DESPITE high youth voter turnout in 2008 — 48.5 percent
of 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots that year — levels are expected to
return to usual lows this year, and with that the usual hand-wringing
about disengagement and apathy among young voters.
Colleges and universities are supposed to be bastions of unbridled
inquiry and expression, but they probably do as much to repress free
speech as any other institution in young people’s lives. In doing so,
they discourage civic engagement at a time when debates over deficits
and taxes should make young people pay more attention, not less.
Since the 1980s, in part because of “political correctness” concerns
about racially insensitive speech and sexual harassment, and in part
because of the dramatic expansion in the ranks of nonfaculty campus
administrators, colleges have enacted stringent speech codes. These
codes are sometimes well intended but, outside of the ivory tower, would
violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. From
protests and rallies to displays of posters and flags, students have
been severely constrained in their ability to demonstrate their beliefs.
The speech codes are at times intended to enforce civility, but they
often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open
debate of controversial issues.
Last month, Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va., forbade students to protest
an appearance by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican
vice-presidential nominee. Why? According to university policy, students
must apply 10 business days in advance to demonstrate in the college’s
tiny “free speech zone” — and Mr. Ryan’s visit was announced on a
Sunday, two days before his Tuesday visit.
Also last month, a student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was blocked from putting a notice
on her door arguing that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney was
fit for office. (She successfully appealed.) And over the summer, a
federal judge struck down the University of Cincinnati’s “free speech zone,” which had limited demonstrations to 0.1 percent of the campus.
In a study of 392 campus speech codes last year, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where I work, found that 65 percent of the colleges
had policies that in our view violated the Constitution’s guarantee of
the right to free speech. (While the First Amendment generally prohibits
public universities from restricting nondisruptive free speech, private
colleges are not state actors and therefore have more leeway to
establish their own rules.)
Some elite colleges in particular have Orwellian speech codes that are
so vague and broad that they would never pass constitutional muster at
state-financed universities. Harvard is a particularly egregious
example. Last year, incoming Harvard freshmen were pressured by campus
officials to sign an oath promising to act with “civility” and
“inclusiveness” and affirming that “kindness holds a place on par with
intellectual attainment.” Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor
and a former dean of Harvard College, was quick to criticize the oath.
“For Harvard to ‘invite’ people to pledge to kindness is unwise, and
sets a terrible precedent,” he wrote on his blog. “It is a promise to
control one’s thoughts.”
Civility is nice, but on college campuses it often takes on a bizarre
meaning. In 2009, Yale banned students from making a T-shirt with an F.
Scott Fitzgerald quotation — “I think of all Harvard men as sissies,”
from his 1920 novel “This Side of Paradise” — to mock Harvard at their
annual football game. The T-shirt was blocked after some gay and lesbian
students argued that “sissies” amounted to a homophobic slur. “What
purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not
acceptable,” said Mary Miller, a professor of art history and the dean of Yale College.
Elsewhere, rules that aim for inclusiveness do more to confuse students than to encourage debate. Earlier this year, Vanderbilt
prohibited student groups (if they wished to receive university support
and financing) from barring students from leadership positions based on
their beliefs. The apparent goal was to prevent evangelical Christian
groups from excluding gay students from leadership positions — but the
policy also means that a Democrat could be elected as an officer of the
College Republicans.
A 2010 study
by the American Association of Colleges and Universities of 24,000
college students and 9,000 faculty and staff members found that only
35.6 percent of the students — and only 18.5 percent of the faculty and
staff — strongly agreed that it was “safe to hold unpopular positions on
campus.”
For reasons both good and bad — and sometimes for mere administrative
convenience — colleges have promulgated speech codes that are not only
absurd in their results but also detrimental to the ideals of free
inquiry. Students can’t learn how to navigate democracy and engage with
their fellow citizens if they are forced to think twice before they
speak their mind.
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