We were recently treated to a sterling ex ample of the new academic intolerance at work when the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University spon sored a lecture by Mari J. Matsuda on the sub ject of “Hate Speech, Sexual Harassment, and Academic Freedom.” A proponent of what is sometimes called critical race studies, Professor Matsuda was graduated from Har vard Law School and now teaches law at the University of Hawaii. Her articles decrying what it pleases her to call “hate speech” have put her in the vanguard of the academic jug gernaut to enforce political correctness.
Professor Matsuda began her lecture blandly enough by arguing that there were “limits of appropriate behavior” that ought to be observed on our campuses—who could argue with that?—but it soon became clear that she was a woman in the grip of an obses sion. Having traveled around the country for five years talking about sexual harassment, she finally had a revelation. “[U]nder the ap pearance of normalcy I came to see an epidemic of harassment and hateful behavior against women” on campus. Not only does she seem to think that every man is a poten tial rapist, she also believes that “Few women will leave our campuses without encounter ing sexual harassment in the form of un wanted advances or a hostile environment created by sexual comments, pornography, or other forms of misogyny.” Things are equally bad for blacks, homosexuals, etc. In her view, our campuses are rife with bad at titudes, and things are getting worse by the minute. “Students would call me anon ymously to tell me stories rich with the kind of detail that only comes from the truth.”
Professor Matsuda’s solution to this “emergency” is, quite simply, censorship. The university has rules against cheating, plagiarism, and theft, she reasoned, so why not against politically incorrect speech? She repeatedly assured her audience that she “believed” in the First Amendment “partic ularly in these days of growing militarism,” and that she was not against dissent, espe cially dissent directed against “the govern ment and the powerful institutions that af fect our lives.” But when a member of the audience asked about the phenomenon of political correctness on campus, Professor Matsuda responded angrily that the media’s reporting of the issue was “a complete lie.” She even seems to believe that partisan politics are somehow involved: “The recent indication that the Republican Party intends to exploit racial tension”—she never said what indication she had in mind—“was one hint among many that things are going to get worse before they get better.”
Early on in her talk, Professor Matsuda defined “hate speech” as “verbal attacks the only function of which is to wound and degrade by suggesting the inferiority of a group.” But as the evening wore on, it be came clear that “hate speech” was a highly elastic category that could be expanded to cover just about any contingency. While Professor Matsuda pretended to offer a re flection on free speech and the First Amend ment, her talk was in fact little more than a tissue of slogans and exhortations whose chief purpose was to provide a justification for enforcing politically correct attitudes. And this brings us to what is perhaps the most ironical development in the explosion of rules and regulations designed to prohibit “offensive” speech on campus. After spend ing more than two decades attempting to destroy every trace of propriety and mannerly decorum on campus—what, after all, could be more “bourgeois” than good manners?—our academic radicals are now promulgat ing codes as sweeping as they are vague to regulate speech and expression. The new speech codes are not aimed exclusively or even primarily at prohibiting racial slurs or what the law calls “fighting words”: protec tion from verbal abuse had already, and rightly, been part of the traditional notion of proper behavior. The presumed jurisdiction of the new regulations extends beyond con tent to the tone and attitude of what is said, written, published, and debated. “Mis directed laughter,” for example, is routinely regarded as a punishable offense on many campuses. In some cases, the new academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a stu dent newspaper was removed from his post because he had given “insufficient coverage” to minority events. What was once a demand for unlimited freedom has thus become a demand for unlimited censorship.
Far from representing a return to civility, as Professor Matsuda and others suggest, what we might call the hegemony of political cor rectness is nothing less than a campaign of in tellectual and moral indoctrination: an effort to recast the traditional, liberal ethos of the academy to make it conform to a mandatory multicultural radicalism. Like most modern tyrannies, the dictatorship of the politically correct freely uses and abuses the rhetoric of virtue in its effort to enforce conformity and silence dissent. Those who fifteen minutes ago were telling us that there is no such thing as truth, that all values are relative, that morality is strictly a “personal” matter are now clamoring for the imposition of strin gent controls on speech—ail in the name of a higher virtue and sensitivity. This union of moralism and radicalism, while hardly a novel mixture—it is indeed the stock in trade of left-wing tyranny—is particularly destruc tive in an institution dedicated to intellectual inquiry because it attacks the very basis for the free exchange of ideas. The question remains: is this what the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia stands for?
