PC Speech Codes
by Marty Lewinter
Free speech in academia is in jeopardy as a result of "politically correct" speech codes. These codes outlaw speech that can hurt other people's feelings.
On these politically correct campuses, guilt depends entirely on the perception of the alleged victim. Thus an innocent teacher (or student) could acquire the label "racist" upon uttering his disapproval of affirmative action, rap music, or Jesse Jackson's tirades, if someone feels offended. He could even get himself in hot water for discussing minority crime statistics. A teacher or student who voices a strong preference for Western culture can be accused of offending an American Indian, Caribbean, Eskimo, or Pakistani student. One college ordered its faculty to refrain from posting American flags on their doors after 9/11, for fear that such acts could make foreign students feel "uncomfortable."
A campus citizen who ridicules modern art (or anything else) can be accused of creating a "hostile learning environment." Satire, once a tool for getting one's point across (Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain come to mind), now puts its user on thin ice with "human resources" (the enforcers of speech codes) at many colleges.
Humor in the classroom (an invaluable tool for teaching mathematics) can subject a well-meaning professor to disciplinary action if a student "feels" offended by a joke. A joke about a divorce might offend a student whose parents are divorced. A joke about surgery could make a student who had a recent operation feel uncomfortable. The same goes for just about any joke. These speech codes are having a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
If a professor greets a student with a cheerful hello, the student can charge the professor with sexual harassment. The professor is immediately presumed guilty because he "made the student feel harassed." A professor who makes an overture of friendship such as, "Would you like to join me for lunch?" exposes himself to the now overplayed and trivialized charge of sexual harassment. Since the real thing (pressure to have sex—in the form of a quid pro quo) is lumped together with nonsensical offenses ("Good morning, Suzan!"), the genuine offense is indeed trivialized.
The upshot of this is clear. Free speech is in grave danger at our colleges—the institutions of learning, the marketplaces of ideas, the battlegrounds for all kinds of intellectual and artistic issues. When intelligent people enact insane policies, there is an error in their reasoning. So what is wrong with speech codes? After all, shouldn't people's feelings be protected? Let's have a look at this issue.
To begin with, feelings are not tools of cognition. They reflect the thinking we have done in the past—whether that thinking was correct or incorrect! If we feel fear when we see a loaded weapon pointed at us, it is because we understand through past thinking that we are in danger. If a man thinks that Hitler was a great leader, he will feel nostalgia when he sees a documentary about the Third Reich. If a man's faulty thinking led him to become a bigot, he will feel good when he sees injustices perpetrated against blacks or Jews. In short, feelings represent past thinking and carry with them the errors in that thinking.
It follows that feelings should not be used to determine criteria for establishing guilt. There is something very wrong with the argument, "You are guilty. You made the student feel uncomfortable." The error in this line of thought is simple: the student created his own emotional responses to the world. And if these are based on irrational thoughts or habits, the student is responsible for feeling offended! If a religious student takes offense to a teacher's rational analysis of religion by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Paine, the student is sorely mistaken and his emotions reflect his errors, not the teacher's insensitivity to the student's feelings.
In the great intellectual battles fought on our campuses, no one should be guaranteed a psychologically "safe" place. Our feelings may take a beating every now and then. That is the price of free inquiry. Professors and students of the world, unite on the issue of free speech! You have nothing to lose but the chains of political correctness.
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