The Threat to Freedom of Expression at American Universities

>> Stephen Haber: There is a broad consensus that something has gone terribly wrong at America's universities. Faculty report that they walk on eggshells in their classrooms, invited speakers are heckled. Students denounce one another, fearing one another, they keep their ideas to themselves. A necessary first step in fixing something that is broken is to diagnose the problem.

Let us therefore start with the fundamentals, universities play a crucial role in democratic societies. Their task is twofold, to conduct research that sorts out what is true from what is not and to teach future generations the critical thinking skills necessary to perform this analysis on their own. There is an inherent tension baked into sorting out what is true from what is not.

The reason is simple, when people disagree, it generates feelings of discomfort. That is especially the case when they realize that what they thought was true is shown to be false. Threats to the freedom to follow logic, reason, and evidence wherever it takes faculty or students, historically tended to come from outside universities.

Today, and for the last 20 years or so, threats to academic freedom have tended to come from inside universities, what has changed? The short answer is the growth of immense bureaucracies composed of non faculty administrators. University bureaucrats are not in the business of sorting out what is true from what is not, they are in the business of growing their bureaucracies.

It would not take lengthy argumentation to show that many university bureaucrats are also in the business of social engineering. The most generous interpretation of the motivation for social engineering by university bureaucrats is that they see their task as minimizing feelings of discomfort among students. To that end, university bureaucracies have redefined a word in common usage, harm.

Harm in common usage has multiple meanings, such as material harm or bodily harm. But what all those meanings have in common is that harm can be objectively established. Harm has now been redefined by university bureaucrats as feelings of discomfort, which means that it cannot be objectively established. It is a subjective state of mind, their goal is to keep students safe from those feelings.

The implications of this change are many, but first and foremost, it means that the goals of the bureaucrats, the duties of the faculty, and the aspirations of students are not aligned with one another. The bureaucrats, in fact, often come to see the faculty and the students as a problem that the bureaucracy has to fix.

My team and I wanted to get a sense of how widespread these anti intellectual social engineering initiatives are, so we did a study of the top 100 ranked colleges in the United States. If harm means feelings of discomfort and discomfort can be caused by a written or spoken word, then the bureaucratic solution is to deem certain words harmful and purge them.

14 of the 100 colleges and universities we looked at have or had a such lists of harmful words. Here is just a small selection of the harmful words in needs of purging, American immigrant, survivor, and man made. If harm can be caused by ideas, even those that might be implicit in a comment by a professor or an offhand remark by another student, then the bureaucratic solution is to police comments or offhand remarks.

University bureaucrats have therefore set up online bias reporting systems that allow students to report on one another, on staff, and on the faculty. These systems are Orwellian, they exist to make complaints about something that someone might have said. 84 of the 100 colleges we sampled have such bias reporting systems in place.

Shockingly, among those 84, 82% allowed students to file reports on one another and on the faculty anonymously. The consequences of these assaults and academic freedom are still being played out, in the short term, faculty and students are the losers. In the long run, it's American society that will bear the brunt of the damage as free expression is suppressed and the ability to discern truth and falsehood withers amongst its citizens and policymakers.

Academic freedom and freedom of expression are pillars of American society, their survival is crucial to a flourishing democracy.