Last week, another crazed brute carried out attacks on innocent Europeans in the name of Islam, this time in Copenhagen. This ignoble coward’s religion is not important—he was just a deranged man with too much free time. More notable was the first target of his murder spree: a free speech event attended by a cartoonist who in 2007 committed the abominable act of drawing a particular prophet of the Muslim faith. (The second target was a synagogue where he killed a Jewish security guard.) Sound familiar? Stomachs turned worldwide in January when a trio of brainwashed scoundrels slaughtered over a dozen people while targeting French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Its offense: printing crude drawings of Muhammad.
These frail-minded fanatics—who I am obliged to stress constitute a fraction of a fraction of the world’s largest religion, one that is overwhelmingly tolerant—have demonstrated to us in the most horrific way their anachronistic distaste for free expression. In response, we have largely rallied behind Charlie and the banner of free speech. But as several commentators pointed out, most notably The Times’ David Brooks, as American college students we had little right to proclaim, “I am Charlie.” We love to extol free expression when it’s convenient, when it involves lampooning conservative politicians or mocking the old guard of capitalism. But on campuses across the country we have little stomach for discordant perspectives and engage in chilling patterns of groupthink, self-censorship, and suppression of dissenting voices.
Charlie Hebdo was intended to be an extremely offensive publication. It would not have survived a day at our school, which enjoys an unflattering Red speech code rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for having at least one policy that “clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.” The foundation also cites an embarrassing 2008 episode in which two male students were formally disciplined for distributing a parody of the Feminist and Gender Studies Department’s newsletter The Monthly Rag. Their version referenced “chainsaw etiquette” and the ranges of sniper rifles, so our college found them guilty of “juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality,” as if merely mentioning weapons and sex on the same piece of paper constitutes a call to sexual violence.
Not every form of speech is acceptable, nor should the principle be invoked to protect calls to violence. On this point, the Supreme Court established a litmus test in the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio: the government cannot punish speech unless it is directly intended to incite imminent lawless action.
While this provides valuable recourse against draconian speech codes, a bigger problem is self-imposed censorship, something much more difficult to prevent. Our campus is a microcosm of a worrying trend in American higher education where students band together to stifle free expression. There are a few particularly embarrassing examples that stand out. Last year, Brandeis students coerced their school into cancelling an honorary degree for women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of statements she made in 2007 criticizing Islam. In the same year, Smith College students blocked IMF Director Christine Lagarde’s commencement address because they disagreed with her institution’s policies.
The message was clear: we disagree with what you stand for so we don’t want to listen to you. Again at Smith, an alumna was publicly lambasted after daring to utter the n-word in reference to “Huckleberry Finn” during, ironically, a panel discussion on free speech. And, in an example not restricted to college campuses, Tumblr uses across the country demanded the Washington Post fire columnist George Will because they disagreed with his opinion regarding sexual assault at colleges and universities. (The Post stood firm.)
The point of a liberal arts education is to explore diverse, often unsettling perspectives and determine their merit. This is not possible if we succumb to mob mentality, prejudging certain voices as illegitimate and refusing to expose ourselves to them.
Trigger warnings—tags preceding anything from a CC Confessions post to a seminal work of literature that warn of potentially offensive content—represent another threat to the free exchange of ideas. Crawling into syllabi and campus publications across the country, their intent is reasonable: to protect disaffected or traumatized populations from experiencing psychic pain. But at the root of this noble cause is a patronizing conception of humans as hapless, vulnerable creatures that must be protected at every turn from microtraumas. Goaded on by students and professors (however well intentioned) who find discrimination and oppression in everything they see, we are eagerly swallowing up a pernicious ideology of speech regulation.
To criticize this misguided crusade is to be labeled callous, ignorant or, worst of all, privileged. But expecting society to shelter its members from any reminder of the dark corners of human experience or past traumas is delusional. Furthermore, such a project unduly circumscribes our range of critical thought. How are we to approach works of philosophy, literature or art with an unbiased eye if we are implicitly told from the start that we ought to find them offensive?
Inherent in all of this—the dismissal of controversial speakers, speech codes, and trigger warnings—is the dangerous and deeply flawed assumption that everyone has a right to never be offended. This is abhorrent to the principles of a free and thoughtful society wherein all perspectives can be rigorously examined and put to the test in the marketplace of ideas.
If we self-censor, deprive ourselves of dissenting voices, and promote biased interpretations with ill-conceived trigger warnings, we are betraying a cornerstone of the liberal arts tradition. Colleges and universities are supposed to bastions of liberalism, not politically correct echo chambers that send it spiraling into absurdity.