The Silencing (14 page)

So what were the racial microaggressions that spawned the interruption of a class at the University of California at Los Angeles? One student alleged that when the professor changed her capitalization of the word “indigenous” to lowercase he was disrespecting her ideological point of view. Another proof point of racial animus was the professor’s insistence that the students use the Chicago Manual of Style for citation format (the protesting students preferred the less formal American Psychological Association manual). After trying to speak with one male student from his class, the kindly seventy-nine-year-old professor was accused of battery for reaching out to touch him. The professor, Val Rust, a widely respected scholar in the field of comparative education, was hung out to dry by the UCLA administration, which treated a professor’s stylistic changes to student papers as a racist attack. The school instructed Rust to stay off the Graduate School of Education and Information Services for one year.
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In response to the various incidents, UCLA also commissioned an “Independent Investigative Report on Acts of Bias and Discrimination Involving Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.” The report recommended investigations, saying that, “investigations might deter those who would engage in such conduct, even if their actions would likely not constitute a violation of university policy.”
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(HAIR) TRIGGER WARNINGS

College students typically revel in satirical reviews. Not so among the illiberal left, if you choose the wrong target. University of Michigan
student Omar Mahmood encountered the humorless speech police after he wrote a satirical column in late 2014 for the independent, student-run publication the
Michigan Review
. In a funny riff on political correctness on campuses, Mahmood—who describes himself as conservative and libertarian—wrote of his struggles as a man of color, having to face white privilege everywhere, including the “white snowflakes falling thick upon the autumn leaves, burying their colors.” He wrote sarcastically of the indignities he faced for being left-handed and how his “humanity was reduced to my handydnyss.” Mimicking the language of overwrought victimhood so prevalent among the illiberal left, he complained that, “the University of Michigan does literally nothing to combat the countless instances of violence we encounter every day. Whenever I walk into a classroom, I can hardly find a left-handyd desk to sit in. In big lecture halls, I’m met with countless stares as I walk up the aisle along the left-handyd column. The University cannot claim to be my school while it continues to oppress me.”
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The column seemed to have hit too close to home. Mahmood, who also wrote for the campus newspaper the
Michigan Daily
, received a call from an editor there after his
Michigan Review
column ran. The editor informed Mahmood that his column created a “hostile environment” and that someone on the
Daily
’s editorial staff felt “threatened” by what he
⁴⁰
wrote.
⁴¹
He was told he could only write for one of the two papers and, as a condition of staying on at the
Daily
—where they suspended his regular column—he would be required to write a letter of apology. Mahmood refused and FIRE intervened on his behalf. As of February 12, 2015, the paper had failed to reply to FIRE’s inquiries.

Mahmood’s column began with a “trigger warning,” a phrase that is likely meaningless to anyone not schooled in the jargon of lefty university groupthink. He was wryly mocking the illiberal left’s campaign in favor of “trigger warnings” on university syllabi so that students who might be “triggered” by certain content could opt out of completing assignments or attending classes that might upset them.

Oberlin College
⁴²
found itself in the midst of a firestorm in 2014 after telling its professors that they should “avoid unnecessary triggers and provide trigger warnings.” They defined a trigger as “something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual.” Professors were urged to educate themselves about “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The administrators explained, “Anything could be a trigger—a smell, song, scene, phrase, place, person, and so on. Some triggers cannot be anticipated, but many can.”

How could any professor be expected to teach in such an environment? More importantly, why should they? Oberlin College administrators asserted that literally any topic could potentially “trigger” a student. The guidance continued, “Sometimes a work is too important to avoid. For example, Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.” For such books, the university suggested professors issue a “trigger warning” because it would “show students that you care about their safety.” Some professors had understandably expressed concern that trigger warnings would give away the plot of the assigned books. The university administrators were unmoved, arguing that “even if a trigger warning does contain a spoiler, experiencing a trigger is always, always worse than experiencing a spoiler.”

Under these guidelines, it would be “unsafe” to assign most any book to most any student. Still, the professors were told to, “strongly consider developing a policy to make triggering material optional or offering students an alternative assignment using different materials. When possible, help students avoid having to choose between their academic success and their own wellbeing.” These suggestions were met with concern and incredulity by many of the professors. Political science professor Marc Blecher told a reporter, “It would have a very chilling effect on what I say in class and on the syllabus.” Meredith Raimondo, an associate dean who oversaw
the committee
⁴³
told the Associated Press that in response to protests from some faculty, the task force removed the controversial section and “plans to rewrite it with less ‘emphatic-ness.’”

Echoing the concerns of the Oberlin administrators, an editor of George Washington University’s student newspaper, Justin Peligri, wrote a 2014 column arguing for trigger warnings on syllabi as a “preventative measure” because the university “offers many politically-charged classes that explore controversial social issues.”
⁴⁴
Yes, that’s generally the point of a college education. Over at Rutgers, student Philip Wythe asserted in a 2014 column in the campus newspaper that his university should also employ the use of trigger warnings.
⁴⁵
Why? Because, he wrote, “literature courses often examine works with grotesque, disturbing and gruesome imagery within their narratives.”

What kind of works did Wythe think pose a danger to his fellow students’ mental health? He noted that, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s critically acclaimed novel,
The Great Gatsby
, possesses a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence. Virginia Woolf’s famous cerebral novel,
Mrs. Dalloway
, paints a disturbing narrative that examines the suicidal inclinations and post-traumatic experiences of an English war veteran. And Junot Díaz’s critically acclaimed work,
This is How You Lose Her
, observes domestic violence and misogynistic culture in disturbing first-person narrations.”

Thus Wythe helpfully suggested that
The Great Gatsby
might include the trigger warning: “TW: ‘suicide,’ ‘domestic abuse’ and ‘graphic violence.’”

Is that what you think about when you read
The Great Gatsby
: suicide, domestic abuse, and graphic violence? Or might this classic novel tackle themes much larger than these bizarre “trigger warnings” suggest?

If a college student is going to be traumatized by
The Great Gatsby
, then they are going to find day-to-day life unbearable once they step outside the child-care programs that are passing for universities today. Rather than truly educate students, the illiberal left would rather “protect” students
from some of the greatest works of American or world literature. Under these “trigger warning” rules, how would professors teach Dante or Shakespeare or just about any great book of literature beyond the narrowest politically correct confines?

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel,
The Giver
, the author portrays an authoritarian society that has eradicated all bad memories from the world. People know nothing of racism, sexism, disease, or anything that might make them feel sad or uncomfortable. The world is left with unthinking robots with human skin. A character in the book explains why the government had to do this: “When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong.” So, the illiberal left will choose for them.

The University of California-Santa Barbara is blazing the trigger warning trail. In March of 2014—the same month professor Miller-Young told the police officer that she attacked a student because she felt “triggered” by a demonstration
⁴⁶
—the student government formally called on the university to mandate that all professors employ trigger warnings. “A Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings” demanded a policy that would require professors to alert students of potential triggering material and “allow . . . students to miss classes containing such material without losing course points.”
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“Hypersensitivity to the trauma allegedly inflicted by listening to controversial ideas approaches a strange form of derangement—a disorder whose lethal spread in academia grows by the day,” free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate noted in the
Wall Street Journal
. “What should be the object of derision, a focus for satire, is instead the subject of serious faux academic discussion and precautionary warnings. For this disorder there is no effective quarantine. A whole generation of students soon will have imbibed the warped notions of justice and entitlement now handed down as dogma in the universities.”
⁴⁸

Students at Wellesley College employed the “triggering” concept to object to a statue of an underwear-clad man. One student started a
Change.org
petition insisting the statue be removed because it was “a source of
apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault.”
⁴⁹
Sruthi Narayanan, another offended student, posted a complaint that, “Our safe space—the only safe space for some of us—is being heavily compromised.”
⁵⁰
By a statue. Okay, a ridiculous statue. But if anything it deserved to be laughed at, not cast as a menacing threat. She lamented the “administration’s decision to put up such a triggering statue without student consent.” Another student, Megan Strait, complained that “not all students consented to this installation” and that due to the location students have no way to “opt out” of seeing the statue.

Do students think that once they graduate they will be able to “opt out” of anything they don’t like? If colleges and universities encourage that attitude, they are not educating students; they are perpetuating their immaturity and fostering intolerance.

One voice of sanity responding to the petition to ban Wellesley’s “Sleepwalker” statue was a student named Fani Ntavelou-Baum. She noted, “Reading this letter and the comments, I find what a student mentioned in one of my classes to be very true: ‘In Wellesley you somehow have a position of power if you are the most offended person in the room.’”

We need to abandon the childish and illiberal idea that universities are meant to be emotionally “safe” places where students are never offended, never have to defend their beliefs, or never have to encounter a view or idea or fact they dislike. The goal of a college or university should be developing intellectual rigor that comes from the free clashing of ideas.

FIVE

INTOLERANCE 201

FREE SPEECH FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE

              
Shut up he explained.

              
—RING LARDNER

T
he phrase “free speech zone” should be jarring to any American. The entire country is, and should be, a free speech zone. Yet on many college campuses, the public expression of views is relegated to tiny spaces requiring university preapproval for use. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), one in six of America’s four hundred top colleges has so-called “free speech zones.” The University of Cincinnati’s (UC) free speech zone accounted for just 0.1 percent of the campus. Students were required to register ten days in advance of their planned expression of free speech, and if they failed to do so could be charged with trespassing.
¹
The university abandoned their anti–free speech policy only after the campus branch of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a conservative student activist group, successfully sued the university with the help of FIRE.
²

It seems absurd, except to the illiberal left, that on a college campus, sharing ideas, handing out flyers, even distributing copies of the Constitution, has to be relegated to a limited space controlled by university administrators.
³
Free speech zones ostensibly exist to create a “safe” environment for the expression and exchange of ideas. In reality, they serve as tools to regulate and discourage dissent and free speech. These bureaucratic roadblocks dissuade students from engaging in peaceful expression and protest, both of which should be regular occurrences on college campuses. According to FIRE “many students must wait five to ten business days to use a free speech zone.” At many colleges, including Boston College, the dean of students has the authority to choose the time and place of any such demonstrations.
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In 2014, students at the University of Central Florida noticed that their free speech zone, which previously included the entire patio in front of the Student Union, had been reduced to a tiny area of inclined grass.
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