THE ANSWER TO A BAD SPEECH CODE IS NOT AN IMPROVED, MORE REPRESSIVE SPEECH CODE.

I was not a fan of speech codes thirty years ago, when the lunatic notion that words are violence first infected higher education in a serious way.  My stance has always been "Justice, freedom: still contested territory. Whether it is black or Palestinian or male lives that are being diminished by the administrative ethos, it is the administrative ethos that is wrong. If there's no chance to play with controversial ideas in the university, where do they get played with?"  I'm sympathetic to arguments that the invocation of "civility" might be a polite form of censorship, and there are myriad ways in which that conversation-ender can be applied.

When the current crop of diversity hires with entry level curricula vitae made fools of themselves in Congress, I saw an opportunity to be rid of the speech codes.

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.

Unfortunately, a few Members of Congress are going to continue the punishment cycles of a grim strategy equilibrium in a cold civil war.

On Friday, several House representatives introduced legislation that would permit the Education Department to create third-party antisemitism monitors at any college receiving federal funding. The purpose of the bill—the full text of which is not yet available—is to crack down on rising antisemitic speech on college campuses. However, the bill's supporters fail to consider how an "antisemitism monitor" would create a chilling effect, curbing academic freedom and encouraging colleges to punish protected expression.

Following a growing number of pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, universities are facing increasing scrutiny over their handling of student demonstrations—especially as photos and video footage from these protests have often captured extremely inflammatory, offensive rhetoric from student activists.

In response, Reps. Mike Lawler (R–N.Y.) and Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) introduced the, ahem, carefully named College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability (COLUMBIA) Act. According to a Friday press release, the bill would allow the Education Department to appoint a third-party antisemitism monitor to any college receiving government funds. The department would have broad power to set the "terms and conditions of the monitorship," and the colleges would be forced to pay the costs of their own antisemitism monitor. Schools that don't comply with the monitoring would risk losing federal funding.

"Rising antisemitism on our college campuses is a major concern and we must act to ensure the safety of students," Rep. Mike Lawler (R–N.Y.) said in the press release. "If colleges will not step up to protect their students, Congress must act."

"The monitor would release a publicly available online quarterly report," the press release reads, "evaluating in detail the progress that a college or university has made toward combating antisemitism on campus and issuing policy recommendations to Congress, the Secretary, and state and local regulators as needed."

It's not difficult to see how, if passed, the COLUMBIA Act would chill a wide range of anti-Israel speech—not to mention constitutionally protected, genuinely hateful expression. Facing the loss of federal funding, colleges will be incentivized to suppress any speech critical of Israel. At public colleges in particular, universities facing antisemitism monitoring could end up in an impossible position—bound by the Constitution to allow any protected speech yet facing punishment from the government for not suppressing offensive expression.

It's also easy to see how the use of "monitors" for hateful speech could be expanded to cover just about any controversial topic, suppressing any speech that runs foul of a representative's pet issue.

However, these consequences seem of little concern to the bill's sponsors, who remain focused on the need for the government to intervene to stop offensive campus protests.

Any time somebody rushes to the floor of the House legislation with a cleverly acronymed title, it is time for the public to regard that legislation with the most suspicious attention.  That "facing punishment from the government for not suppressing offensive expression" was a thing for bureaucrats in the Obama regime, only the offensive expressions were proscribed under the rubric of sexual harassment doesn't make it any more right.  That deanlets and deanlings squealed like stuck pigs when Donald Trump issued an executive order reminding higher education of its responsibility to protect free speech, or at least free inquiry, suggests that they'll be in a difficult place distinguishing a proscription of incivility without an anti-Semitism clause from a proscription of incivility including an anti-Semitism clause.

Among the many responses to President Trump’s executive order on campus free speech last week, some of the lamest came from the major groups representing colleges and universities. Flipping open their “Intro to Corporate PR Crises” textbooks to page one, they did what many large and powerful institutions do when faced with an embarrassing, obvious, and public problem: Deny there’s a problem at all.

Few people with any knowledge or experience of higher ed actually believe there’s no free speech problem on campus. FIRE’s 20-year history defending students and faculty across the political and ideological spectrum is a testament to the existence of the problem. So is the more than a decade FIRE has spent reading and rating the speech-related policies of more than 400 of our nation’s largest and most prestigious schools. 90 percent continue to feature speech codes that are either unconstitutional (on public campuses) or violate their own promises of free speech (on private campuses), with nearly 30 percent of them doing so egregiously.

The final solution to the speech code question does not involve ever more speech codes.

It's in Rev. G. S. Hagler's "If Everything Is Antisemitic Then Nothing Is."  On one level, we can read the column and play a word-substitution game.  For example, replace "antisemitic" with "racist."  On a logical level, that's straightforward: a description incapable of distinction is useless except as a cheap smear.  As a persuasive tool, it fails.  That's where the reverend's column takes us.  "Unfounded charges of antisemitism have become an instrument to short-circuit debate and discussion, and to bully people into silence where there needs to be discussion, analysis, and dialogue."  I'd prefer he use the term "discourse" rather than "dialogue," but that is an aesthetic objection.

That post concluded, "If the people enforcing speech codes and rooting out 'demeaning' and 'harassing' behavior continue to label any objection to the common-room commonplaces as 'demeaning' or 'harassing,' will more people cheer when such people get lit up, even demagogically so, in Congress?"

I object to writing anti-Semitism into a harassment code, because I object to harassment codes.  "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?"  Unfortunately, those bourgeois norms might have been among the first things to go.

We have good manners to serve as a constraint on free speech in the first sense, or perhaps enlightened self-restraint. It's probably not smart to go into a Harley bar and pour beer over the riders and say good things about rice-burners. We have rules of order to serve as a constraint on free speech in the second sense. No matter how good it might feel to yell "Believe all victims" when the legislature is debating tax policy or the siting of an airport, that really isn't convincing anyone not already convinced, or is it germane to the question before the house.

No speech codes, no opportunities for populist Members of Congress either to mock them or to propose adding on to them.

Just get rid of the speech codes.