{"id":540,"date":"2008-12-05T13:36:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T20:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2008\/12\/05\/the-left-at-christian-universities-part-7-speech-codes\/"},"modified":"2009-03-11T19:27:37","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T02:27:37","slug":"the-left-at-christian-universities-part-7-speech-codes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2008\/12\/05\/the-left-at-christian-universities-part-7-speech-codes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left at Christian Universities, part 7: Speech codes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part 6 in this series can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Speech codes limit campus freedom<\/a><\/p>\n

Millions of high school seniors have started the process of deciding which college or university to attend in the next academic year. Prospective students will take into consideration cost, academics, social life, and location. And while many students will also look at schools that reflect their interests and values, virtually none will be thinking about the school’s speech codes or free speech zones. They should. Students at colleges and universities who articulate conservative and traditional views are at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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On college campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was students who embodied campus radicalism. Today some administrators practice a brand of radicalism intent on punishing students who dissent from the ideology of the campus power structure. In their book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, authors Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate declare, “In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of censorship, self-censorship, and self-righteous abuse of power.”<\/p>\n

Limits on free speech is uniquely troubling for the future health of a free society. Students become accustomed to having their rights limited, and will be more lethargic in countering possible oppression from a growing and intrusive state. Perhaps even worse, some students might be unaware that their rights have been violated because they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to challenge punishment and oppression. Educational systems where students are encouraged to memorize and regurgitate information have not properly prepared them for healthy and constructive dissent.<\/p>\n

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has cited a list of speech codes from several universities, some later modified thanks to FIRE’s own efforts. The University of Connecticut outlawed “inconsiderate jokes,” “stereotyping,” and even “inappropriate directed laughter.” Some schools put limits on speech using phrases like any words that result in a loss of “self esteem,” or cause “embarrassment” or “psychological discomfort.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps none are as striking as the University of Deleware’s 2007 “Diversity Facilitation Training,” where resident advisers were trained with definitions that described racist as applying “to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class gender, religion, culture, or sexuality,” and reverse racism as “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” Resident Advisers after their training then peppered new students with questions like “When did you discover your sexuality?,” and in one training session students were called upon to announce their views on same sex marriage, and pressured to alter their position if it fell outside the political orthodoxy of the overseers.<\/p>\n

These examples are just a smidgen of the outlandish practices performed by the Office of Residential Life at Delaware for the purpose of reeducating incoming freshmen. Overseers of this indoctrination actually called the program a form of “treatment” for students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You may think that this sort of thing only happens at secular universities, but the exact opposite is the case. A great many Christian universities (and some colleges) have administrative positions with names like Director of Diversity, Associate Provost for Diversity, Director of Intercultural Affairs, Special Assistant to the President for Diversity, and so on. These are not mere “human resources” staff positions, they are high level administrative positions, and they seem to exist for the purpose of promoting a combination of Left-leaning initiatives that includes controlling the vocabulary that is allowed to be used on campus, and doing so from a position superior to any faculty member, a position of real power, all the while claiming to be in the role of “speaking truth to power”.\u00a0 Mr. Orwell, where are you when we need you?<\/p>\n

And in addition to all the usual rhetorical devices used by diversity activists elsewhere, Christian institutions add one more, by claiming it is a divine mandate to be “diverse” as institutions, and to love “diversity” as individuals IN institutions.\u00a0 Never mind the fact that no theologian identified such a mandate before the secular Left piggy backed on Justice Powell’s use of the word “diversity” in the Bakke case<\/a>, as a way to pursue their agendas while masking the quota-based nature of them. \u00a0 Sometimes the church just has to be led to divine truth by the secular Left, don’t you know?\u00a0 One wonders what new revelations await us in the scriptures, planted there by God, to be identified at some future point when the secular Left leads us to yet another hermeneutically novel promised land.<\/p>\n

So the bad news is this:\u00a0 students attending Christian colleges and universities may be among those “at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues”.\u00a0 Faculty who do not agree with the agenda may be deemed racist, and that word may well be used in public descriptions and “faculty round-tables” to describe those who simply don’t buy into the entire concept of diversity.\u00a0 The added bite: faculty who don’t sign on to the entire diversity agenda are racists who are going to hell!\u00a0 It is actually said in faculty meetings at some Christian universities and colleges.\u00a0 Not all agree, of course, but they are likely to feel too intimidated to speak up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How very, very far we have come from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a color-blind society.\u00a0 How much I wish he had lived, to fight the perversion of his movement into victimology-mongering.\u00a0 But the content of your character is the last thing that matters these days.<\/p>\n

The next post in this series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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