Liberal ideals are stunting speech on college campuses

Is a discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae elicited this ominous warning when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs ... .

No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning?

Smith President Kathleen McCartney had joked, We're just wild and crazy, aren't we? In the transcript, crazy was replaced by (ableist slur).

One panelist mentioned the State Department had for a time banned jihad, Islamist and caliphate which the transcript flagged as anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language.

Discussing the teaching of Huckleberry Finn, I questioned the use of euphemisms such as the n-word and, in doing so, uttered that forbidden word. I described the difference between quoting a word in the context of discussing literature or prejudice and hurling it as an epithet.

On campus, I was branded a racist. McCartney apologized that some students and faculty were hurt and made to feel unsafe by my remarks.

Unsafe? These days, when students talk about threats to their safety, they're often talking about the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It's not just rape that some women on campus fear: It's discussions of rape. At Brown University, a scheduled debate between two feminists about rape culture was criticized for, as the Brown Daily Herald put it, undermining the University's mission to create a safe and supportive environment for survivors.

How did we get here? You can credit or blame progressives for this embrace of censorship.

In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin framed pornography as an assault on women. They defined pornography as a violation of women's civil rights and championed an anti-porn ordinance that would authorize civil actions by any woman aggrieved by pornography. MacKinnon and Dworkin lost that battle, but their successors are winning the war. Their view of allegedly offensive speech as a civil rights violation has helped shape campus speech codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward free speech.

The '80s and early '90s recovery movement adopted a similarly dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound, anti-porn feminists and recovering co-dependents agreed. Self-appointed recovery experts, such as author John Bradshaw, promoted the belief that most of us are victims of abuse. They broadened the definition of abuse to include common, normal childhood experiences. From this perspective, we are all fragile and damaged by presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship looks like a moral necessity.

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Liberal ideals are stunting speech on college campuses