It appears that American colleges’ speech-censoring chickens have come home to roost, in the form of three dickish white bros. The students filed a racial discrimination complaint after their black, female professor dared try to teach them about structural racism.
While no one should support the guys’ desire to remain ignorant about race, some are blaming increased competition in higher education for the debacle. This misses the larger, more important problem at play. In their quest to restrict speech, schools have prioritized comfort over truth. And in so doing they have created the perfect opportunity for traditionally privileged students to start using these policies to suppress ideas which make them uncomfortable.
Today’s American college campuses restrict speech in a variety of ways, from “free-speech zones” to dictate when and where students may pass out pocket Constitutions, to preventing students from taping flyers criticizing politicians to their dorm doors. Anti-harassment policies like the one which appears to have been invoked by the students here are intended to ensure students and faculty, especially those who have traditionally borne the brunt of identity-based harassment, can teach and learn in an non-hostile environment.
But what speech restrictions reliably do is protect people from unpopular speech. As the ACLU so eloquently explained, “Those with unpopular political ideas have always borne the brunt of government repression.”
Speech policies on college campuses generally work out okay because outright racism against minorities has been mostly unpopular. But making sure they work in the future requires that outright racism against minorities remains unpopular. This is not a safe bet. White people actually believe they are victims of racism more often than blacks. What we are seeing on this particular campus may be a harbinger of a backlash against the “politically correct” attitudes on college campuses which have traditionally not tolerated racism and sexism well.
For instance, A Voice for Men describes college campuses thusly:
College campuses are among the least tolerant places in America. Smug, elitist faculty gravitate to the easily mouthed clichés of feminism and other forms of political correctness to give them a false veneer of enlightenment and sophistication, and to separate them from the “guns and religions” crowd they find so abhorrent. This veneer arms them with McCarthyistic bats to attack anyone who doesn’t share their world view.
In this environment, continuing to allow anyone to use speech codes to stifle unpopular speech will empower people with racist, sexist views to stifle any dissenters.
The harmful effects of the majority’s tendency to use speech restrictions to silence the minority is one reason America fiercely protects free speech.
Ultimately, we need fewer racists and sexists. But speech restrictions actually protect racism and sexism by forcing it underground on college campuses, leaving it unexamined and unchallenged. Under anti-harassment policies, teachers can’t teach about race if it makes students uncomfortable, and students can’t question their teacher if it makes her uncomfortable. In this situation, everyone is comfortable, but no one is learning.
Racism in America has not been beaten back by restricting racist speech. What history shows is that the way to fight repugnant speech is with more speech. Education is key. One would think that institutions of higher learning
would understand this best.
A college’s job is to foster learning, not make their students, faculty, and administrators comfortable by deciding which ideas deserve a hearing. Speech restrictions do everyone a disservice. They keep the dudebros ignorant about race, and the professor ignorant about their racism. By allowing the free flow of ideas, schools facilitate learning by challenging the majority’s assumptions.
This post originally appeared on the Daily Caller.
HA HA
/ Nelson Muntz
Serious question: where can I find structural racism in the US?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=structural+racism+in+the+US
But short version: mainly in home prices and property values, and in the patterns of inherited wealth tied to historic housing discrimination. E.g., when my grandmother died, she left us all a sum of money mostly generated by selling her house of 50 years a few years prior. When my grandparents bought that house, racial discrimination in housing financing and sales was very open, explicit, and legal. Therefore, all her (white) descendants get a little boost in inherited money that was accumulated in part by participation in a racially rigged system. Sure, such housing discrimination is now illegal (though with some evidence that it still happens), but the societal and multi-generational patterns that were constructed by an explicitly racist system don’t disappear overnight.
Thanks for the link 🙂
So, how long after the end of racial discrimination do its effects last? One generation? Two generations? Forever?
After reading some articles about that particular event, it’s still pretty difficult to know what really happened between the teacher and the students. It really could go either way, because of course the teacher is going to say she was explaining reasonably while the students will say they were unfairly singled out and whatnot.
I know that from my experience at Boston University, professors did *not* actually bring up politics in classes where it was entirely irrelevant to the course material. I did take an English course on African American literature, but the professor handled everything entirely reasonably. Every school and even every professor is different, and I may have just been very lucky with my professors, but it certainly has not been my experience that professors like to waste class time on things that are irrelevant to the course material.
I wonder how the professor, Shannon Gibney, presented her ideas to the class. If you skip the basics of any framework, it can be very easy for people to misinterpret what is being discussed. It’s too bad there really isn’t much being reported on how she presented ideas to the class. It’s just become a he said, she said type of situation.
P.S. Wow most of the comments on your article at the Daily Caller are awful. I’ll be sure to never comment on there.
To me, the specs don’t really matter. Don’t report a professor for harassment for teaching something you don’t like. But I guess it would be interesting to know. And yeah, apparently I’m “cuntish,” haha. Have you ever seen Ask A Daily Caller Commenter? Hilar.
It seems pretty absurd that they reported her for harassment. She’s been teaching there for years without students reporting her, so it’s very unlikely that she’s actively harassing students. I’m just curious about how she presents her ideas because presentation really can be far more influential than the content of the message. It doesn’t seem like these guys were interested either way, so it was only a matter of time before they reported somebody; it just happened to be her.
“Dear Aunt,
This comment has been flagged for review.”
Perfect.
I know that from my experience at Boston University, professors did *not* actually bring up politics in classes where it was entirely irrelevant to the course material. I did take an English course on African American literature, but the professor handled everything entirely reasonably. Every school and even every professor is different, and I may have just been very lucky with my professors, but it certainly has not been my experience that professors like to waste class time on things that are irrelevant to the course material.”
I’ve had it happen in classes I’ve taken – a prof at City College of SF teaching a *photography* class taking class time to rant about Bush. On one hand, I was never a fan of Dubya, so I didn’t disagree with her, nor do I think profs have to keep their opinions hidden, but I did (and still) feel that this kind of off-topic editorializing was out of line. Then again, I’m in the SF Bay Area, where people can be incredibly smug about their politics under the idea that makes them “outspoken”.
I had the same general experience in high school. Many teachers there would go on political tangents. I was sure I was going to experience the same thing in college, so that’s why I was so surprised to only have professors that wanted to focus on the course material. I probably got lucky with my professors, as I’m sure there are professors at BU that will talk about politics during class.
I agree with the author. I don’t know whether the professor or the students were right – or even if all of them were wrong. I don’t even need to know. Speech restrictions don’t solve anything – they just hide problems and let them fester. Such restrictions force those with well-grounded concerns to share an ideological space with bigots and cranks, which results in an unfair smearing of the one and a dangerous new tolerance for the other – precisely because intelligent people understand that the two groups are not the same but are deprived of the tools to tell the difference.