RUTHFULLY YOURS

What about the delicate sensibilities of those of us who find censoring offensive?

Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning?

Anyone should be able to criticise or question just about anyone. We should not care — or even know — what minority group, if any, someone belongs to. That would be racist.

When you hear the quite horrific stories of censorship and dangerous restrictions on expression at universities in the US, the UK and Europe, your first reaction might be to laugh at how infantile the nature of political discourse in the student world has become.

Cardiff Metropolitan University banned the use of the word “man” and related phrases, to encourage the adoption of “gender neutral” language. It is the equivalent of the “newspeak” about which Orwell warned: “Ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda”.

Currently, longstanding expressions carrying no prejudice are now used as the trappings of often fictitious “oppressions.”

City University in London, renowned for its journalism school, is apparently banning newspapers that do not conform to the current student body’s various political biases. If the Sun, Daily Mail and Express are such bad publications, why not allow students to read them and make up their own minds? Perhaps students do not trust their peers to make up their own minds? What if they make up their minds the “wrong” way? To suggest that the brightest and best at our universities cannot contend with a dissenting argument should probably be at least slightly concerning.

There seems to be a growing consensus among student populations that certain views should not be challenged, heard or — if one does not hear them — even known.

A culture has also emerged at universities of promoting “safe spaces”. These ostensibly aim to be free of prejudices such as racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and other bile. But all too often, we have seen them filled with exactly these prejudices – anti-whiteness, anti-maleness and of course anti-Semitism, as even some of Britain’s leading universities are “becoming no-go zones for Jews”.

We have seen the staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo slaughtered by ISIS terrorists for mocking Mohammad, and banned from Bristol and Manchester University, apparently because some students might find it offensive. What about the delicate sensibilities of those of us who find censorship offensive? Especially of a publication that has stood up to religious fanaticism and paid the ultimate price? Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning?

At the University of Edinburgh, a student official was silenced for raising her hand — as if a raised hand were a “thought crime” tantamount to physical violence. Yet, as Sigmund Freud said, “The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilisation.”

Does mean, then, that many campuses are going back to pre-civilisation? Last year, the magazine Spiked found that 90% of British universities hold policies that support censorship and chill free speech. In February, riots to disrupt a speech at University of California, Berkeley caused $100,000 worth of damage — but only one person was arrested.

Do the advocates of suppressing speech not see — or care — where silencing free speech leads? You set a precedent that allows further silencing, which, in turn, creates ever-expanding censorships. One imagines that especially universities should be the institutions that protect the exchange of ideas.

Historically, contrarian views — such as those of Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Darwin, Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, Servetus, Oldenburg, Domagk and Freud — have been essential to shaping our culture. They have reversed accepted practices and opened minds. Where would our culture be without the freedom to question, be creative or even at times offend?

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced last week that the Trump administration would revisit its predecessor’s “guidance” on adjudicating accusations of campus sexual assault, she added that “the era of ‘rule by letter’ is over.” Well, not quite. A second instance of the Education Department’s overreach under President Obama, this one involving discipline in public schools, remains firmly in place.

In 2012 the Education Department released a study showing that black students were three times as likely to be suspended and expelled as their white counterparts. Two years later, the department issued a “Dear Colleague” letter warning school districts to address this racial imbalance, or else. The letter said that even if a disciplinary policy “is neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administered in an evenhanded manner” the district still could face a federal civil-rights investigation if the policy “has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”

The threat worked. Fending off charges of discrimination can be expensive and embarrassing, so spooked school districts chose instead to discipline fewer students in deference to Washington. The Obama guidance didn’t start the trend—suspensions were down nearly 20% between 2011 and 2014—but the letter almost certainly hastened it. The effects are being felt in schools across the country, leaving black and Hispanic students, the policy’s theoretical beneficiaries, worse off.

After the Los Angeles school district, where more than 82% of students are Latino or black, ended suspensions for nonviolent offenses, the district reported that the number of students who said they felt safe in school dropped to 60% from 72%. When Chicago curbed suspensions, students and teachers felt the increased disorder. And following New York City’s reforms making it more difficult to keep disruptive kids out of the classroom, the schools that showed increased fighting, gang activity and drug use tended to be those with the highest percentages of minority students.

Somehow racial balance in the rates of suspension and expulsion has become more important than school safety. As Max Eden, my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a March report, these policies turn the focus toward the well-being of the bullies rather than their victims. “Advocates of discipline reform often say that they are concerned that a suspension may have negative effects on the student being disciplined,” Mr. Eden wrote. “They are largely unconcerned about the potential of discipline reform to increase classroom disruption and schoolhouse disorder—and the harmful consequences of that disorder for well-behaved and engaged students.” When you diminish a teacher’s and a principal’s authority to discipline students, you undermine their ability to do their job. Disorder only begets more disorder; students who misbehave and face no consequences soon have imitators.

Yet civil-rights activists, liberal academics, policy makers and others calling for fewer suspensions—come what may—insist that what explains imbalances in school discipline is racism, not varying rates of misbehavior. Never mind that these disparities persist in schools with black and Hispanic principals, teachers and administrators, who would have no reason to single out minorities for punishment unless the behavior warranted it. Arne Duncan, the education secretary under Mr. Obama when the “Dear Colleague” letter was issued, said in 2014 that racially uneven discipline is “not caused by differences in children” and that “it is adult behavior that needs to change.” CONTINUE AT SITE