Protect Collegiate Speech

Ideally, the college campus is a place where all ideas, from the conventional to the extreme, are given the opportunity to be expressed and considered on their merits by students and faculty. Unfortunately, during the 1990s many universities have fallen increasingly short of this ideal, as free speech on campus has often fallen victim to political correctness masquerading under the banner of "tolerance." This has manifested itself in several ways, including efforts by several schools, including the UM and Stanford, to implement speech codes to punish "offensive" speech codes which have subsequently been found unconstitutional. In recent years, however, the trend to limit free speech on campus has taken a new and more disturbing form the harassment of staff members or the destruction of press runs of student publications which fail to follow the P.C. party line.

In 1997 alone, several incidents of speech suppression on campuses have even drawn the ire of liberal free speech advocates like Village Voice columnist and First Amendment expert Nate Hentoff. The most notorious example is the controversy which erupted on the campus of Cornell University last April, when several student staff writers for the conservative Cornell Review penned a satirical piece which translated the course descriptions for the school's Africana Studies Department into Ebonics. In response, staff members of the Review received hate mail and death threats, and student activists proceeded to burn several hundred copies of the paper at a campus demonstration while yelling, "The Review, the Review, the Review is on fire! We don't need no water, let the motherf***** burn!" The University's administration took no action against this destruction of property; in fact, Cornell's Dean of Students, John Ford, condemned the Review, saying: "If it offends people, if people say they are offended by it, it is something we should not tolerate, something we should not support." The president of Cornell's student assembly promised the protestors to defund and decertify the Review as a student organization. And finally, Cornell's president, Hunter Rawlings, denounced the Review as an "exceptionally despicable" newspaper, and described the Review as "offensive" and "disgusting" in his commencement address.

Unfortunately, the incident at Cornell is not an isolated case; similar attacks on free speech have occured recently at Amherst, where copies of the new conservative monthly, the Amherst Spectator, were burned in response to an article which criticized a gay student group for offensive chalkings it wrote in front of a campus chapel, and at Boston College, where student vandals stole and trashed 2,000 copies of the Observer of Boston College to which the College responded by withdrawing funding for the paper. The censorship bug has even affected the U of M; it was not so long ago (March 1996) that students calling themselves the "Ad Hoc Committee Against the Bullshit in the Daily" stole approximately half of the Michigan Daily's press run in response to what they deemed as rascism in the Daily's pages.

Regardless of one's opinion and feelings, there are numerous perfectly acceptable ways to express disfavor with any written piece in a newspaper. It is not acceptable for irate students to steal and/or burn issues of that paper to express disgust with the contents in it. It is reprehensible for these students, acting under the guise of being tolerant and sensitive, to supress others' freedom of speech, a right more important than the right to live in a community where one will not have one's feelings hurt or one's political ideals challenged.

These incidents are ultimately a reflection of the larger belief among today's purveyors of political correctness in a doctrine of "free speech for me, but not for thee." For an increasing number of students and administrators, the ideals of free speech and expression on campus only apply to those who share their opinions. The overriding quest for "tolerance" has led many people to believe that any expression which might hurt someone's feelings should be stifled and suppressed, as the above quote by Cornell's Dean of Students amply demonstrates. One could do well to remind such individuals that living in a free society, especially at a college campus, means one must sometimes be exposed to ideas which they might find personally disturbing. We must remember that the First Amendment was created not only to protect speech which is popular; it is the unpopular, the dissenting voice which the First Amendment prevents from being silenced. Unfortunately this notion of what free speech means has been lost on many of the protestors at cornell; as one of them stated, "If 99% of the campus disagrees with what the Review says, then it should be shut down."

To change this trend, college administrators must begin to speak out against these acts. Unfortunately, many of them share the same liberal views and intolerance of dissent as the students responsible for the thefts and burnings, so a call for true tolerance may fall on deaf ears.