Wall Street Journal June 10, 1992. Review & Outlook page (A14) Reprinted with permission of the Wall Street Journal. Copyright 1992 by Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Speech Codes and Censors The academic year ends as it began. Campus enforcers of political conformity are still busy denying that any effort to restrict free speech exists. The concern over "political correctness," they say, is overstated. Such denials don't alter the clear evidence that freedom of speech and scholarship is no longer assured at many colleges and universities. We have only to look at schools where nervously compliant administrations have established "harassment" policies. These behavioral codes, which more often than not bear a close resemblance to a political sermon, would clearly restrict freedom of speech as well as a few other freedoms. Laughing at the wrong kind of joke, for instance, is sometimes listed among the punishable forms of harassment. Last month, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, protestors demanding more minority control of the Collegian, a student newspaper, twice invaded the paper's offices, destroyed property, and threatened and attacked staff members. One protestor chased an editor and threatened him with a baseball bat. In the face of this violence, the administration took a loftily evenhanded view. The whole thing was, U. Mass. Chancellor Richard O'Brien told us, a struggle "between the ins and the outs," and that he did not think the university should take sides. The chancellor did not tell us what degree of mob rule and violence it would take for the administration to decide it could venture an opinion on the matter. He might, of course, have consulted his own university's harassment policy, which includes in its definition of harassment physical attack -- unless of course, editors of the school paper representing what the chancellor calls "the status quo" aren't the sort of people eligible for protection under the code. On a lighter note, though no less telling, we have the case of Camille Paglia and the Connecticut College summer reading list. Ms. Paglia, who specializes in making hash of the wilder reaches of feminist scholarship, is the author of a book titled "Sexual Personae." When the book was included on the reading list, members of the Women's Studies Committee and other centers of feminist theology, and their campus allies, set about removing it. Assistant professor of art history Robert Baldwin told the school's student newpaper the book was "offensive to human beings, especially women." Others complained that Ms. Paglia's book was hate literature, like "Mein Kampf." The campaign to remove Ms. Paglia's book from the list succeeded. One undergraduate member of the committee described herself as shocked at this act of censorship. This student -- like a lot of others -- is getting the sort of political education the school catalogs don't list. In the end, the powers that be decided that the Paglia book could be read and discussed by students later in the term but only if done in conjunction with Susan Faludi's feminist tome "Backlash" -- for balance. (A heavy summer reading load, to be sure.) Anyone doubting that an unhealthy and repressive climate exists on campuses today has only to look at the policies on harassment put in place at -- to name just a few -- Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Minnesota, Florida, and Brown. At Brown, as at other institutions, the code says that harassment can be defined as any behavior that produces "feelings of impotence" or "anger" or "disenfranchisement." And the harassing speech or behavior doesn't have to be deliberate. "It can be intentional or unintentional." Colby College's policy decrees that any behavior or speech that causes someone to feel "loss of self-esteem," a "vague sense of danger," is harassment. Emory -- like many other institutions -- says that harassment is any behavior or language directed at others on account of race, afe, gender, sexual orientation, handicap, etc., that has the "reasonably forseeable effect" of creating a hostile environment for those in the above identified categories. We are clearly sunk here in a marshland of never-ending offenses, where anything from a look to a laugh can be defined as harassment -- and has been. Harassment is punishable by all sorts of measures -- including "separation from the university." The University of Minnesota includes in its faculty guidelines the suggestion that the faculty "monitor" the classroom climate by having the faculty "monitor" the classroom climate by having students "comment anonymously -- in writing -- about... things they have seen or heard that they want to acknowledge." All that is missing is the suggestion that students be convened for mass confessions, or trials where they can all come forward and repent of having laughed inappropriately (an offense at the U. Conn.). There are some exceptions to this dreary lineup, notably the policy of the Yale College faculty, which specifically rejects any infringement or monitoring of speech, for whatever reason. Perhaps more universities will follow suit one day, but that day can come only when college presidents and chancellors, deans, provosts, and the other timid and politic souls running the universities today stop accomodating the political ideologue and start to behave like administrators. In the 1950s -- the era of Senator Joe McCarthy and other zealots -- college students often sang a protest song called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" -- My Thoughts are Free. A song of leftist origins sung by Pete Seeger, it nevertheless came to be the anthem for students of all political persuasions who detested efforts to stifle dissent. "My thoughts will not cater to duke or dictator," went one of the lines. Who, then, could have believed that the nation's campuses would a few decades later become the only place in American society where censorship and intimidation rule, and where ideological dukes and dictators flourish?