In a recent controversy simmering on the Johns Hopkins University campus, university administrators seem to be giving credence to an observation by Abigail Thernstrom, who categorized left-leaning, politically correct institutions of higher education as “an island of repression in a sea of freedom.”
Instead of actually functioning as marketplaces of ideas — “to protect the university as a forum for the free expression of ideas,” as described in Johns Hopkins’ own student handbook — universities continue to punish what they categorize as “offensive” speech and behavior that do not conform to the acceptable, liberal views of politics, race or sexuality.
When posting invitations on Facebook.com, an online social networking site, for a “Halloween in the ‘Hood” party to be hosted by his Sigma Chi fraternity, junior Justin Park included some racist comments, crude stereotyping and such vivid descriptions as likening Baltimore to a “motherf—ing ghetto” and “hiv [sic] pit” — all of which drew the not-surprising accusation that the party was not only “offensive,” as critics of the party put it, but pointed to “institutionalized racism” at Johns Hopkins.
Apparently Johns Hopkins administrators found offense as well: on Nov. 20, Park was suspended from the university for one year and ordered to perform 300 hours of community service, read and write thoughtful reviews of 12 books, and participate in mandatory workshops on diversity and race relations.
There are troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question of fairness of punishing a student with a draconian, life-altering college suspension because he exhibited loutish behavior. He received his punishment, not because he participated in actual illegal harassing or intimidating behavior, but because some individuals were “offended” by speech that was not even made directly to them.
Students have a right to be offended by the speech — even hate speech — of their fellow students, but they also have a Constitutionally protected right to be offensive, provided their conduct is within the bounds of the law. When did universities stop teaching students how to think and instead begin indoctrinating them on what to think?
And the Johns Hopkins administration has previously demonstrated its own hypocrisy when dealing with issues of free speech. In May this year, 2,000 copies of the conservative, student-run Carrollton Record were confiscated from parts of campus by University officials who were unhappy with a published story that questioned why students’ funds were used for an April lecture by gay pornography director Chi Chi LaRue, an event sponsored by the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance (DSAGA). In the curious world of campus “free speech,” a lecture to students by a sexually deviant pornographer is not offensive, but reporting about it somehow is.
Administrators at Johns Hopkins seemingly hold the notion that free speech is only good when it articulates politically correct, seemingly hate-free, views of protected victim or minority groups. But legal scholars, including such jurists as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., have always been dedicated to the protection of unfettered speech, where the best ideas become clear through the utterance of weaker ones.
“If there is any principal of the Constitution,” he observed, “that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principal of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Dr. Richard L. Cravatts is director of Boston University’s Program in Book and Magazine Publishing at the Center for Professional Education.
