There’s a specter at the University of Connecticut, and a recent op-ed argues that the threat of freedom of speech looms large over campus politics. The problem I have writing this response article is the same I have at an all-you-can-eat buffet, I’m not entirely sure what I want to start on.
I’m not sure if Stein’s argument is from malice or ignorance. I think it’s generally a bad practice to assume other’s motivations. However, Kevin Williamson aptly understands the problem of writers like Stein, “Journalists are people who have had the bad taste to learn in public.” I hope that writing this article will provide some additional context about the situation, and while I will criticize the arguments, I hope that this leads to a constructive dialogue. I’m happy that Stein cares about this issue, and I wish more people cared about free speech, regardless of the side of the argument.
Let’s start with some context. Like many other political squabbles most onlookers do not come in with the same information as people involved in the dispute.
To begin, I’ve been invested in freedom of expression for a while, even prior to much of the tension on campus about the topic. I’ve always thought that censoring ideas was antithetical to learning. I shared the Student Coalition for Social Justice’s concerns and saw reviving the spirit of their petition urging UConn to preserve protected expression on campus. Here is their speech code memo.
I show this to emphasize that although my speech has been mostly protected on campus, I believe one needs to be ever-vigilant about the threat of censorship. This does not mean that free speech is easy. Many of the people who free speech proponents defend are later opponents of rights when it comes to people they dislike. While I’m probably not going to convince someone antagonistic to speech that good ideas beat out the bad, I want to provide the tools to better assess what me and fellow activists are talking about so that if one disagrees, one can better understand why.
One article that made me controversial on campus was End the Inquisition: Abolish the position of Chief Diversity Officer in Undergraduate Student Government. I openly admit that this article was intended to provoke, because I saw it as troubling that an anonymous bias reporting system was being used, without any form of due process, or transparency, up to the judgement of an employee of UConn on the basis of discretion to remove on comments ranging from age, disability, ethnicity, gender, nationality, physical appearance, politics, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, veteran status and more, before a trial. Making matters worse, the incidents referred to could be pretty much any statement. The list includes “email or internet messages (outside student government), offensive classroom comments, verbal comments, visual representations, social media posts, written slurs, etc.”
Imagine for a second that tomorrow the United States Government decided that Fuck the Police was offensive and that all black lives matter supporters were offensive because they posted criticisms of the beloved police on social media. Without a public trial, they are removed from their organizations and are told that sharing the details of what happened was confidential. The point that I’m getting at is that its important to be broadly protective of freedom of speech, regardless of the ideology. I want to emphasize that advocates for freedom of expression like myself don’t care about the title of a position that censors. I don’t see my investigative journalism undermining diversity. Instead, I see myself as holding accountable dishonest people who cloak their censorious tendencies in language of D&I. Diversity suffers when grifters ruin its image. I direct those who think I’m arguing this cynically to my high school graduation speech where I directly and in an unqualified matter argue that diversity is a compelling goal.
The original Daily Campus article I wrote had the editorial team remove some of the evidence I originally wanted to put in the article because it would implicate a UConn student doing a bad, and probably illegal thing. However, sunshine is often the best disinfectant for bad behavior.
Evidence on Ridiculous Bias Report
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Following this article, the Undergraduate Student Government had a freak-out session (which is conveniently recorded with a transcript), before they decided to unconstitutionally (if you want to check yourself, page 8 point 9) issue a vote-of-no-confidence against Mike, slandering him.
Much of the initial opposition to the bill I authored came as a result of criticizing Damani Douglas, and many in student government saw this opposition as solidarity protecting students of color. However, upon closer examination, this perspective should fall apart. Reading the UConn Statement I authored, I fail to see any reason that this should have been interpreted as racist or evil. On the contrary, it appears that many students, misled by people being dishonest, have failed to hold student government accountable.
As pressure mounted, I became more involved when I noticed other censorial tendencies of student government, several more of my friends were threatened with bias reports for disagreeing with a Defund The Police addition on all bills.
I became more vocal about the need to seriously revisit our standards of free expression because with the threat of being officially called a racist or insensitive and censored without any due process is a dangerous arena for a student government to step into.
One high profile instance of what happened when we tried to oppose the politicization of student government was condemning the student body president, my friend Michael, as a white supremacist. Campus Reform article, Legal Insurrection report, Breitbart Reporting
Following this, we started to communicate with FIRE about how we were experiencing some serious backlash when we were exposing some not-so-pleasant practices of student government in the student paper. We received more vitriol as we began to criticize a candidate for Chief Diversity Officer, B Diaz for open hatred of white people, friendships with people who threaten others, etc.
The Student Government, realizing that we were serious about pushing our bill, prevented it from coming out of committee and being brought to a vote. Here’s some coverage. They effectively prevented us from being able to vote on it by flooding the committee meeting we were in to keep it in permanent limbo.
Around this time, because we were continuing to push for free speech, student government decided to issue a Vote of No Confidence basically smearing his name for promoting our free speech bill. At this point, we were very unpopular on campus.
This became a cornerstone issue in the student government election with pretty much every candidate saying that our free speech bill was a bad idea, and that we had freedom of speech, but not to offend. Here’s the new USG president’s stance. Here’s another candidate basically saying showing he doesn’t understand anything about free speech.
After the student government elections, I criticized B Diaz intensely and pointed out that her role is clearly unconstitutional and that she planned to wield it terribly. She ended up resigning. Ironically, in the same article, it notes that the bylaws say that the runner up should win. Instead of that being the case, the student government supreme court overruled the bylaws and constitution to have a senate appointment which *shockingly* gave a paid position to the person ruling that the runner-up didn’t deserve the seat. This behavior at one point was getting so bad that the school decided to step in and sanction student government because of how badly they were behaving and the mental health problems this organization was causing.
Later on, FIRE released a story explaining some of the details of how badly the student government was behaving (I was not dressed my best that day). College Fix wrote a great follow-up explaining the situation and then did an investigation into the way bias reports are used on campus, which pretty vindicated our concerns about the curtailing of free expression.
Later, Students For Liberty, Reason, National Review, and several other outlets wrote follow-up pieces explaining the situation.
Even if it was the case that freedom of speech is divisive, I think it isn’t thought about enough how censorship may be more divisive.
Censorship is likely to be more divisive than freedom of speech for a variety of reasons. First, it punishes people for saying things they believe. As a result, people are often frustrated, and are often willing to try and get other groups to shut up as well.
Censorship is similarly divisive in that it pushes moderates out of the political scene because they worry that they will be targeted. However, extremists become highly visible as a result and it martyrs and intensifies them. Is it better to have a discussion or is it better to avoid engaging and depolarizing people.
Finally, censorship is often arbitrary and run by lunatics. What a student may want censored may be very different than what an administrator might want to do. Furthermore, giving administrators these rights have been abused a lot in the past. There’s little institutional reason to think that censorship will suddenly have a superior return-on-investment than before. Worse, since college admin is part of state government, censorship is likely to cost students hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for no clear and meaningful goals.
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