Most campuses still cling to speech codes and other restrictions on expression that violate First Amendment principles, seemingly without understanding that these policies not only chill speech but also teach students that an open exchange of ideas might not really be such a good thing. Administrators have been able to convince well-meaning students to accept outright censorship by creating the impression that freedom of speech is somehow the enemy of social progress. When students began leaving college with that lesson under their belts, it was only a matter of time before the cultivation of bad intellectual habits on campus started harming the dialogue of our entire country. The tactics and attitudes that shut down speech on campus are bleeding into the larger society and wreaking havoc on the way we talk among ourselves. As I will expand on throughout this book, the punishment of dissenting opinions or even raucous parodies and satire has surprising downstream effects, encouraging the human tendency to live within our own echo chambers. It turns out the one institution that could be helping elevate the national discussion may actually be making it worse. To put it bluntly, I believe that three decades of campus censorship has made us all just a little bit dumber.
This book grew out of my experience reviewing thousands of instances of campus censorship and defending faculty and students at hundreds of colleges across the country over the last eleven years. The overwhelming majority of accounts here are based on primary documents ranging from police reports, to letters from campus administrators and judicial boards, to university policies, contracts, and student handbooks that FIRE has collected and posted online.
Over the past two decades, the topic of censorship on campus has often been treated as a “conservative issue,” because the fact is that socially conservative opinions are the ones most likely to be stifled at colleges and universities today. While many attempts at censorship are apolitical, you are far more likely to get in trouble on campus for opposing, for example, affirmative action, gay marriage, and abortion rights than you are for supporting them. Political correctness has become part of the nervous system of the modern university and it accounts for a large number of the rights violations I have seen over the years. For decades, our universities have been teaching students that speech with a chance of offending someone should be immediately silenced; but the slope for offensiveness has proven remarkably slippery, and the concept of hurtful speech is often invoked by campus administrators in the most self-serving ways. The press has gotten so used to such cases that they are often shrugged off as the same old “political correctness” on campus. But the problem is much more serious than that dismissive definition. When students risk punishment for speaking their minds, something has gone very wrong in the college environment.
One thing that makes this book a little different than one might expect is that I am not your stereotypical social-conservative critic of “political correctness run amok.” I am a lifelong Democrat and have something of a liberal pedigree. I have never voted for a Republican, nor do I plan to. I am one of only a few dozen people honored by the Playboy Foundation for a commitment to free speech; others include Bill Maher, Molly Ivins, and Michael Moore. In March 2010, I received the Ford Hall Forum Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE, which has also been bestowed on Ted Turner, Maya Angelou, and Anita Hill. I have worked at the ACLU and for EnvironMentors, which is an environmental justice mentoring program for inner-city high school kids in Washington, D.C. I have worked on behalf of refugees in Eastern Europe and volunteered for a program educating incarcerated teens in California about the law. I believe passionately in gay marriage, abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, and universal health care. Playing even more into the liberal stereotype, I am a board member of an edgy Philadelphia theater company, I belong to the notoriously politically correct Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, and I have been a regular blogger for the Huffington Post since 2007.11
Why is it odd that a liberal should fight for free speech rights? Isn’t freedom of speech a quintessentially liberal issue? Some members of the baby boomer generation may be horrified to learn that campus administrators and the media alike often dismiss those of us who defend free speech for all on campus as members of the conservative fringe. While I was once hissed at during a libertarian student conference for being a Democrat, it is far more common that I am vilified as an evil conservative for defending free speech on campus. I remember telling a New York University film student that I worked for free speech on campus and being shocked by his response: “Oh, so you’re like the people who want the KKK on campus.” In his mind, protecting free speech was apparently synonymous with advocating hatred. He somehow missed the glaring fact that the content of his student film could have been banned from public display if not for the progress of the free speech movement.
The transformation of free speech on campus to a conservative niche issue is a method of dismissing its importance. Sadly, we live in a society where simply labeling something an evil conservative idea (or, for that matter, an evil liberal one) is accepted by far too many people as a legitimate reason to dismiss it. This is just one of the many cheap tactics for shutting down debate that have been perfected on our campuses and are now a common part of everyday life.
How Campus Censorship Harms Us All
What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. After all, colleges and universities are grooming schools for future leaders and training grounds for the great national debate; and higher education, more than ever, shapes our general culture. Never before in our history have so many Americans held or pursued a college degree.12 Our national discussion is dominated by people with a college education. So, if we assume that colleges and universities are supposed to make us deeper, more creative and nuanced thinkers, we should be enjoying a golden age of American discourse. But I doubt that anyone believes this is the case. Indeed, critics as various as the New York Times columnists David Brooks and Paul Krugman, the comedian Jon Stewart, the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, the media icon Tom Brokaw, and even former and current presidents of the United States have lamented the sorry state of American dialogue.13
A corollary of this failure of dialogue is that our country’s polarization across political lines has gone from controversial conjecture to a fact documented by research. Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort (2008) laid out extensive data to demonstrate America’s growing political polarization and showed that the problem extended beyond our relatively new ability to live in cyber environments where likeminded people confirm our pre-existing opinions (something dubbed by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte as “the daily me”).14 Since the 1970s, there has even been a trend of physical separation, as people move to communities that are more and more ideologically homogeneous. Charles Murray cited a dizzying number of statistics in his 2012 book Coming Apart to show that affluent and highly educated people in particular are sequestering themselves into likeminded communities and social circles, and thus becoming both physically and culturally isolated from their fellow citizens.15
Like most Americans, I have seen the results of this hyperpolarization and groupthink in my own life. Take, for example, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others by a psychopath on January 8, 2011. I was on Twitter as the events unfolded, and I was stunned at how many friends—people I follow for their opinions on art, science, and politics—started ranting, before any meaningful information was known about the case, that the shooting was the result of right-wing rhetoric. One Tweeter whom I had never before seen resort to all-caps asserted, “There is NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that Palin/Tea Party created this political climate.” Some of us on Twitter tried to remind everyone to take a minute to just be sad and recognize the human tragedy rather than twist it into a weapon to bash the “ignorant masses.” But our comments had little impact. Conservatives soon joined the fray, using bits and pieces of information that they had uncovered about the shooter, Jared Loughner, to argue that he was a “left-wing nut job.” It was as if the primary significance of the shooting for countless people was the justification of their hatred for everyone who disagreed with them.
As the days passed after the Tucson massacre, the evidence began to show that Jared Loughner was mentally ill and had political beliefs that didn’t neatly fit anyone’s preconceptions. Some of those who had been so quick to blame the shooting on Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin started