The Board of Trustees makes the rules. Photo by Sarah FaulknerWallace Golding - Contributerwsgoldin@uab.edu
I resent the American collegiate education system, but not for the reasons many of you may think. It is not the outrageous cost of my education that angers me, nor is it the rampant corruption that seems to have taken university officials by storm. Rather, it is the overriding and counterintuitive themes of censorship and political correctness on college campuses that I find so irritating. Speech codes and free speech zones are components of a broken machine, and they are ruining your college education.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am in no way advocating for the use of discriminatory speech on college campuses or anywhere else in society. I do not condone the practice of derogatory or slanderous language, and I am not suggesting that we all abandon our personal filters.
Instead, I am proposing that we all reconsider why we spend thousands of dollars each year on tuition.
In the last decade, several universities, including dear old UAB, have collectively rebranded their speech codes, defined as any policy that inherently limits students’ right to free speech, as portions of anti-harassment policies. While the existence of policies banning discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, gender or race are necessary, university administrators have abused the tag of “anti-harassment” by creating overtly and deliberately broad definitions of harassment. Let me clarify; currently, UAB’s Non-Academic Code of Conduct prohibits “any unwelcome comments” from one individual to another. With a policy as wide open and ambiguous as this, practically any class discussion can result in a student being punished.
This phenomenon of coddling college students is omnipresent elsewhere, also. According to The Atlantic, Harvard law students requested in December 2014 that professors not teach rape law or use the word “violate” because it may cause distress for some students. Additionally, the article reports that professors within the University of California system are explicitly prohibited from saying “America is the land of opportunity” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” because these phrases could be perceived to contain microagressions based on race.
Furthermore, many universities have adopted “free speech zones” that prohibit students from assembling in areas other than those designated by the university.
These policies intended to ensure that nobody’s feelings get hurt actually oppose everything a university is supposed to advocate. In a Bloomberg article, Megan McArdle summarized this concept by writing that “a university education is supposed to accomplish two things: expose you to a wide variety of ideas and help you navigate through them; and turn you into an adult, which is to say, someone who can cope with people, and ideas, they don’t like.” With speech codes and free speech zones, all that is left is the credential of a college degree, but is that credential really that valuable if you are incapable of handling viewpoints that do not perfectly align with yours? The ability to experience other cultures, religions, philosophies, and viewpoints on a daily basis is what makes a college education so beneficial, but inhibitory rules and intentionally broad anti-harassment policies are making this nearly impossible.
