The dogma of PCism advocates the suppression of anything that might give offense "on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, or handicap." Offense is determined by the affronted person; truth is no defense. The aim is to protect minorities and women and enforce awareness of their dignity and worth. This can include enforced separatism--but only when blacks, gays, or women choose it.

When the form of language takes precedence over its meaning, rationalists must take heed. Notwithstanding that the intent of PC speech is usually humane and progressive, civil libertarians are justifiably concerned when universities (of all places) become enforcers of imposed "tolerance" through speech-restrictive codes. What are we teaching students about the guarantee of equal protection under the law? Federal courts and the Supreme Court have consistently held that restrictive speech codes are unconstitutional.

Certainly no one would argue that racist, sexist, ageist, and homophobic beliefs do not persist in this country. But the way to ensure that their toxic influence will multiply is to sweep them into a dark corner and pretend they don't exist.

There is no question that certain non-European and feminist views have been squeezed out of university studies for too long. But now proponents have gone to the other extreme, censoring ideas they dislike just as their own ideas were censored in the past. Surely women and minorities should have learned that suppression is an admission of weakness and fear--a diversion from dealing with the real social issues at the root of intolerance.

The climate created by PC promoters has led to an appalling level of academic self-censorship. For instance, many professors are taping their lectures in case they have a future need to defend themselves from charges of sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on. Professors, most notably at Princeton University and Carleton College, have dropped some courses entirely under pressure from PC forces. Even Nadine Strossen, new president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York University Law School, has resorted to allowing students make their "non-PC" feelings and questions known through anonymous notes which she reads and addresses in class--a culture of forbidden questions.

The Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching, in its report Campus Life: In Search of Community, states that "restrictive codes, for practical as well as legal reasons, do not provide a satisfactory response to offensive language. They may be expedient, even grounded in conviction, but the university cannot submit the cherished ideals of freedom and equality to the legal system and expect them to be returned intact."

Benno Schmidt, president of Yale University, makes the same point. "Universities cannot censor or suppress speech," he says, "no matter how obnoxious in content, without violating their justification for existence. It is to elevate fear over the capacity for a liberated and humane mind and will loose an utterly open-ended engine of censorship." In other words, universities, above all, must not permit "sensitivity" to stifle the free discourse they are supposed to represent and encourage. The PC mindset is too rigid and reactionary for careful thought or objective analysis.

A 1990 study by the American Council on Education and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators found that 60 percent of the colleges and universities they surveyed already had written policies on bigotry and verbal intimidation, including such schools as the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Columbia, Tufts, Emory, and Stanford. Another 11 percent reported that such policies were being formulated.

The University of Connecticut's policy bans "inappropriately directed laughter" and "conspicuous exclusion of students from conversations." The University of Wisconsin has become a model of PC decorum since Wisconsin state legislature stiffened the student conduct code to ban by state law "discriminatory comments, name calling, racial slurs, or jokes."

Numerous documented examples of the enforcement of such policies include an incident in which a University of Michigan student asserted in class that he felt homosexuality was treatable through therapy. The administration has charged him with violating the university's speech code and is seeking his expulsion. This student is black. So is another Michigan student who was punished under the same rules for using the term white trash in class.

In March 1991, the social-science department at Santa Monica College censured economics professor Eugene Buchholz for arguing that ethnic-and gender-based studies "sidetrack students who could otherwise gain useful disciplines or skills."

At the University of Washington in early 1990, a student was removed from a course with a nonpassing grade and threatened with expulsion because he questioned an assertion by a women's studies professor that lesbians make better mothers.

Nina Wu, a sophomore at the University of Connecticut, was brought up on charges of violating the student-behavior code, which prohibits "posting or advertising publicly offensive, indecent, or abusive matter concerning persons..." She allegedly put a poster on her dorm-room door listing "people who should be shot on sight"--among them "preppies, bimboes, men without chest hair, and homos." Wu was ordered to move off campus and forbidden to set foot in any university dormitory or cafeteria. Under pressure from a federal lawsuit, the university administration allowed her to move back onto campus.

Certainly drunks shouting racial epithets in dormitory halls should be disciplined for disturbing the peace, and people who spray-paint public or private property should be disciplined for vandalism regardless of the message. But when a Brown University student was expelled after a wee-hours drunken tirade, it was because of violating the university's speech code prohibiting "racial, homophobic, and anti-Semitic slurs." (These slurs were not accompanied by verbal or physical threats.)

Linda Chavez, a Hispanic Reagan administration official, was asked to speak at the University of Colorado. Upon learning that she opposed affirmative action and thought Hispanics should learn English as soon as possible, PC students protested and the university president, apologizing for his "gross insensitivity," withdrew his invitation to Chavez.

Students have been suspended not only for using "epithets" toward blacks, gays, and other minorities in the classroom but also in dormitories, at sporting events, and off-campus entirely.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political science professor at Vanderbilt, says, "It's reached the point that, if you make any judgment or as assessment as to the quality of a work, somehow you arenít being an intellectual egalitarian." At a recent conference, she referred to Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind as a "classic," to which another female professor exclaimed in dismay that the word classic made her "feel oppressed."

Some who should know better trivialize the problem, rationalizing that incidents have been few and far between and that the accused do have legal recourse. After all, they say, violators aren't shot or sent to the gulag. Amazing. Are these to be the new standards by which we measure the seriousness of First Amendment violations?

It has even been stated that Jewish organizations are "placating" a bigot like David Duke when they uncategorically defend his right to speak. It is suggested that they believe that, by doing this, they'll "be spared."

Spared what? The suspension of their own free-speech rights? Jewish organizations defend the rights of people like Duke because they understand the First Amendment. They understand that, if one wishes to preserve oneís freedom, one must be equally prepared to defend the freedom of those who express views one abhors. They know that no one was ever won over to a more inclusive view of life via bullying and coercion, and that suppression merely allows insupportable views to become stronger. In short, they know the difference between genuine social change and enforced verbal purification.

In its publication Bigotry on Campus: A Planned Response, the American Jewish Committee states:
Universities work best when students and faculty are free to say whatever they think. Whereas students should be aware that their words can hurt others, they should not be forced to weigh their thoughts against administration-opposed limits of political correctness. Higher education is at its best when the clash between ideas is heated, not chilled... No lawyer can draft language precise enough to punish the person who says "nigger" only when he or she really means it... Punishing a student for using bigoted words or printing bigoted articles drapes the bigot, instead of the university, in the First Amendment. Thus, the bigot becomes the victim, even the martyr...

What do the courts say? The Supreme Court ruled in Near v. Minnesota that racist speech is protected by the First Amendment. Last year, a federal court judge in Wisconsin ruled that a University of Wisconsin rule forbidding racist and sexist speech violated the First Amendment. The university's Board of Regents adopted the rule in 1989 after a series of incidents described as racist, including a fraternity's "Fiji Island" party which included some caricatures of blacks. The university has appealed.

Black students should remember that Malcolm X was censored on campuses 25 years ago. What is to save outspoken black rappers from the same fate today? How much better to expose hateful and bigoted ideas to the light of reason!

The underlying issues are much more complicated, and educational institutions are reluctant to tackle them. Some suggestions have been proposed: offering courses on racism; upgrading and expanding black studies; addressing the issues in orientation sessions; welcoming speakers and artists of every sort to contribute their perspective; and broadening the undergraduate curriculum so that no graduating student has failed to be exposed to other cultures and histories.

Truth cannot be determined by government fiat or popular opinion. It is particularly noxious to define truth according to those who are in political power at the moment. Bring on the neo-Nazis, the skinheads, the misogynists, the racists, the hateful, and the angry and let them speak. As always, the answer to a bad idea is a good idea; the answer to the "problem" of free speech is more speech. Ray Bradbury, in a 1979 afterword to Fahrenheit 451, wrote:
I have always maintained that there is more than one way to burn a book--and the world is full of people running around with lit matches. Every minority... feels it has the will, the right, and the duty to douse the kerosene and light the fuse. Fahrenheit 451 describes how books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.

Exaggeration? Alarmism? Not to those who understand the First Amendment.