January 16, 2013 by Harvey Silverglate
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (or FIRE, whose board of directors I chair), has written a remarkable and groundbreaking new book: Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. In it, he posits that pervasive censorship and disregard for due process on our nation’s campuses have disrupted the gears and self-correcting mechanisms essential for the functioning of our free society. In my latest Forbes.com column, I explain how the mindless totalitarianism that befouls the vast majority of our college campuses helps explain some of the injustices of our legal system. The degradation of important social and legal institutions begins somewhere, and I agree with Lukianoff that a lot of our problems start with what is happening in our sadly degenerated system of higher education…
“You can say things in Harvard Square that you can’t say in Harvard Yard. As both a long-time resident of the Harvard Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a 1967 graduate of Harvard Law School, this has been my semi-facetious but all-too-true mantra criticizing the sorry state of free speech and free thought at Harvard. And, alas, Harvard is not unique. At the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities throughout the country, merely voicing an unpopular opinion (or being critical of the campus administration) can easily cause a student, or even a faculty member, serious difficulty with the campus disciplinary tribunals.
This is the topic of Greg Lukianoff’s important new book: Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. Lukianoff, a Stanford law graduate, is currently the president of the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE, www.thefire.org), a non-profit devoted to promoting free speech, free thought, and fair procedures in American higher education. (Disclosure: I am co-founder and current chairman of the board of directors of FIRE.)
In Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff spends considerable time and space laying out a wide variety of examples of campus censorship that, taken together, make the point that these are not isolated incidents. He describes the nature, uses, and impact, for example, of the infamous “speech codes” found nowadays on virtually all college campuses. Well over half of these codes would be demonstrably unconstitutional out in the real world. (FIRE’s most recent estimate is that 65% of liberal arts campuses have speech codes that violate constitutional free speech norms. And even the codes that pass constitutional muster seem oddly out of place on campuses purportedly devoted to vigorous discussion of controversial and often uncomfortable subjects.) Students are not only forbidden from saying things that might upset other students – particularly members of groups administratively deemed particularly vulnerable to hurt feelings – but prohibitions are often so vague that they easily trap the unwary student who becomes the target of an administrator or of another student.”…
You can find the entire piece on my Forbes.com Injustice Department blog
