by Robert Brustein

The latest conflict in the academy between freedom of expression and ethnic and sexual diversity took place at Vassar College recently when minority students called for the banning of a school newspaper called "The Imperialist" because it criticized the creation of special social centers for minority and gay students. (The students were upset by the magazine's "insulting" comparison of these centers with a "ghetto" and a "zoological preserve.") The matter was resolved when the student association that financed "The Imperialist" withheld funds from the publication for one year. As is commonly known, events of this kind have been multiplying at universities over the last decades. The New York Times article that reported the incident reminds us of a low moment in 1997 at Cornell when university administrators defended as "symbolic" speech "the burning of conservative newspapers that printed a provocative article." There have been so many instances of this kind in recent years that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Right in Education (FIRE) was established in the nineties to watchdog campus freedoms. (It proved much more sensitive, under its founder, Harvey Silverglate, to violations on both the right and the left than it does today under its more conservative President, Greg Lukianoff.) Burning and banning newspapers is not to be equated with beheading blasphemers or blowing up dissidents. But the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense. We live in a society where it is no longer conceivable to say (as immigrant kids used to chant) "Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me." These days names seem to hurt people as much as stones, though they are just as often thrown back. It is easy enough to ask minorities to lighten up, toughen their skins, and confront real or imagined insults with speech of their own, as their Italian, Irish, and Jewish counterparts were forced to in the past (though the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the National Italian American Foundation bear some responsibility for everybody's current ethnic, racial and religious oversensitivity). This adjustment will happen in time, after which a whole new strain of immigrants will arrive to receive the taunts of the previous ethnic outsiders. But at what point does our need to protect minority sensibilities cancel out our concern for freedom of expression? And what does it mean for the society at large when the university, designed as a bastion of free inquiry, yields so easily to repressive pressure groups? Tocqueville was among the first to observe that there was a basic tension in our system--if not a basic disagreement--between the constitutional guarantees of liberty and of equality. Equal under the law, Americans were conspicuously unequal in many other ways, the most obvious being inequality of income. But there has also been a continuing tension between the need to speak what is perceived as the truth and the need to protect minority feelings--between the need to achieve excellence (now known as "elitism") and the need to maintain an illusion of egalitarianism (now known as "political correctness")--and this has inevitably led to some kind of speech suppression. It is sometimes forgotten that freedom of expression was an afterthought to the Constitution, and that freedom of the press, of religion, and of assembly were only guaranteed later under the First Amendment. The reason these freedoms (religion excepted) are so easily abrogated these days is that they don't really mean that much to ordinary citizens. They were designed for artists, journalists, writers, dissidents, radicals, and other such atypical Americans. Given the history of dissent in the academy, one would have expected that university students and university professors would also have cherished these freedoms, and would also have fought to protect them, but that seems to be less and less the case. In the fifties, the liberties of many universities were suspended under pressure of McCarthyism. Today, they are under siege from their own faculties, administrations, and student bodies.