Fighting for Free Speech

In a new book, Donald Downs, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, outlines an approach to ridding campuses of political correctness. In Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus, he shifts the focus away from the professors and to the administrators. Downs led the push to rid the University of Wisconsin of its faculty speech code, a struggle he documents in the book.

College and university administrations have always been somewhat suspect—as evidenced by the ubiquity of the fun-inhibiting ‘Dean’ in lowbrow cinema—but today they are larger than ever and continue to grow. Schools now boast handfuls of deans, who often serve a particular segment of the student body. It is not uncommon for an institution to have a different dean for Hispanic students, gay students and others.

Administrations should be the targets of mobilization by students and professors, argues Downs. They, after all, instituted the policies that exacerbated or caused many of the problems in higher education today. It is also the administrators who remain silent when students engage in censorship, such as by stealing newspaper press runs.

Colleges and universities have not always been centers of political strife. For much of the twentieth century, campuses were apolitical, and discipline focused on behavior. Colleges had a policy of in loco parentis, in which the college acted in place of the parents. As campuses grew more politicized the policy waned, as the politicization accompanied students’ calls for increased independence.

Today in loco parentis applies not to behavior, but to thought and speech. The codes of behavior that died as a result of students seeking more freedom have been replaced by codes that are more restrictive. “Whereas old student conduct codes attempted to reinforce manners, the new codes attempt to influence students’ attitudes and thoughts through various kinds of pressure,” Downs writes. Moreover, practice has proven the new codes subjective. Under these codes, a student can be punished for anything deemed offensive, as in the famous “Water Buffalo” case at the University of Pennsylvania. In this case, a student referred to some unruly students, who were black, as “water buffalos.” The school interpreted the remark as a racial slur, though there was no evidence or history of “water buffalo” as a racist slur.

The widespread university crackdown on speech is often attributed to the Sixties, the decade that spawned the free speech movement and showcased political radicalism. The turmoil of the Sixties, however, had its roots in policies that preceded it by decades. The protests and uprising on campuses during the decade were a backlash, strengthened by national and international turmoil, against restrictive policies on speech.

In the 1930s Berkeley was an apolitical campus by decree—the president, Robert Sproul, banned the use of campus facilities to hold partisan activities. As Downs points out,

Sproul’s policy was not dismissive of free speech and inquiry as principles. On the contrary, it was intended, however naively, to protect these goods in the university context from outside forces. Political activists pursue causes, not truth…

Politics were, accordingly, “in some fundamental sense at odds” with the idea of a university.

In the 1960s students discovered the contradiction: they could engage in activism for causes such as civil rights in the town of Berkeley, but not on campus. Initial statements of the free speech movement defy how it has come to be characterized: “civil liberties and political freedoms which are constitutionally protected off campus must be equally protected on campus for all persons.” The libertarian impulses of the free speech movement quickly gave way to communitarian ideas and identity politics.

Today those ideas and politics help drive policies promoting for diversity. “Today we could be witnessing a new chapter in the politics of higher education, as the tenets of academic freedom compete with the perceived requirements of diversity,” Downs writes. And, these “perceived requirements” are inimical to free speech, punishing what is deemed offensive or uncivil.

Colleges and universities have changed and nostalgia for the apolitical campuses of old, while perhaps a noble thought, will not prove effectual, Downs argues. Today, the battle on campuses is over the coercion to subscribe to the ideology du jour. The most effective fight to wage on campus, is the fight against this coercion. Universities should embrace a “liberal individualism,” a worldview that “can protect and promote rights that are essential to the university’s most important mission, which is the Socratic pursuit of truth and truthfulness.”

Downs proposals may not sit well with all critics of higher education, but he did defeat a speech code at his university. The lesson is indisputable: When students and professors band together in spite of the social—and often professional—costs, the fight can be won.

Larry Scholer is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.