Ace points out that in the OU SAE case, even the ACLU (boy, that’s a lot of acronyms in one sentence) has been extremely reluctant to admit that the university acted unconstitutionally in expelling the two student ringleaders of the song. He also notes—correctly, I believe—that the argument running along the lines of “watch out, the same remedy could be used against people who say bigoted things about whites or Jews” runs up against reality:
Part of my problem with that kind of analysis is this: It is idealistic, and departs far from reality. We all understand the reality we are dealing with: Whites are now legally second-class citizens as regards this sort of law (and many others), and no college would ever try to boot out students for the kind of “racism” Volokh discusses. Oh, I suppose maybe some explicitly, actually Christian university might try the former, but they’d be backed down quickly after a bevy of lawyers and newsvans swarmed the campus.
No, what we are talking about with these Speechcraft trials is more-or-less explicitly a tool for non-whites to punish whites.
And no, that’s not just An Racist talking. The leftwingers pushing these Speechcraft trials are admirably upfront about their belief that speech codes bind “Oppressors” only, and do not bind “The Oppressed.”
There is even a claim made — frequently — that blacks are definitionally incapable of being racist, no matter how filled with racist animus a particular black person might be. The silly claim goes that Racism equals Racial Animus Plus Power, and as they have explicitly defined themselves as the powerless Oppressed, it is actually impossible for a black person to be racist.
Ace closes on a very somber note, saying he has no idea what to do and that “Pretty much the country is lost.” I’ve been feeling rather somber myself for the last couple of years, and in my bleaker hours I’m inclined to agree with him that the republic is over.
But I have a few things to say. The first is that the constitutional amendment protecting free speech is there because the Founders knew how great the temptation to suppress speech always is, and will probably always be. So although the suppression has taken a new form in recent years—a form that is in itself discriminatory, because it is differentially applied to different groups—the fight for free speech has always been a difficult one to win, human nature being what it is. The impulse to suppress “bad” speech feels so—well it feels so good and so right.
Ace is correct when he says that the “it could be applied to other groups” argument is unrealistic. But unrealistic or not, the argument can serve to point out a possibility that many people supporting the students’ ouster have perhaps not even considered, which is that actions like that could at least theoretically be extended in ways they wouldn’t like, and against people they support.
That may seem to be an obvious point, but it’s been my experience that many people have trouble imagining anything other than the situation that is actually before them. These hypotheticals about other races and religions can help them stretch their imaginations, and might perhaps cause a few to change their minds through mere self-interest: don’t support something that has at least the possibility of someday coming back to bite them in the butt.
It also has another possible (although related) effect, which is to underline that there is a principle involved, and that the principle is not “to defend young racist white guys.” It can help broaden the issue and get a person to see the point of protecting offensive speech in general.
Do I think most people will listen to that argument and concede the principle that it’s good to defend free speech, even offensive speech? No, absolutely not. And that’s where my pessimism arises.
I also am well aware of how long these trends have been going on, and that it’s not just about free speech, either. The university has been the epicenter of it all, and as long ago as the 60s it became clear that most college administrators are craven cowards. If you want to have more proof of that, do a search for “Allan Bloom” on this blog, or read his superb book The Closing of the American Mind.
In a previous post, I discussed and quoted Bloom, and it seems highly appropriate to do so again. The situation Bloom talks about is reversed from that at OU—Bloom describes the non-expulsion of some black students who were behaving in a way that should have unequivocally merited their dismissal (and even arrest)—but the incident shows how easily administrators can be intimidated by fears of being thought racist, and how ready they have long been to apply differential standards because of it:
In the following excerpt Bloom is describing an incident that occurred when he was a faculty member at Cornell during the late 60s, when black militants with guns occupied a campus building and made demands. Bloom had gone to the university provost to speak up for a black student of his (unnamed in the book, but actually Alan Keyes—who happens, in a strange twist of fate, to have been the person Barack Obama soundly defeated in his 2004 US Senate race, when Keyes was put on the Republican ballot as a hasty substitute for Jack Ryan). Keyes had earlier been threatened by a black professor at Cornell for refusing to take part in a demonstration. Here’s what Bloom says transpired [emphasis mine]:
The provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance. He, of course, fully sympathized with the young man’s [Keyes’] plight. However, things were bad, and there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association…He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.
…The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger…At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so…No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later—immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected—the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.
It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university…These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them…To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization…
In the approximately fifty years since the Cornell battle occurred, and the over twenty-five years since Bloom’s book was written, things have progressed even further in the same direction. Now professors don’t even talk about the sanctity of the university and its principles; its main principle seem to be the defense of politically-correct thinking and the suppression of anything that smacks of its opposite.
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, thoughtcrime was detected by the telescreen, a ubiquitous TV set installed in all homes and public places to monitor people’s behavior and speech. Orwell was an exceptionally brilliant man, but he didn’t foresee the invention of the cellphone camera plus the internet, two developments that put the equivalent of a telescreen in the hands of nearly every citizen. Who knew that it would give people ammunition to spy on anyone they happen to encounter, whether in public or semi-private, and record their every offense?
The SAE brothers were in public, but next up will be the monitoring of one-on-one exchanges that fail to meet the PC test, and it won’t take something as egregious as the offensively racist song the SAEs sang. Already we have seen incidents where people are excoriated and shunned worldwide for jokes they’ve made on Twitter that are misinterpreted as racist—see the cautionary tale of Justine Sacco if you don’t believe me.
Big Brother isn’t watching you; Little Brother is, and he/she isn’t constrained by free speech rights when the chosen remedy is shunning by the community at large and/or firing from a job.
Like Ace, I don’t have a remedy. People are free to shun whomever they wish. But what used to be private or semi-private moments of stupidity, particularly among the young and foolish and/or drunk, have become public moments with extremely major consequences, now that things can so easily go viral. I think we lose more than we gain from this.
[NOTE: The free speech that should be protected by the university is not just about race and religion, either. Politics, gender, and a host of other issues can fall into the PC mindset.]
