Unlearning Liberty - Greg Lukianoff

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that they could not be openly political; those students probably would’ve literally rioted.

      The restriction on political speech defied parody in 2008 when the executive vice president of the University of Oklahoma announced that no university resources, including email and presumably Internet access, could be used for “the forwarding of political humor/commentary.”33 For those of us who have a hard time imagining what we would forward if we weren’t allowed to forward anything political or anything from The Daily Show and The Onion, this was a startlingly broad restriction. Nonetheless, it took an article I wrote in the Huffington Post and a letter from FIRE to get the university to reverse course.34 If there were protests over this policy, we can’t find them. Likewise, we can find no evidence that any student objected to Case Western Reserve University’s policy stating that “University facilities and services may not be used . . . to advocate a partisan position,” despite FIRE naming the code our December 2010 Speech Code of the Month and publicizing that fact widely.35 (More about our Speech Code of the Month project in the next chapter.)

      On the even sillier side, the silence was deafening in 2006 when a university in Wisconsin tore down a quote from the humorist Dave Barry that a Ph.D. student had posted on his door. Marquette University claimed that the quote was “patently offensive”—a term reserved in law to refer to XXX pornography. The quote? “As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.” Marquette has yet to back down from its decision, even citing sensitivity to the victims of 9/11 as justification.36 The censorship was absurd, and it garnered national attention and calls from reporters, yet the students and faculty did not register a peep.

      But worse than ambivalence and apathy are the cases where students see free speech as an obstacle to progress, and censorship as the kind of thing that good, enlightened people do.

      At San Francisco State University in 2006–2007, members of the College Republicans who stomped on hand-drawn Hamas and Hezbollah flags during an antiterrorism protest were brought up on charges of “incivility” by the campus judiciary.37 When Debra Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, called SFSU to ask how it could be possible to punish the students when the Supreme Court has held that even burning an American flag is protected expression under the First Amendment, university spokesperson Ellen Griffin responded, “I don’t believe the complaint is about the desecration of the flag. I believe that the complaint is the desecration of Allah.”38 This is the first time I know of in American history that a public official tried to justify a violation of the free speech clause of the First Amendment by violating the First Amendment’s clause banning the “establishment of religion” by mandating an Islamic norm. Apparently, the word for God appears in Arabic script on one of the flags, but when the College Republicans discovered this, they let a Muslim student mark out the word. Because there really could be no question that the students had the First Amendment right to show their contempt for two designated terrorist groups in this way, the College Republicans ultimately prevailed in the campus judiciary and in a First Amendment lawsuit against the university.39

      But what interested me most were student reactions to the protest. The non-Muslim student who filed the complaint asked this question of the disciplinary board: “How can we let the College Republicans have such a rally that was politically motivated and one-sided?” (I believe a non-politically-motivated rally is called a party.) The outrage machine at SFSU is powerful, and it was clear from the moment that the College Republicans engaged in their intentionally provocative protest that the students and administration were going to find something to charge them with.

      The overwhelming majority of the cases in this book involve student bodies that didn’t care enough to react when they saw their fellow students’ rights being violated. More disturbingly, the victims themselves often didn’t know they have the right to be free from viewpoint-based censorship, from being pressured to say things they don’t mean, and from speech codes. The K–12 system has little interest in producing students who know they have rights, and college and university administrators take full advantage of that fact. In the short term, they gain tremendous power to avoid campus controversies, stifle disagreeable opinions, and dodge criticism. In the long term, however, they are neglecting to cultivate the difficult intellectual habits of robust inquiry and critical reasoning. By keeping students in the dark about their rights and about why they have those rights in the first place, schools are failing to prepare them for the rigors of being educated citizens in a diverse, dynamic, and powerful democracy.

      One thing that has always struck me as bizarre is that respect for multiculturalism and diversity is one of the most common rationales that people use when defending the policing of campus speech. I find this strange because my experiences growing up as a first-generation American in a multicultural environment are what led to my lifelong interest in freedom of speech. My second earliest memory relates to this very topic.

      I was four years old and it was Christmas, and my auntie Rhona had given me a plastic drum as a present. It was the first gift I ever remember truly disliking. But as I looked at my mother and father, I didn’t know what to do. My father is a Russian refugee who grew up in Yugoslavia and who believes it is more important to be honest than polite, while my mother is ethnically Irish but was raised in England and always emphasized the absolute importance of politeness. I was stuck. I hated that drum, but when my mother asked me, “Do you like your present?” I didn’t know what to say. Under the cultural values of my father I had to say “no,” but under the cultural values of my mother I had to say “yes.” This dilemma bounced back and forth in my head, getting harder and harder every second that my mother waited for my response. So I did what any sensible four-year-old would do: I started crying. I remember my older sister saying, “Poor baby, doesn’t like his present, starts crying.” I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time, but if I had, I would’ve said, “No, it’s not that—it’s my first experience with a cultural paradox!”

      The other kids my age in my neighborhood all came from different backgrounds. The coolest kid in my neighborhood was Peruvian, while some of the other children were Vietnamese, Korean, Italian American, Puerto Rican, or African American, and several of the other white kids were from the American South (which, to a first-generation Russo-British American, is certainly another culture). One thing that became crystal clear in this environment is that no two cultures and no two people entirely agree on what speech should and should not be allowed. Indeed, ideas about politeness and propriety differ from economic class to economic class, between genders, among cultures, between different regions of the country, and certainly from one era in history to another.

      If we were to put someone in charge of policing politeness or civility, whose ideals would we choose? My British mother’s, which emphasizes politeness at all costs? My Russian father’s, which values honesty over politeness? Danny Nguyen’s? Nelson Beledo’s? If we tried to ban everything that offended someone’s cultural traditions, class conceptions, or personal idiosyncrasies, nobody could safely say a thing. It has been obvious to me ever since I was little that free speech must be the rule for any truly pluralistic or multicultural community. Far from requiring censorship, a true understanding of multiculturalism demands free speech.

      A high school environment that often portrays free speech as a problem, that does not teach the philosophy or law or utility of free speech, and that presents punishment of students for bad opinions as morally righteous is an environment that naturally produces students who are cautious about what they say and who may even favor pressure towards conformity or silence.

      Here are a few things a student should know before heading off to college:

       1. When it comes to rights, K–12 schools and colleges are as different as night and day. At a public college, you

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