Comments on Free Speech and Punishment at Hopkins

• Language
• Posted by Un Known , Remove from TV and Radio on December 1, 2006 at 9:05am EST

• If it is ok to say certain expressions, because they are heard on radio and TV everyday. More accountablity should be placed on media outlets, because the theme of this party was definitely offense. Is the issue protecting free speech, or this naive student for making the comments?

• Party Invitation
• Posted by Rita McWilliams , Dr. on December 1, 2006 at 10:01am EST

• Racism is alive and well. It's just a little more covert than it was in the past. Often it masquerades as humor. Anyone doubting this should look up Moris Dees' group Southern Poverty Law Center who monitors bias crimes throughout the US and produces an Intelligence Report. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intpro.jsp

  In fact, the University might do well to look into their Teaching Tolerance program.

• Lighten UP
• Posted by Politically incorrect on December 1, 2006 at 11:05am EST

• Come on folks, as a nation we need to lighten up with the political correctness. These KIDS had a party, no different than a pajama party we had here on campus during homecoming week. Was it in poor taste? Who died and who is now the "Politically Correct" police? I believe that African-Americans need to start to demand that their leaders focus on issues like teen pregnancy, education, violence, drug abuse, prison rehab, equal access to higher education for those who qualify, AIDS, and other issues particularly those dealing in health of African-Americans. Too often our African-American leaders are quick to jump on issues like this one, or the "Cramer" dude who said some offensive things to his audience, or the big flap over the Confederate flag that flies on the state house grounds in South Carolina. Going on the news to demand apologies for this behavior and reparations instead of equal access to housing, health care, and education makes for good press because it inflames old issues and feelings and keeps our people from focusing on issues the leaders are reluctant to handle or are simply not qualified to address. Lighten up, focus on building not tearing down. We can continue to divide ourselves by ethnicity, but it's time we all join one race - the HUMAN race.

• free speech on campus
• Posted by HL on December 1, 2006 at 11:10am EST

• IHE has reported on many difficult campus issues where students' right to free speech conflicts with campus policies against harassment and intolerance. It's a tough question. Still, I'm uneasy describing FIRE simply as a free speech group, associated as they are with a narrow band of religious right critics of universities as bastions of secular humanism. It's not so much about freedom all the time as it is about attacking the notion of a tolerance policy.

• "The Dictatorship of Virtue"
• Posted by Jonathan Cohen on December 1, 2006 at 11:10am EST

• About fifteen years ago New York Times correspondent Richard Bernstein took a year's leave of absence to visit college campuses to report on several incidents that involved harsh punishments for faculty or students for alleged insensitivity towards minorities or women. They were incidents where someone took offense but no offense was intended and they resulted in suspensions or firings. He categorized them as part of the Jacobin period for a political movement whose origins were the protest movements of the 1960s which is why he titled his book "The Dictatorship of Virtue".

  There have been a whole rash of new incidents that illustrate that the problem still exists.

  1. As reported in this article, Johns Hopkins suspended a fraternity for its "Halloween in the Hood" party. A member of the fraternity who advertised the party in facebook was suspended from the school for a year and ordered to do 300 hours of community service, read 12 books and write reports on them (which books and who determines them) and to undergo diversity training in diversity workshops.

  2. At Duke, on what were almost certainly false allegations of rape, three students have been indicted and suspended from school, the lacrosse team season was cancelled, 88 professors signed a letter condemning them, the school administration never publicly criticized the outrageous violations of due process, and the lives of three clearly innocent students were severely damaged.

  3. At Dartmouth the president of the university very publicly condemned a student for writing an article in the Dartmouth review criticizing a native American student for taking offense at displays of the "Indian" symbol that used to be the school mascot.

  4. At DePaul University, some racist and anti-semitic graffiti was written on the walls of one of the dorms. Since the graffiti also included a statement attributing authorship to the College Republicans, it is believed by the school's chief investigator of the incident and the entire executive team that it was an attempt to implicate the College Republicans.

  A group on campus, the DePaul Conservative Alliance that has pretty much the same membership as the DePaul Conservative Alliance, had staged a protest against affirmative action that antagonized some portion of the campus. They claimed that the protest constituted harassment and demanded that the conservative students be punished.

  Though the actual perpetrators were never found, the graffiti hoax was viewed by the campus administrators as payback. Yet the campus has never been informed that the incident was in all probability a hoax, and the school has used the incident to justify renewed efforts to combat hate on campus. In a sane world you would think that the school administration would want to assure its African-American and Jewish students that there were not a bunch of bigots running around campus. But far from it, they informed the campus and the local media that the affirmative action protest had contributed to the climate that led to the graffiti.

  5. At Columbia University a talk on immigration by a member of the Minutemen group that actively opposes illegal immigration was invited to speak by the College Republicans. He was prevented from speaking by a group of students who rushed the stage and halted the talk. The entire scene was made public by a video that was widely distributed on the internet. The Columbia administration while deploring the action has shown obvious reluctance to identify and punish those responsible. This stands in stark contrast to their prompt suspension of the school's hockey club for inserting the phrase "Don't be a pussy, play Columbia hockey" in a flyer recruiting people for their team.

  6. At Ball state, a couple of students threw a pie at David Horowitz as he attempted to enter a room to give a speech at Ball State.

  7. At a Halloween party at the home of the university president, a student dressed up as a suicide bomber conducted mock beheadings and posed with a smiling president of the university. Reportedly she had jokingly remarked to him "How did you get by the security".

  If you go to the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education you will find a wealth of similar stories. They reflect an academic culture that is more concerned with preserving political and social narratives than in telling the truth. They also demonstrate administrative priorities at campuses that is more concerned about buying protection from accusations of insensitivity than protecting the individual rights of the members of their communities. When "bearing false witness" is ignored in favor of false accusations that preserve the narrative of a campuswide culture of racial and gender oppresion, there is a problem. We ignore it at our peril.

• Harrassment?
• Posted by Matthew on December 1, 2006 at 11:10am EST

• “There is a difference between expression of opinion and harassment,” he said.

  How can sending out invitations to a party through the Facebook be construed as harrassment?

  Should Johns Hopkins publish guidelines for acceptable Facebook party invitations, so that other students can avoid being suspended for three semesters?

• what other ideas do you want to supress
• Posted by Larrry on December 1, 2006 at 11:10am EST

• “Un Known” I don’t get it. While the school is arguably correct that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to them – no matter how silly their actions are – you seem to be arguing that the government (likely the FCC) should fine or suspend the licenses of media outlets because of the ideas that they convey. Do you really feel that some ideas are so dangerous that you are unable to meet them with your own arguments?

  Dr. McWilliams, There is no indication that any of the students involved committed any actual crimes, nor is there any indication that the party or the invitation caused someone to commit any crimes. (Oh, by the way, I am a supporter of the SPLC in money and time.)

• Ridiculous overreaction
• Posted by Robert Griffith on December 1, 2006 at 11:11am EST

• Given that a private institution can have whatever silly policies they deem necessary, they are still obligated to follow their own rules. Suspending a student for a web posting that "offended" is a ridiculous overreaction. If you're offended by the web site, DON'T LOOK AT IT! Did the offender demonstrate bad taste and poor judgement - yes. Is that worth a suspension, no.

  Bringing the word "harrassment" into the discussion is also troubling. How can a web site harrass anyone? Has some malicious computer genius figured a way to make the web site pop up unwanted on the computers of the hypersensitive?

  Time to send another check to FIRE.

• Political Correctness as Brand Management
• Posted by Eveningsun at Small Public College on December 1, 2006 at 1:00pm EST

• I have some reservations about FIRE. The group's free-speech commitment is genuine and applied evenhandedly. On the other hand, its board skews heavily to the right and, more importantly, its "feeder system," if you will, somehow works mostly to attract reports of censorship of conservative viewpoints. I don't think the bias is intentional. It's just that cases like "Halloween in the Hood" get forwarded to FIRE, whereas cases like (say) the massive attempt to prevent Michael Moore from speaking at Utah Valley State College barely register on FIRE's radar. I mention this because even though FIRE is a good organization, staffed by good people who do good work, its website creates a false impression that feeds into the myth of "liberal PC academia." Also, FIRE has a habit of overgeneralizing. Consider, for example, Mr. Cohen's claim above, that FIRE's free-speech cases "reflect an academic culture that is more concerned with preserving political and social narratives than in telling the truth." Well, yes and no. First, there are thousands of campuses across the country, and I'm not sure that a few dozen cases like the one at JHU can be said to reflect anything so broad as an "academic culture." Second, if the sort of PC nonsense we see at JHU "reflects" anything at all, it reflects not "academic culture" generally but quite specifically an ADMINISTRATIVE culture. The culprits are usually housing and "student life" officials, not faculty. Third, those housing, student life, and administrative officials strike me as concerned less "with preserving political and social narratives" as with keeping students sheltered and happy, and of course with preserving the institution's public image (which, as Mr. Cohen points out, is bound up with "political and social narratives" of racial harmony). It's not about mind control (JHU's administration doesn't care what students actually believe) but about image control, about brand management. Most of FIRE's caseload is not the result of the "left-wing PC takeover of the universities." It's the result of colleges and universities adopting a business mentality and prioritizing PR over free speech. Such a phenomenon can hardly be characterized as "left wing."

• Posted by Larryt on December 1, 2006 at 2:10pm EST

• Eveningsun articulated my thoughts about FIRE quite well. They are 1) evenhanded; but 2) somehow biased in favor of conservative cases. Moreoever, his point about “band management” is well taken. Rather than professors dealing with academic issues, most administrators are concerned with how ideas look to the outside world. This, of course, has nothing to do with academic freedom, and in public universities often runs afoul of the First amendment.

  While I am sure grands of JHU will always get jobs, some schools have suffered because of the perception that their students are not exposed to ideas in the same was as others. For those reasons, many simply won’t respond to resumes from applicants that graduated from schools with a reputation from religious ideology. So, every administrator that makes a decision to suppress an idea must realize that people will look upon the graduates as having been exposed to less ideas.

• Posted by Matthew on December 1, 2006 at 2:40pm EST

• Eveningsun, your point about "administrative" culture and administrators operating from a PR rather than a free-speech mindpoint is a good one. But I think we have to keep in mind that a lot of students--it's debatable just how many, but a lot of them, especially certain student organizations, like those which promote far-left causes--at these schools are highly complicit in this sort of posturing and aggressive policing of language.

• Faculty vs. Administrators
• Posted by thomassowellfan on December 1, 2006 at 2:45pm EST

• It is often the case today that administrators at colleges and universities obtain a master's in student personnel and/or a doctorate in higher education leadership (or some other similarly named program usually located in an institution's Education department). It is often the case that these types of programs are both less rigorous than an acedemic program and attract less qualified candidates in the first place. This in turn means that administrators often times do not have the intellectual depth needed to be effective leaders within higher education. They simply don't understand the give and take, the "sifting and winowing" of ideas, that must necesarily take place within higher education to arrive at the truth.

  Thus we often times, as FIRE's website will attest to, come across students and faculty who are subjected to outrageous investigations and sanctions over incidents that should never result in any type of punitive scrutiny.

• Free speech and expression in the university
• Posted by Thomas A. Gregor on December 1, 2006 at 4:35pm EST

• The right to free speech and expression within the university should never be narrower than in the wider society. Efforts to police speech and expression are ultimately efforts to control thought, and the results are exactly like those reported at Johns Hopkins and in Jonathan Cohen's excellent discussion above. I hope Mr. Cohen will publish his remarks more formally -- they are compelling and need to be heard by a broad audience.

• blame the students?
• Posted by Larry on December 1, 2006 at 4:35pm EST

• Matthew, How can students be “complicit” in this? These decisions are not made by the students. The administrators are making public statements. The policies are not written by the students. We should just admit that because undergraduates are universally despised, schools assign the most idiotic people to work with them. (This is a pretty close paraphrase of what a college president told me.) Since the undergrads are treated like babies and not adults, there really is no need, in the mind of their handlers, to be too concerned about their intellectual development or inquiry.

  Mr. sowell, Your comments are remarkably constructive. Therefore, I think that FIRE and others should differentiate between idea-suppression by faculty, and idea suppression by administrators. I have rarely (with two exceptions out of about 100 that come to mind) seen faculties advocating censorship the way administrators do.

• There is a problem
• Posted by Jonathan Cohen on December 1, 2006 at 5:10pm EST

• I agree that there is an administrative culture that is harbored in offices of diversity and within student affairs and residence hall staff that is caught up in the culture of "managing diversity". Their role is mostly to make sure the school is not embarrassed. Like most bureaucracies, it is self-serving and tends to grow without any real justification coming from the needs of the institution it is supposed to serve.

  But there is also a deeper problem and it affects the education of students. To quote from Richard Bernstein's book, The Dictatorship of Virtue,

  "To put matters bluntly, the multiculturalist rhetoric has the rest of us on the run, unable to respond for fear of being branded unicultural or racist, or (to get into the trendy academic lingo) complicit in the structures of hegemony imposed by the Eurocentric patriarchy and the strategies of domination.
  In such a way does multiculturalism limit discussion; it makes people afraid to say what they think and feel; it presents dubious and cranky interpretations and analyses as self-evident, indisputable truths. It often operates, not through usual means of civil discourse and persuasion, but via intimidation and intellectual decree. It rewrites history. It sanctions a cultivation of aggrievement, a constant claim of victimization, an excessive, fussy, self-pitying sort of wariness that induces others to spout pieties. And that, in turn, covers public discussion of crucial issues with a layer of fear, so that we can no longer speak forthrightly and honestly about such matters as crime, race, povery, AIDS, the failure of schools, single-parenthood, affirmative action, racial preferences, welfare, college admissions, merit, the breakup of the family, and the disintegration of urban life."

  Bernstein's description is if anything more pertinent today than it was twelve years ago when his book was published. And if people are afraid to say what they feel about the issues mentioned in his quote, it is certainly a problem that affects academic life.

• Posted by Matthew on December 1, 2006 at 5:20pm EST

• Larry,

  From the article: "The Black Student Union had met with Park after the Halloween party and later held multiple protests over the issue. Its members were angry about both the invitations that Park had written and the general theme of the party. Leaders from the group did not respond to multiple requests for comment."

  This is not to say that the Black Student Union is responsible for the suspension. And I don't mean that they don't have a right to be upset.

  But if you also look at Jonathan Cohen's list of incidents in the comments section here, you'll see that #5 and #6 were at least initiated by students.

  And in many cases, the administration steps in because student groups protest, raise a fuss, or make demands on the administration to do something. This happened a lot when I was an undergraduate.

  That doesn't excuse the administration from being excessively punitive.

• Posted by Eveningsun at Small Public College on December 1, 2006 at 6:25pm EST

• Jonathan, there may or not be the "deeper problem" you mentioned. But consider for a moment Bernstein's claim (which you quoted) that "we can no longer speak forthrightly and honestly about such matters as crime, race, poverty, AIDS, the failure of schools, single-parenthood, affirmative action, racial preferences, welfare, college admissions, merit, the breakup of the family, and the disintegration of urban life.” First, the statement is simply false: many can and do speak forthrightly about these issues, from a variety of perspectives. I do it every day in class. (We falsely generalize from individual incidents like the Summers fiasco.) Second, note the common element unifying Bernstein's otherwise disparate items: they're all problems that conservative nonacademics lay at the door of individual irresponsibility and that academia generally tries to understand in social terms. I suspect Bernstein's real beef is simply that academics, at least in the human sciences, quite rightly reject "individual virtue" as an explanatory concept. (Note that, when complaining about the dearth of conservatives in the professoriate, conservatives tend to explain the dearth not in terms of the generally mercenary values and self-centered career choices of individual conservatives but in terms of some structural "bias" in academe.) Too many conservatives want to reduce large-scale phenomena to individual choice and to dismiss the idea of social determination as mere excuse-mongering. That can make for effective politics but is unlikely to ground an effective academic study. You're right that many nuance-challenged students come away from it all feeling aggrieved or victimized, and no doubt many of these, perhaps through a process of self-selection, go on to become higher-ed administrators. Anyway, whatever the solution to the PC problem is, it can't be to replace rigorous (but easily misinterpretable) theories of social determination with simplistic accounts of individual virtue and choice. You can't fight stupidity with stupidity.

• Not a public institution
• Posted by mp on December 2, 2006 at 7:00am EST

• Ok Sowell fan: this is a market informing decision. As FIRE pointed out with two of their quotes, John Hopkins is not a public institution. The market for students or other support regulates the actions of the institution. Bob Jones also has a restrictive code of conduct – are they too nut-job to be taken seriously as really violating free speech, or do we all trust that the students who want to attend that institution know what they are getting into.

  It seems like the students have forgotten that they represent the school that they attend. If a private university wants to remind them of their standard by suspending their student status, they have the choice of continuing at John Hopkins or finding another university. It is the same choice that their supporters also have.

  You should check out the Tim Wise article “Racism and Free Speech on a College Campus”. (http://www.blackcommentator.com/165/165_think_wise_college_campus_pf.html)

• Promises
• Posted by thomassowellfan on December 2, 2006 at 9:40am EST

• MP
  As noted on the FIRE web site the Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Student Conduct Code requires that students must “protect the university as a forum for the free expression of ideas.” I agree that as a private institution Johns Hopkins has the right to set the rules as they wish, however, when they promise one thing and then deliver something completely different then they have breached an ethical commitment to its students.

  Altough Bob Jones is a very restrictive university students who go there know what they are getting into when they first enroll. The students at Johns Hopkins, based on the tradition of that school, have a fairly reasonable expectation that they are entering an environment where the free exchange of ideas is not only welcomed but expected. The free exchange of ideas, and the excellent learning environment that it produces would be a fundamental reason why Johns Hopkins has a much better reputation than Bob Jones when it comes to academics.

  Also the link you provided does not work and the Black Commentator site requires a subscription.

• what about accidental exposure
• Posted by Larry on December 2, 2006 at 1:25pm EST

• Thomas Sowell,

  You bring up an interesting point regarding BJU. While it is true that many employers won’t hire people from that school because what is regarded as a lack of intellectual exposure, most people tend to think that the entire point of college is to expose people to new ideas. Therefore, even if there are students entering BJU whose main goal in life is to avoid exposure to new ideas, there is a slight chance that they might be accidentally exposed to some ideas, and BJU and similar schools might be unable, as an educational institution to fulfill those students needs.

• Posted by mp on December 2, 2006 at 2:05pm EST

• The university evidentially also decided to uphold section E of the code: harassment. And free expression has never meant expression without consequences. The market can still judge a private institution about whether or not they are upholding their standards.

  Employers might want to know that universities check racism and educate about it in terms of appropriate conduct before that student comes to work for them. Underrepresented students might want the safety of knowing that the school will pay attention to what is harassment, even if majority populations don’t immediately understand.

  Here is another link to the same article.
  http://www.civilrights.org/issues/hate/remote-page.jsp?itemID=28372105
  and part two http://www.civilrights.org/issues/hate/details.cfm?id=39954

• Posted by LArry on December 2, 2006 at 8:45pm EST

• MP, Just wondering how you conclude that this is “harassment.” If so, can I complain that Dilbert and “The Office” are harassment, too? As a practical matter the damage that you people did to my self image in such movies as “Revenge of the Nerds” and “Apocalypse Now” was great. But nobody called it harassment.

  For the most part, employers don’t care what JHU students do. Only if the cumulative effects are so big as to make people consider JHU and BJU in the same breath will its reputation suffer. Until then it will just be a party school wither a better-than-average reputation.

  I appreciate your efforts to stifle some ideas in favor of others. However, a better route might be to make the students that you are trying to help into universally recognized scholars, rather than professional victims.

• Posted by D on December 2, 2006 at 9:25pm EST

• Here are the 1st and 2nd invitations, available at www.thefire.org. I presume they are real.

  http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/149b98b36d399c96318250cf47b50fc5.pdf

  http://www.thefire.org/pdfs/26afaf214dde75f5de1214663e4ca2cd.pdf

  Please, that's it? His entire professional future is threatened for THAT? Anyone who takes offense to this obviously light-hearted joke seriously needs to grow a backbone. I see nothing in either of these invitations that Dave Chapelle, Chris Rock or any other Black comedian hasn't said a thousand times before. What does THAT say about our culture?