perfidy

Not that it's anything new, but as I hurtle on into my future as a professional curmudgeon, college kids are really starting to bug me. Don't get me wrong - by and large, they're a great bunch, all shiny-eyed and eager. I especially love the way each new generation rediscovers nifty funtime ideas like Marxism, Eco-Feminism, and Not Bathing and latches on to them like they were their own. 

But I worry. I'm a partial alum of the University of Massachusetts (in that I got my Masters' there), where they just had that ridiculous flap over changing mascots from the evil, bad, gendered and violent Minutemen to the gentle, majestic Gray Wolves (see previous posts). That incident is part of a grand tradition of colleges and universities trying too hard to protect the student body from opinions that may be alien or offensive to them. That's a huge mistake.

The Boston Phoenix, which I pick up from time to time when we're low on cat litter at home, had a decent article this week on this topic. You can read it here. The article argues there is a single

. . . assumption underlying most speech codes: namely, that there is a serious conflict between civil rights and civil liberties, and that members of diverse groups will never have full civil rights to an equal education without muzzling ideas that might make the campus feel less welcoming. 

This "civil rights vs. civil liberties" paradigm rests on the belief that when a person feels discomfort as a result of exposure to racist, sexist, homophobic, or other unpleasant words and ideas, such discomfort is, in and of itself, a civil-rights injury equivalent to being turned away from the lunch counter for being black, denied a job for being a woman, or beaten up for being gay. In this view, emotional discomfort is the essential element of a civil-rights injury. Thus, students have a right not to be offended or hurt by exposure to ideas that could diminish their feelings of self-esteem; they are - as a matter of civil rights - entitled to a comfortable and "safe" emotional environment free of such ideas. 

This bizarre and dangerous expansion of commonly accepted notions of civil rights distorts the debate over free speech on campus. What is at stake here is not, properly speaking, a conflict between civil rights and civil liberties: rather, it is a question of whether protection from emotional discomfort deserves independent status as a "right"  and, if so, whether it is a fundamental right that should compete with or (as has happened at Shippensburg and the vast majority of colleges and universities today) supersede a university's core intellectual mission. When college administrators say that students are entitled to a "safe" environment, they mean something very different from what people in the world outside the ivy walls mean by "safe." Indeed, for at least two decades now, it has been permissible to say things in Harvard Square that would be punishable if said in Harvard Yard. . . .

I'm not yet thirty, and I already feel like I don't understand what kids these days are about. I worry that we are raising a crop of college students who will finish their education without ever having to question or defend their basic assumptions about life. Isn't debate, and the interplay between conflicting points of view, an integral part of education? If so, the current crop American college students run the risk of ending up less educated than any students in recent history. How do you know you hate Republicans, if you've never met one, much less debated them? There is nothing worse than untested beliefs, and nothing more obnoxious and arrogant than a college student who has never had to defend themselves. Except the Norwegians. 

N.B.: Critical Mass (linked in my blogroll to the left) is a great clearinghouse for issues of this kind.