Colleges value civility over free expression

Write about free speech on American college campuses occasionally, and you quickly come to realize that a good many people honor the concept mostly in the breach. Every column defending free expression generates a number of emails with this basic message: Of course I support free speech, I just don't think someone should be allowed to say that.

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The anti-speech sentiment is not always couched quite that explicitly, of course.

Usually the caveat is about the need to realize just how hurtful a controversial statement is to this group or that, whose self-image or self-confidence or self-worth will be irreparably injured by hearing or seeing something that offends or angers them.

Indeed, when I did a column about the University of New Hampshire's absurd disciplinary action against a male student who put up a satirical poster suggesting that the women in his dorm might avoid the dreaded freshman-year weight gain if they took the stairs rather than using the elevator, even his mild jape, directed at no person in particular, invoked the same response.

You don't know what it's like to have someone make snide comments about your weight, replied some readers. (Actually, I do, having recently been denounced as a fat, pizza-gobbling ''pantload'' by one of the coruscating philosopher kings of the local talk-radio scene. That, apparently, is what passes as wit on talk radio, and in the spirit of the new year, I'd certainly grant that it's half-witty.)

My feeling is that people need to grow a little thicker skin if they expect to survive in this world. And that if colleges operate the way the PC gendarmerie prefer, they aren't preparing students for the real world so much as sheltering them from it.

Unfortunately, however, too often the prevalent notion on campus is that people have a right not to be offended, and that that right, and the goal of preserving an amorphous civility, should trump the right to free expression.

David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit devoted to defending free speech on campus, says the foundation frequently encounters that sentiment among college administrators and faculty.

''One of the most common experiences we have at FIRE is for an administrator or a faculty member to pledge undying loyalty to the First Amendment even while they are censoring a student,'' said French. ''They claim to support free speech, and if you put them on truth serum I think they would still claim to, but they think if a person's feelings are hurt, speech has just gone too far.''

Harvard University President Larry Summers encountered that same sort of mentality in the recent brouhaha he sparked by mentioning - not embracing, mind you, but merely mentioning - theories than men and women have different innate abilities when it comes to science and math.   Continued...