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Sticks and
Stones
By Kate Burch
Living or working on today’s college campus must be, for one who is not
a member of a protected group, something like navigating a mine
field. One may, while totally lacking malevolent intent, commit a
“microaggression” or otherwise be guilty of insulting or disparaging,
or even “harassing” another by simply offering a compliment or
remarking about an interesting characteristic of someone—if the other
person perceives it, or claims to perceive it, as disparaging or
somehow threatening. A professor in Louisiana was fired recently
for alleged sexual harassment because she used off-color humor.
At the University of Kentucky one may be, I read, subject to
investigation if accused of making critical remarks about a smoker.
I am willing to bet that white, middle-class students, particularly
males, are seldom if ever going to be the beneficiaries of official
policies that punish someone who may have hurt their feelings.
They, after all, are “privileged” and deserve to be taken down a peg or
two.
Such stifling of free speech and expression may at last—we may dare to
hope--have peaked. According to “FIRE” (the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education), the proportion of public colleges with
speech codes that ban constitutionally protected speech has dropped
significantly. Unfortunately, the schools with these “red light”
speech codes still constitute almost 40% of public colleges. The
situation at private colleges is somewhat worse, since they are
permitted under the law to restrict speech, not being bound by the
First Amendment! A number of schools have even established
reporting systems that encourage students to report on other students
and faculty members who show “bias” in their speech or expression.
We are permitted to criticize and disparage people in public life, and
those who go into politics or become celebrities must accept that being
targets of such criticism is just part of the life. When people
in public life, however, disparage ordinary people, as did Hillary
Clinton in her famous characterization of Trump supporters as
“deplorables,” it is clearly unacceptable, and that remark
certainly wounded her and her chances of prevailing at the polls.
Restriction of free speech is harmful when it is used, not as a
reasonable guarantor of public safety, but in support of the political
cause du jour, to protect a favored group, or to further an ideological
agenda. When it gets really dicey is when one may not speak the
truth about an actual threat or real harm to the public safety, because
of “political correctness.” The recent example of the radicalized
Somali immigrant student at Ohio State who attempted to kill other
students by running them down with his car and slashing and stabbing
them with a knife, is illustrative. A student journalist who had
interviewed this radical Islamist and written about his “soft-spoken”
and “friendly” manner despite his feeling at risk of attack for
practicing his religion, wrote after the mayhem of November 28 that the
student, Abdul Artan, must have “snapped” due to the Islamophobic
attitudes of the Ohio State student body. Josh
Earnest, the president’s press secretary, expressed similar
ideas. Another example is the official designation of the
Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence” when it was clearly a
terrorist attack by a radicalized Islamic extremist who wanted to kill
infidels. Abundantly documented, but still denied by
officials.
Censorship has been a useful tool of tyrants since people began
organizing governments. The First Amendment was a tremendously
liberating law, one of the most effective ways of getting people out
from under the yoke of oppressive government. Why, now, are
people insisting on imposing censorship?
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