JUST GET RID OF THE SPEECH CODES.

Two years ago, I had some fun with a proposed code of conduct at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh.

The morale conditioners at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh decided to take a stand against disrespectful interaction, envisioning "An environment that is free of harassment and free of insulting and demeaning comments and epithets based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, socioeconomic status, family status or political views; and consistently enforces federal, state and university protections against discriminatory treatment yet is free from any official speech codes."  Anybody catch the internal inconsistency?  "So students have a right to expect an environment free from insulting and demeaning comments and from any official speech codes?"  Good luck with that.

That post anticipated what transpired in that Congressional hearing last week.

I wonder if asserting that a statement is "racist" or any of the other -isms or -phobias is insulting or demeaning on its face. Or if referring to someone as "neanderthal" or "deplorable" or generally engaging in the usual casual common-room smugness is also grounds for a harassment complaint? The policy appears to leave that opportunity available. "Members respect and accommodate the views and needs of others in order to allow the development of individual potential."

Clearly, to those poseurs presiding at Harvard, MIT, and Penn some harassment is more actionable than others.  The asses have been kicked.  The names have been taken.  Now is time to take stock.

Let's start with a silly observation by Tori Otten at coastal elite propaganda sheet New Republic.  "It does not seem to have occurred to Republicans, who regularly pride themselves on being the protectors of free speech, that they have launched a project to essentially police free speech on college campuses."  That has potential, if she's going to take a position similar to mine, that the speech codes have to go.

The problem is that the speech codes are present, and they're enforced, selectively.  Megan "Jane Galt" McArdle nails it in one.  "What happened at Penn presents real problems for academic freedom. But it was also the natural end result of abandoning free speech principles, which left Penn and Harvard with no plausible defense when donors asked 'So why is this speech okay?'"  Presumably the Members of Congress could have flung any deflection right in those smirking, condescending faces.

The best answer any of those poseurs could have offered is a qualified "yes" along lines Jennifer Sey suggests in the wake of Elizabeth Magill's ouster.

She could have gone in there to testify and done the right thing.

She could have said: Yes this is a violation of our code of conduct but our code of conduct is problematic. As a university, we need to be beacons of free speech, even offensive speech. Especially offensive speech. And we haven't been. We have failed. But that is all going to change now. These students need to toughen up and hear ideas they may find offensive. They need to defend their own ideas not just cry that words are violence. That time starts now. And of course, harassment, violence, threats, are criminal and will be punished.

She might have still been forced out. But it would have been epic. And important.

Instead, she clearly read from a script prepared for her designed to minimize damage and it did no such thing. She dodged the question and came across as deeply unprincipled and smug.

Just get rid of the speech codes.

Bari Weiss hosted several columns dealing with the fallout to the hearing, and the first firing.  In her summary article, which includes four policy proposals which we might revisit on another day, we note the same problem squaring free expression with speech codes.

The point is that university administrators selectively and unevenly enforce codes of conduct depending entirely on the viewpoint being expressed and the identity of the person expressing it. It’s a nasty business and the congressional testimony the other day went a long way toward exposing it. We shouldn’t stop there.

Correct. Exposing the limitations that trammel inquiry is the first step.

Just get rid of the speech codes.

In one of the essays that summary introduces, Peter Savodnik observes,

We have to move beyond the moronic juncture we have arrived at in America in which people are severely punished for offending other people. This is a cancellation, and all cancellations are lamentable—an undermining of the republic.

The problem here is Magill faced an impossible dilemma that, to be fair, was not of her own making: for years, universities—lots of them, not just Penn—have been chipping away at the freedoms of students and professors.

He continues with another qualified "yes."

“We’ve been doing things wrong here at Penn for a long time, telling people they can’t say things that someone else might not like. Starting today, we’re done with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions, and we’re dismantling the whole DEI complex at Penn, which, let’s face it, is all about censoring wrong-thinkers and actually foments antisemitism on campus. What’s more, I’m putting our students on alert: if you’re uncomfortable with being subjected to speech that upsets you, you should go to school somewhere else. We put a premium on debate and argument at Penn, and that demands free expression.”

Of course, that would have opened Pandora’s box, and it would have demanded a fortitude and moral clarity that Magill, like so many of our so-called leaders in the third decade of the twenty-first century, seem congenitally incapable of. That’s a shame. But it is the only way we return to our republican virtue.

It has come to this because our universities are being run by terminally stupid people..

Just get rid of the speech codes.

There's an encouraging endorsement of the academic values by Danielle Allen in Washington's Post. "We have gotten lost both in the thicket of debates about the First Amendment and in the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism."  The key to her article is in that "particular tenets."  The various versions of critical theory or radical skepticism represent ways of playing with ideas.  The academic enterprise is about finding empirical support for working hypotheses, or identifying anomalies thereto.

It is when those critical theories insinuate themselves into Student Affairs or codes of conduct or the dominant ethos in a department that scholarly inquiry mutates into catechism.

Avoiding violations of academic freedom should be the easier part. In the classroom and out, it is perfectly within our rights to tell people (kindly) that their arguments are bad or their views weak or erroneous and then to work with them to correct them. We correct students’ math; we can correct their reasoning, and that includes correcting moral errors. Does a student think it’s reasonable to expel Israelis from their country as a part of freeing Palestinians? That’s a moral error that a teacher should require the student to confront and learn from. Does a student think the conflict can be addressed without asking how both peoples can thrive in this land they share? Ignoring that question is also a moral error requiring correction.

The idea of moral error is unfashionable and must be employed judiciously. But it is indeed one of our tools for improving reasoning. It’s always best if people think through their arguments and reach self-correction themselves, through forms of Socratic questioning. Nonetheless, put bluntly, academic freedom does not protect people from intellectual correction.

Avoiding violations of free speech rights while correcting a pattern of generalized intimidation is much harder. But it’s not impossible. We should not just protect students’ speech rights but also insist that they exercise those rights in accordance with campus norms for a culture of mutual respect.

How much simpler all this would be if higher education respected rules of evidence, criteria for judging the strength of an argument, and bourgeois norms for interaction?  Her essay, based in part on her experiences at Harvard, notes that the tight priors of the culture studies types held sway.  "[I]n Harvard’s case, three themes in our report went largely overlooked by university administrators as they began to pursue implementation — our focus on academic freedom, on the need to make space for religious identity and on the need for greater political diversity on our campus. Older paradigms that focused only on some groups as marginalized, as opposed to all groups as sources of potential and perspective, came back to the fore."

Just get rid of the speech codes.

Inside Higher Ed contributor Karl Schonberg offers the closing argument.

Tension between these roles of college administrators has become more acute as the polarization of our society has deepened, and last week’s hearing highlights the need for clarity within campus communities. In some cases, the same politicians who have criticized colleges for being close-minded and hypersensitized to offensive speech now criticize them for being too open to hate.

These arguments may be politically self-serving, but it is also clear that the tension on campuses nationwide about what is acceptable and proscribed speech has been growing more palpable for a decade or more, and the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza has only further heightened it. The visible failure of three college presidents to state their institutions’ opposition to speech advocating genocide last week brought this tension into sharp focus but also clarifies what administrators can do to help themselves, and the country as a whole, grapple with questions of how to enable debate without condoning hate.

Universities need policies making clear that speech that dehumanizes any member of their community is not acceptable on their campuses, both because it is a moral principle but also because it is consistent with their obligation to offer an intellectual environment open to every member of their community. Arguments that deny the humanity of some members of that community cannot be protected speech on college campuses, because protecting them would privilege the rights of those expressing such opinions over those who are diminished as less than human, a diminishment that undermines their ability to fully participate in the intellectual environment.

At the same time, allowing individuals to silence policy arguments solely because they find them offensive, or conflating positions on controversial political questions with ad hominem attacks on individuals, also is not conducive to the intellectual mission of a college and will remain a recurring challenge.

The only answer to arguments advocating hate and genocide must be “not on our campus, ever.” With that stated, campus communities must then recognize both the difficulty and the necessity of open discourse that can lead to anger, passion and offense. In this process, it is vital to have clearly elaborated policies, well supported by stated institutional values, precisely to help address these fraught questions without having to crystallize guiding principles in the heat of the moment.

College leaders can help to anticipate these vexed issues and enable their campuses to meet them when they arise by fostering conversations before that happens, by organizing communitywide discussions about principles of speech and the requisites of humane civic discourse. Doing so can provide the foundation for clear, specific policies that can be invaluable when contention flares and both intellectual openness and firm resolve against hate must be defended.

I'd suggest that he be more careful about referring to "hate."  That sort of language is part of the speech codes.  As far as "humane civic discourse," we could do worse than to start with bourgeois norms for interaction and the standard conventions of scholarly inquiry.  Professors might consider setting a proper example, for instance, refraining from referring to political or popular figures as "neanderthal" or speaking too disparagingly of the scholarship of rivals.

Moreover, no speech codes, no opportunities for populist Members of Congress to raise those self-serving arguments.

Just get rid of the speech codes.