many administrators, the unseemly rise in the salaries of administrators (especially university presidents), and how a burgeoning bureaucracy jacks up costs while diluting educational quality. This ever-expanding bureaucracy creates and enforces an environment of censorship on campus.
The Price of Bureaucracy and Hyperregulation
From the 1981–1982 school year to the 2011–2012 school year, the cost of tuition and fees at private, nonprofit four-year colleges almost tripled, even adjusting for inflation, according to the College Board, a nonprofit collegiate testing organization. During the same period, the cost of attending a four-year public college almost quadrupled.26 Meanwhile, between 1980 and 2010, the “average family income declined by 7% ($1,160 in constant 2010 dollars) for the poorest 20% of families,” while it rose by only “14% ($7,249) for the middle 20% of families.” The increase in college costs even outstripped the 78 percent ($136,923) growth for the wealthiest 5 percent.27 In other words, the cost of higher education at both public and private colleges has skyrocketed relative to all income levels.
Bringing this gap into stark relief, for the 2011–2012 school year, tuition at the one hundred most expensive schools in the country ranged from $59,170 (#1, Sarah Lawrence) to $51,182 (#100, University of Miami) per year.28 These top hundred colleges include New York University, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, Boston College, Duke, the University of Chicago, Tufts, MIT, Brown University, Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Yale, and my alma maters American and Stanford.29 Meanwhile, median family income in the U.S. hovers around $50,000 a year.30
As the cost of college has distanced itself from what all but the richest Americans actually make, students and parents have relied more and more on debt. In 2010, student loans overtook credit cards as the largest category of American personal debt. It will soon total over a trillion dollars, and it has increased by 25 percent just since the start of the Great Recession.31 Average student loan debt is around $25,000, and it is not uncommon for college graduates to owe more than $100,000.32 Unsurprisingly, default rates are rising.33
The result is what Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, has called the “higher education bubble.” Thiel sees the rising costs in higher education as similar to the tech and housing bubbles of the last two decades: in each case, an asset suddenly skyrockets in value, far outstripping any normal expansion of price. Today, education is “basically extremely overpriced,” writes Thiel:
People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math…. It is, to my mind, in some ways worse than the housing bubble. There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans.34
Critics, especially those who work for or run colleges, have scoffed at Thiel’s notion of a higher ed bubble. But Standard & Poor’s issued a report in February 2012 agreeing that “[s]tudent-loan debt has ballooned and may turn into a bubble” and that defaults and downgrades of student-loan-backed securities are on the rise.35
The rise in cost is related to the decline in rights on campuses in important ways. Most importantly, the increase in tuition and overall cost is disproportionately funding an increase in both the cost and the size of campus bureaucracy, and this expanding bureaucracy has primary responsibility for writing and enforcing speech codes, creating speech zones, and policing students’ lives in ways that students from the 1960s would never have