Speech Codes Worked

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former George Washington University president with impeccable Ivy League credentials (Columbia College, Harvard MPA, Yale Law), writes on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog that campus political correctness and speech codes worked.

True, he recognizes that it’s good news that political correctness seems to have run its course, because it “turned out to be an impediment to free academic discourse and possibly thought.” But by then (now), it had done its good work. Also true that he recognizes that the First Amendment has some claims in this area — “Free speech and all that” — but the overall tone here is more appreciation of the good work done by political correctness than dismay over its transgressions or delight over what he sees as its demise.

A hunch I have is that a structured form of political correctness — a speech code, for example — is no longer necessary because our culture has changed; in the last 30 years I have seen discourse shifting toward the better — gradually but definitely. The sources of this shift are hazy, but certainly the civil rights and women’s movements had a powerful effect….

No doubt they did, but then it was the most outspoken adherents of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement who were behind the speech codes, codes that were intended to curb the outspoken speech of others. Or maybe that’s the very contribution Trachtenberg is talking about.

That is, aside from the occasional boneheaded and offensive utterance, the casual slurs and prejudices of the 1950s (my undergraduate years) have largely vanished from campus speech. I think this happened because policies about speech, general or rigid, changed several generations of high school students — made them aware that some words (and, lamentably, some ideas) were forbidden. Thus, over time, the policing of any academic community’s discourse has become less important and largely immaterial as new expectations were imported from high schools.

In other words, speech codes are no longer needed because they succeeded in cleaning up campus speech. This is rather like saying that we no longer need McCarthyism because, look around: we no longer have communists and their sympathizers among us.

And what about that troublesome concern of some for “Free speech and all that”? Trachtenberg, Yale-trained lawyer that he is, obviously recognizes that free speech is a nice thing to have, but he’s also happy to set it aside when doing so will liberalize our “cultural responses.”

I am not suggesting that the denial for First Amendment protection for words likely to cause a “breach of the peace” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 1942) ever directly entered the public consciousness. But it seems credible that along with the racial integration of the armed services and schools (and baseball) and the social integration produced by the GI Bill, suburbanization, and the rights movements, a realization that fighting, or prejudicial, words are out of bounds further liberalized our cultural responses and, quite likely, later was given a leg up in the academy by structural political correctness.

Well, yes. I’m sure liberal political correctness did indeed work, at least on campus, to reinforce, police, and “liberalize” our “cultural responses.” And we certainly wouldn’t want something as airily flimsy as the First Amendment to stand in the way of such wholesome liberalization.