Arthur Wang: Free speech still alive at UCLA

Rest in peace, free speech. We at UCLA hardly knew ye.

This is the obituary that is being written: Free speech at this campus and the University of California is dead, verbally slaughtered in cold blood by oversensitive students, has been codified by cowardly administrators and is being replaced by an overbearing political correctness police – oh, and I forgot the trigger warning for depicting violence.

The ongoing UCLA investigation of Sigma Phi Epsilon and Alpha Phi, and the suspension of their social activities in light of a “Kanye Western” themed party, was perceived to be the latest hack in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts of unfettered campus expression, which apparently includes the right to offend and upset entire groups of people with little to no consequence.

Reality, of course, is more tame, even more nuanced and a lot less replete with literary effect. That hasn’t stopped pundits and writers like myself – in terms of vocation but not in viewpoint – from cobbling together evidence and arguments that the UC system, under pressure by students, is doing more to regulate speech than ever before. The perceived attacks on free speech are serious misinterpretations of universities and students who want a campus community to be more sensitive to marginalized and vulnerable groups.

Contrary to the alarmist headlines – most notably, Conor Friedersdorf’s “The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA” in The Atlantic – free speech has gone nowhere, even if some students have displayed or articulated viewpoints that are genuinely harmful toward speech. It is true that, as Friedersdorf mentions, one random internet commenter demanded an investigation of the Daily Bruin for publishing a submission about the Sigma Phi Epsilon party that the person thought was hate speech. This is indeed a censorious comment – it may as well be satirical, at that – though it is also a worthless one, as the submission was more misguided than hateful.

Think about this: The newspaper knowingly published this unpopular submission, and a variety of commentary that followed, without any ensuing action taken by the university or the communications board which oversees campus publications like the Daily Bruin. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for every campus publication. For running a September op-ed critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, Wesleyan students petitioned to defund the campus paper and stole hundreds of print copies. These actual attempts to stifle speech are not happening here at UCLA.

Rare and extreme incidents like these are not the only reason why First Amendment advocates continue to sound the alarm on campus speech. They have been captivated by a narrative in which administrators at the UC and elsewhere have become inundated and overwhelmed with students’ supposed desire to police and regulate speech with trigger warnings and by calling out microaggressions. The idea that adults who, supposedly, should know better, have capitulated to the demands of idealistic young student activists is a subtle criticism of both allegedly leftist universities and misguided millennials who apparently do not understand what free speech is, because we weren’t around during the eponymous movement during the 1960s.

Microaggressions and trigger warnings, indeed, are a crucial piece to the speech-under-fire narrative. Discussions of such reached its height during the summer, when the UC released a Statement of Principles Against Intolerance and a memo listing examples of microaggressions that explained how members of marginalized groups may feel when these statements are made. Critics jumped on this and asserted that these documents would produce a chilling effect on campus speech.

A viral article on Vox by a pseudonymous liberal professor published in the summer became the unofficial manifesto of this belief. Yet his experiences are his alone and, as the deluge of responses suggests, does not reasonably reflect the beliefs of college faculty at large. And the tragically ignored bottom line of all this so-called politically correct culture gone rampant is a net increase in sensitivity to students’ backgrounds and experiences.

Jerry Kang, the vice chancellor of diversity, equity and inclusion, notes that statements and memos like these are a part of a wide variety of university statements. Some of them “have the weight of policy, while others are more aspirational,” Kang said. He cites the True Bruin Values, a list of statements that students commit to upon matriculating to UCLA, as an example of how broad university statements can be. The values are not a legally binding contract; similar pledges, promises and compacts are articulated in clubs, fraternities and so on. The university takes these values seriously, but the university does not punish students simply for violating them.

We should realize, then, that free speech at the UC is not cut-and-dry as “it’s being suppressed.” The fact is that the question of speech on college campuses is currently the subject of a lively debate – it is not being swept under the rug. And students are not commandeering administrators into an era of political correctness – after all, if we truly had our say in this institution, tuition would not exist.

Reports of free speech’s death at the UC have been greatly exaggerated, and they are being exaggerated because it’s easier to claim that applying any degree of scrutiny to expression, offensive or not, is an unlawful sanction against said expression. What it’s really about is cultivating a greater degree of sensibility between peoples and groups of differing backgrounds. Call me naïve for believing that’s not such a bad thing – nobody will censor you.