The Generational Swindle

American students of these times are victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions. My own academic cohort appears to have no shame, and it has moved on campus after campus from its Free Speech Movement to its speech codes; from its struggle against mandatory religious chapel to its struggle for mandatory sensitivity “training” in matters of race, sex, and sexuality; and from its freedom to smoke pot openly on college lawns to its war against the kegs and spirits — literal and metaphorical — of today’s undergraduates. It is always revealing to look at policies enacted in the early ’70s to protect student rights from “traditionalist” administrators and faculty. What a different song the “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” crowd sings today — “Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.”

At Penn, where I teach, for example, the faculty and administration, in the 1970s, overwhelmingly passed a set of Guidelines on Open Expression that stated plainly, “The substance or the nature of the views expressed [by students or faculty] is not an appropriate basis for the restriction upon or encouragement of an assembly or demonstration.” Indeed, the Guidelines proclaimed that they took precedence over any other university policy. By the 1980s, however, with the authors of such policies themselves faculty and administrators, and students now deemed children in need of chastisement or protection, Penn had its speech codes, and the Guidelines on Open Expression were an archaeological artifact for politically incorrect students, an artifact buried under new repressive policies and new double standards.

I spoke at Colgate University this past Thursday, and reviewed their policies before speaking. One subject of debate at Colgate, as at most universities today, is the fate of politically incorrect students who dissent in politically correct classrooms. What are their rights? What are their protections against inappropriate political grading of their work? No one I spoke to at Colgate — student or faculty — was aware of what was still operative policy there, buried toward the end of the Student Handbook. Passed in January 21, 1974, by the Committee on Faculty Affairs to protect radical students from traditionalist professors, Colgate’s policy on “Student’s Freedom of Expression and Inquiry” got it just right, taking its cue, knowingly or unknowingly, from the AAUP’s own statement of student rights. It should be the standard everywhere—from Colgate, to Columbia, to Berkeley, to Citrus College — although it sadly is the standard almost nowhere:

Grievance Policy

Student’s Freedom of Expression and Inquiry.

At its meeting of January 21, 1974, the Committee on Faculty Affairs approved the following statement:

The professor in the classroom and in conference should, consistent with the nature of the course, encourage free discussion, inquiry, and expression. Student performance should be evaluated solely on an academic basis, not on opinions or conduct in matters unrelated to academic standards

Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion, but they are responsible for learning the content of any course of study for which they are enrolled.

Students should have protection through orderly procedures against prejudiced or capricious academic evaluation. At the same time, they are responsible for maintaining standards of academic performance established for each course in which they are enrolled.

If every campus were capable of summoning the will to protect its students in this manner, what a victory it would be for critical mind, education, restraint of abusive power, and individual liberty.