In The Atlantic, Columbia professor Jon Cole writes:
Today, nearly half of a random sample of roughly 3,000 college students surveyed by Gallup earlier this year are supportive of restrictions on certain forms of free speech on campus, and 69 percent support disciplinary action against either students or faculty members who use intentionally offensive language or commit “microagressions”—speech they deem racist, sexist, or homophobic.
Noah Smith, a professor and Bloomberg View writer, tweeted:
69% of U.S. college kids think colleges should punish students and faculty for “microaggressions”
I saw this, in turn, because Cathy Young retweeted Noah’s tweet. I was suspicious of the claim – it’s difficult to believe that 69% of college students even know the word “microaggressions” – so I went and checked the survey (pdf link). In fact, students were never asked about “microaggressions.” Here’s what the relevant part of the survey says:
What the students were asked about – deliberately offensive slurs – is the opposite of microaggressions. (As Cathy said when I pointed this out to her.) And conflating “establish policies that restrict” with “punish” or even “disciplinary action” seems dubious.
(For a much more detailed response to Cole’s article, read Don’t Blame the Students on Academe Blog.)
This misleading reporting reminded me of last week, when Miles Goslett, editor of Heatstreet, tweeted:
.@clreid9 on the latest ‘safe spaces’ farce: straight white men are banned from an equality conference.
The link was to an article with the unambiguous headline Straight White Men Banned From Equality Conference; the story was just what you’d expect from its headline.1
And, again, the reporting is extremely misleading. The conference itself included four breakout sessions for (respectively) female, black. disabled, and lgbt members – but also included workshops, training sessions, and meals that were open to all members.2 The first sentence of the article3 gave the impression that conference had used the term “safe spaces” to explain the policy; I was unable to find any official conference statement or materials using that phrase.
The story was misreported in the same way in The Evening Standard and Drudge.
Which in turn reminded me of March, when lots of conservative publications – including major outlets like The National Review, The Daily Caller, Foxnews, and Campus Reform – reported that Southwestern University in Texas was cancelling its annual production of The Vagina Monologues because TVM is too white.
All these articles about the canceled show used the same source, an article in the Southwestern student newspaper4 – but that article didn’t say anything about a scheduled production being cancelled, nor did it mention an annual production. I contacted the author of the original article, who confirmed that there had never been an annual production of The Vagina Monologues at Southwestern, nor was there a production that had been cancelled.
It’s as if all these journalists uncritically repeat anything they hear which fits in with their pre-existing biases.
That’s hardly a problem that’s unique to this issue, unfortunately – just think of Rolling Stone and the Jackie story. Journalists would be well advised to start fact-checking campus horror stories rather than just repeating them.
- A followup article published days later did a slightly better job getting the facts straight, without admitting that they’d screwed it up previously. [↩]
- That’s last year’s schedule, but the reporting at Indy100 indicates that this year’s conference is much the same. [↩]
- The first sentence reads: “News that a university lecturers’ union has banned straight, white men from attending their equality conferences in a bid to create ‘safe spaces’ is deeply depressing.” [↩]
- Their website is currently offline, otherwise I’d link the article. [↩]
It seems to me that while a question using the word “microaggression” wasn’t asked, questions #1 and #3 refer to acts that are commonly considered microaggressions. Whether or not a generalization from that to “microaggressions” is justifiable is debatable, I suppose.
I’m taken aback that any of those proposed policies got any support, never mind that two of them actually got a majority of support. That’s depressing. It’s as if our schools don’t teach civics and the history and meaning of the Constitution anymore. At least not effectively.
Pretty common across the profession – whose members are dominated by Democratic party supporters – as far as I can see.
Non-sequitur?
To restate:
Pretty common across the profession – whose members include the entire political spectrum – as far as I can see.
I mean, it’s not as if right wing media doesn’t suffer from this problem as much as mainstream or left wing media.
Number 3 might be, but I’ve rarely seen political speech categorized as microaggressions, except within some really specific contexts. The root “micro” is in there for a reason — it specifically refers to the small things that add up over time. Things that most people would consider offensive aren’t microaggressions by definition — they aren’t micro.
Perhaps not. But I’m sure when they do they point out that Constitutional free speech guarantees apply to governmental action, not private universities (public unis are in an intermediate space). See, e.g., plagiarism that falls short of copyright infringement: legal, will usually get you kicked out if proven. Or the conservative private universities that ban protesting and other kinds of speech.
As a reply to the post in general, I also want to point out the important difference between “should be able to” and “ought to”.
There are plenty of private universities that require that faculty sign a Statement of Christian Faith.
That’s a good point I should have caught. Thanks!
Like Harlequin already pointed out, if the government is not preventing or punishing someone’s speech, it’s not a Constitutional issue. And even when it is the government (as in the case of a public university), there are still situations where speech becomes harassment. Should a student whose roommate constantly calls them an ethnic or religious slur just have to put up with it because it’s free speech? If a student turns every classroom discussion into a screed about “those people,” should teachers not be permitted to redirect, and if necessary to dock that student’s grade or even kick them out if they absolutely refuse to stop? If the school holds a Halloween or other costume party, do they have to allow kids in KKK or Nazi costumes?
And does your opinion on that change at all depending on who’s being targeted? Like, for example, if it’s an atheist calling their Christian roommate a “stupid Bible-thumping fundie” or showing up to the Inter Varsity meetings in a “pedophile priest” costume.
The questions in the original survey don’t have a lot of nuance, but they read to me as though a “should not be able to” answer to all three questions requires the school to allow the behavior I’ve mentioned. I don’t think that serves either the students who are required to put up with the harassment and mistreatment, or the students who are allowed to get away with it. After all, many employers can and will fire you for harassing your coworkers, or for using ethnic or religious slurs at work.
Wait. More Fundamentally…
If one beleives “colleges should not be able to establish policies that restrict” types of speech, then one is advocating a restriction of the First Ammendment.
Those who answered “should not” are the real PC censors. *
*at least in reagards to private colleges.
Goddammit…I see Harlequin already went there.
Amp, just a reminder, you have a 1A right to erase comment #4, if you fancy. Just make sure to wack #6 and #9 too, while your at it.
“Microaggression” looks to be the next “socially constructed” or “deconstruct” — a nifty jargon term that people latch onto without understanding it, and misuse until it doesn’t mean anything. That’s not just true of journalists. There’s a tumblr called the Microaggression Project, which collects people’s (mostly students’) experiences. Many of them are what I’d call macro-aggressions, or aggressions, full stop. Quite a few others are intra-group (“You don’t speak Chinese? Are you a Twinkie/banana?”), which probably doesn’t make them less micro-aggressive, but it looks to me like micro-aggressions are also a normal way of socializing people, including children. More on this in the blog post I wrote about it.
Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to take a look this summer at the professional literature on micro-aggression and see what the people who invented the concept meant by it; I’d better get started.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some college students would approve of restricting or punishing “micro-aggressions” if polled, but that wouldn’t mean they or the pollster understood what they were talking about. And I had to laugh when RonF was shocked! shocked! to find that many Americans favor restrictions on freedom of speech, as if they’d never been taught about the First Amendment. Who remembers what they were taught in Civics class? Hardly anyone. Certainly almost no one in my graduating class whom I know on Facebook remembers it.
First, the First Amendment does apply here directly if these questions were asked at publicly-funded schools. But it’s not clear if that was true. I would be surprised if at least some of the schools involved were not publicly funded, though.
But second; there are broader points in bringing up not just the Constitution but civics in general in the context of a university. The First Amendment was written because it was recognized by the Founders that the ability of a government to restrict speech is harmful to the civic body. So they put forward a legal barrier to restrict the government created by the Constitution. But while that idea is legally established for the Federal government by the First Amendment, the concept in general has broader application in American civic society. And if there is any institution in America where this idea applies, it would be in academia. It is a core function of a university to examine, to question ideas without restriction.
Here’s a excerpt from the University of Chicago’s statement on the topic of free expression that I think captures this:
If people claim that some other person’s expression is a “microaggression”, it’s entirely appropriate for them to have something to say about it. But it is not appropriate for the university itself to attempt to define, investigate or restrict such. A school that does otherwise is cheating on it’s core mission of actually educating it’s students and teaching them how to think, analyze, challenge and debate.
There’s some good stuff in this article by Jesse Singal (he of the terrible article about Dr. Zucker and trans activists, doing better here) about the original Cole piece. Some of it repeats what Amp says in this post, but he puts it in two important contexts: one, the history of poll results that show lots of Americans, in lots of eras, want to restrict free speech (so these numbers are not particular to Millennials or college students); and some numbers that were in reports Cole cited, but which he did not highlight:
I’ll add that there’s a possible explanation here in that students may not believe restricting microaggressions restricts free speech, in addition to others floated above.
Again, this is more complicated than you make it out to be. Public universities do have greater duties in this matter, but because of how they’re set up and run, not because of funding (the average is 37% of budget from state and federal funding [source]; in comparison, for example, the University of Chicago receives 14% of its operational budget from government grants alone–not including student loans, a major way the federal government invests in education). Also, universities have specific duties (educating students) and they can restrict free speech if it’s necessary to accomplish those duties (again: see plagiarism). The legal ability to impose those restrictions is strongly curtailed, more so than it is for private universities, but it’s not absent.
Edit for two things: one, it occurred to me after I wrote this comment that you may have meant to include those restrictions in your description of the applicability of the first amendment–the tone of your comment overall made me think not, but I could be wrong, and I apologize if so. And to be clear, also, I’m not disagreeing with you on the importance of the principles of free speech here; I just disagree that these poll results are obviously a result of people not understanding speech, when they’re as plausibly explained by people coming to a different conclusion when two deeply-held principles (free speech and fair treatment of all students) are coming into conflict.