Talking the talk: Have universities lost sight of why they exist?

• Author: Lomasky, Loren
• Position: Cultures & Reviews

When looking for vigorous, freewheeling speech, where do you turn? Certainly not to any conclave of politicians: Although the torrent of words they pour out on the campaign hustings and in legislatures is prodigious, the whole mass of it signifies little more than the plea, "I'd really like you to vote for me." Hierarchical organizations such as churches and corporations aren't friendly to talk that does not directly advance their missions. Like the military, their operative procedure is "don't ask, don't tell." Talk radio would fit the bill if its content weren't so uniformly trashy and unreflective. A few bars remain where undiluted give-and-take is dispensed along with the suds, but too many have gone the way of designer martinis and vapid ambience. By process of elimination, then, we had better be able to rely on our colleges and universities for speech that really matters, speech that is genuinely free.

Along with expert teaching and cutting-edge research, unconstrained discourse

is the university's distinctive reason for being. These three functions should not be thought of as separate, but rather as integrated aspects of the task of creating and disseminating knowledge. In order to attain new insights, investigators must be free to try out bold hypotheses that will then be criticized without fear or favor by their peers. Any holding back in this context stanches the flow of ideas.

Similarly, education--insofar as it goes beyond rote transmission and memorization--involves challenging students' accustomed beliefs and attitudes so as to determine which hold up under pressure and which need to be rethought, improved, or junked. The greatest educator of them all, Socrates, declared that the unexamined life is not worth living. He persisted in questioning what the eminent personages of his society held sacred until they formed a lynch mob to silence him. This Socratic understanding of uninhibited speech as the linchpin of research and education was echoed by Abelard in the Middle Ages and eloquently restated by John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman in the 19th century. Today the natural home of this ideal is the university.

That home is, however, under continuing threat of invasion. Many colleges and universities have instituted speech codes spelling out which ideas and words are offlimits. At one, the epithet "Water buffaloes!" was found by the resident oracles to be impermissibly racist. Another banned "inappropriate laughter" and managed to maintain a straight face while doing so. Elsewhere officious administrators have shut down student newspapers and formally disciplined writers and editors alleged to have printed offensive material. Distinguished faculty members have been the object of student protests for classroom remarks denounced as racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise contrary to the prevailing Zeitgeist.

Remarkably, those faculty members are often left to swing in the winds by skittish deans rather than defended. They have been subjected to mandatory "sensitivity" sessions, as have whole classes of entering students. Even before they manage to locate the library, freshmen are taught that speaking their mind can harm their academic prospects.

Unlike previous episodes of repression such as the McCarthyite inquisitions of the 1950s, these are almost always orchestrated by cadres within the university community itself rather than outsiders. Nonetheless, awareness of this endemic intolerance has reached a general public which finds itself mostly bemused by these teapot tempests and doesn't...