The privilege of calling out "male privilege"

February 19, 2013

If you are reading this article before 12:30 p.m., you can attend a lecture right here at Bellevue College in D-106 today about the pervasiveness of a somewhat ambiguous blight on our liberal culture known as “male privilege.” In theory, “male privilege” embodies the social, economic and political advantages granted to men on the basis of their gender. We are incessantly told we live in a binary world of first and second-class citizens, where men are institutionally treated better and afforded more opportunity while women are broadly oppressed. In reality however, we live in a more complex and gray world, where mistreatment happens in both directions. The phrase “male privilege,” in practice, is simply a conversational trump card to end debate, drawn from historical guilt and confirmation bias.

I’m not merely speaking from personal experience here. While I have been repeatedly told I don’t have a right to have an opinion on particular issues because of my own race and gender, my major concern is the general acceptance and dissemination of this idea, particularly in academics. When the educator and author Warren Farrell went to give a lecture about the crisis of boys in educationat the University of Toronto, for instance, he was warmly greeted by about a hundred students ripping down posters, threatening and insulting him yelling, “You should be fucking ashamed of yourself, you fucking scum!” to Farrell, his audience and the police (male and female) attempting keep relative order. Farrell’s crime was to have written a book titled, “The Myth of Male Power.”

The very word that is used to defend this kind of behavior—“feminism”—betrays part of the problem here. Everyone I’ve talked to about the word has defined it as, roughly, equality between the sexes. If that’s all there is to it, then I proudly call myself a feminist. What a wonderful concept…but why call it that? Why limit this equality to the feminine by calling it feminism? Isn’t that a form of inequality in itself? Why not just call it “equality?”

It is because, as far as I can tell, many of these so-called feminists don’t want equality. The assumption that feminism is working off of is that in the status quo, women are treated as inferior to men, so their goal isn’t equal treatment in the legal sense, but the elevation of women. They cite things like gender stereotypes about driving ability, higher numbers of men in politics and expensive, uncomfortable clothing as absolute proof that this is the case.

I wonder why it is that men are forced to sign up for selective service and die by the thousands in combat, why women are treated with more leeway in court cases involving domestic abuse and child custody then men, why the prison population (which is so often cited as proof of racial discrimination) is 85% male, why our public schools undeniably favor women and why medieval notions of manhood—what it means to “be a man”—are to this day infused into our expectations of men; men are, after all, expected to pay for and protect their women. I wonder why, during all of this, comparatively minor issues in the opposite direction are sobbed over.

More importantly than any of that, I wonder why men who bring this up whenever women claim they are “oppressed” are immediately labeled as sexist. It is said that the beginning of all wisdom is calling things by their proper names and the name of this culture, the one that responds to disagreement by alleging “male privilege,” is nothing short of misandry.

It is true that women are victims of inordinately high levels of sexual crime, a subject I am in fact quite passionate about. Historically, sexism was the prevailing social norm in Western culture. In some non-Western societies, this remains the case to this day. These are extremely serious problems that warrant all of our support, and it’s an enormous step forward that the Violence Against Women Act has been making such headway this last week, but these problems aren’t any kind of warrant for shutting people out of conversation based on their gender by labeling them as “privileged.” That kind of discrimination is precisely what we’re all against, after all. At least in theory.

Put Personal Safety First on Valentines Day

February 11, 2013

www.internations.org

In a relatively safe and affluent area like Bellevue, it is easy for students to forget scary numbers.For example, in 2011 there were on average more than 392 violent crimes per 100,000 people in the United States. Statistically speaking, 27 of those 392 incidents were cases of forcible rape. These are numbers that are important for people to know and understand, particularly college-aged people and, unfortunately, particularly women.

While it is a natural instinct for people to think, ‘that’s what the police are there for,’ I challenge you to look at your surroundings. If you can see a cop, then congratulations, you might be safe presuming a potential predator is particularly unobservant. If not, then your first line of defense is you. I used to assist in teaching “stranger safety” seminars for a martial arts school in Sammamish, and it was always a ghastly point of interest that the instructor was able to tell numerous stories of his own students who had had to use skills we taught to protect themselves from abduction or worse. It is simply a fact that police cannot be everywhere at once, and when thinking about crime statistics, it is worth bearing in mind.

Valentine’s Day represents a predictable spike in incidents of date rape around the world. With understanding about the real nature of these types of crimes, it might be possible to better avoid them this coming Feb. 14 and beyond.

First, to clarify a few misconceptions. Many women seem to imagine rape as a threat peering out of dark alleys and dingy bars. While it is certainly possible, vastly greater numbers of sexual assault occur within the confines of a known, “safe” environment like the perpetrator’s home or a hotel. On a similar note, the statistically normal stalker or rapist is not a creepy stranger in his 50s, but an acquaintance the victim has known for less than six months. Often, this is a classmate, friend or even a boyfriend.

Thus, the most difficult part of dealing with a stalker or potential rapist is identifying them. While these people are sometimes difficult to pick out, there are some indicating manipulative behaviors that should raise red flags.Unusually assertive charm and niceness, unsolicited help or promises with expectations of reciprocation and “typecasting,” a self-deprecating insult designed to obligate acceptance (You’re probably too cool to spend time with a loser like me), are three such examples. The refusal to accept “no” as an answer is another particularly strong example that should set off immediate mental alarm bells. You are under no obligation to be polite and observe normal social niceties if you feel that your safety is in danger.

Most importantly, trust your instincts. Your sympathetic nervous system has been keeping your ancestors alive for millions of years and your gut readings of people are the cumulative result of those thousands of generations of tweaking and perfecting your brain. Your body is smarter than you think it is, so if you get a creepy “vibe” about someone, it isn’t worth testing your amygdala’s judgment for the sake of social graces. Be smart, stay safe and have an enjoyable Valentine’s Day.

For more detailed information, Sam Harris gives an excellent basic guideline for avoiding violent situations and protecting yourself here, and I can't recommend Gavin de Becker's book "The Gift of Fear" highly enough. It is long, repetitive, and at times boring, but is perhaps one of the best investments in your own safety someone can make, particularly for law-enforcement agents, military personnel, and women.

"It's Not-So-Great Britain"

It is easy, listening to intelligent and forward-thinking Muslims like Tariq Ramadan and Maajid Nawaz, to forget the real-life problems facing our society from radical Islam; the foremost being the normalization of things that should strike us as quite radical indeed. Before following the example of the recently replaced Archbishop of Canterburry Rowan Williams and agreeing to Sharia "zones," as they are called, I wonder how many Americans would be willing to live alongside this kind of behavior:

The video was taken Jan 17, 2013 in downtown London.

I submit two main points from this. First, that no one would suffer more under this kind of precedent of legal exemption than the very people liberals think they would be assisting in giving in to this kind of barbarism: moderate Muslims. Secondly, I would assert that acquiescing to this kind of "zone" is not only contrary the principles of freedom and liberty that I hope all rational Americans could agree to stand together in support of, but that this kind of 'tolerance' is self-destructive. It opens the gateway to intolerance of apostates, Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists, women and, don't forget, the wrong kind of Muslims.

Should the United States entertain the notion of parallel Sharia laws in certain urban zones, following the example of much of Western Europe? The question seems nearly self-answering in the light of what this would inevitably entail.

Douglas Murray on Religion

The journalist, outspoken critic of Islam and recent Anglican "de-convert" I've been following quite closely recently gave a brilliant defense of the values of organized religion at Cambridge a few days ago. While I don't think he was entirely correct (there was a bit of equivocation between the values of the message and the belief in the truth of the religion itself), I think his points were admirable and enlightening; certainly more eloquent than my own positive views on faith.

It's definitely worth watching, particularly for those more hard-core atheists and anti-theists.

Misogyny v. Autonomy: Women in Combat

 February 5, 2013

“Don’t send our daughters into combat,” proclaimed Kathleen Parker in last Monday’s Seattle Times, describing the decision to allow women to work in combat roles within the military as an “abandon[ment] of all reason.”

Her obnoxious tone turned to a two-faced tirade of tiresome inanity after she attempted to defend her stance as a “feminist” view. Apparently words don’t mean anything anymore, or else she would have taken a pragmatic approach instead of defending her unequal treatment of the sexes in the name of equal treatment. Her reasons were essentially that women are physically inferior to men in combat, that including women poses a threat to unit cohesion and that women are more at-risk in prisoner situations. On the same line of thinking, she makes a rather teary emotional appeal, asking the reader to “hold the image of your 18-year old daughter, neighbor, sister or girlfriend” in mind when discussing combat. I’ll save that one for last.

For starters, it is true that on average, women don’t have the same upper-body strength that men do. Conceded. Fine. What you must say, however, isn’t that women in general don’t have the same physical strength—you must say ALL women lack the constitution to be good soldiers. We have physical standards to weed out unfit soldiers, male and female, so why add superfluous gender restrictions? This attitude of generalization isn’t just the very definition of stereotyping and gender discrimination; it’s patently untrue as well. If you care to disagree, I’m sure you could settle that score in a parking lot somewhere with Ronda Rousey; the number one female MMA fighter and judo gold-medalist would handily take down most military men in a heartbeat. Limiting the ability of minimally and equally qualified, let alone exceptional, individuals from participating in combat roles because of sweeping gender generalizations is morally indefensible. Saying so under the banner of feminism merely adds irony.

On to the issue of unit cohesion.

What’s wrong with saying we shouldn’t integrate blacks and whites in uniform? Is there something intrinsically bad about segregating platoons and brigades by ethnic and national origin, as was done in early 20th century combat? What’s so terrible about keeping gays out of the military? After all, a change to any of these standards might cause strife and disunity within the respective group.
The fear of damage to morale and unit cohesion is such a definitively destroyed argument that I can’t help but speculate on the motives of those who offer it in a serious manner. As for women, they’re already integrated in the rest of the military, including the many groups like the Naval construction battalions (SeaBees) that carry weapons, suffer mortar fire and enemy attacks and are working under combat-like conditions. Shockingly, damage to unit cohesion doesn’t seem to be threatening our borderline-overpowered military’s combat readiness in any way. To say, “oh, but it’s different this time,” would require a much higher burden of proof than the sexist hunch of a misogynistic military tradition.

As for the claim of increased vulnerability to exploitation in prisoner situations, everything that’s wrong with the argument is summed up by Parker in an appended parenthetical in the paragraph. On the heels of a snide comment deriding the “adult” designation of 18-year-old girls, she says “parents know better.”

This is paternalism if there ever was such thing. As if these women weren’t adults! As if women couldn’t make decisions for themselves! If you were to meet a woman who was physically fit, who was mentally steeled, and knew the implications of combat, to tell her “you can’t go because I feel uncomfortable” is undermining her right to self-determination in defense of a personal view on defined gender roles. Without seeing it, I wouldn’t have imagined a writer for a publication like The Seattle Times could seriously take such a condescending and disrespectful position.
Are there dangers in combat for women? Absolutely. Hygiene challenges, boredom, psychological damage, injury, rape, torture and death are possible problems for both sexes, and the burden is not shared equally. Women know this better than men. This is precisely why a willing and qualified female soldier who desires a role in combat should be granted their request with all of the expediency and support afforded to their male counterparts. If Parker and like-minded people, men or women, don’t have the guts themselves to serve their country on the front line, that’s fine. I’m sure no one will hold that against them, particularly those they’d be serving alongside. But they should keep their worries about other people’s welfare to themselves, at least where legislation is concerned. Let adults (yes, they are adults) make their own decisions without other people’s confusion over what “equality” actually means infringing on their right to do so.

Don't Embrace "Multiculturalism" Under the Guise of "Diversity"

February 4, 2013

“We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong[…]We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.”

These were the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, in Feb. 2011, speaking on the failures of the British state’s support of “multiculturalism.”  Recently, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany uttered similar public confessions, all speeches delivered after decades of support for the inclusive policy. What is “multiculturalism,” and what’s wrong with it?
Multiculturalism is more than a mere tolerance of cultural differences; it is a positive and proactive accommodation of differences, accomplished through Will Kymlicka’s “group-differentiated rights.” It’s the application of exemptions and exceptions for certain groups from the normal social and legal expectations of society, such as allowing certain religious groups to be exempt from the no-hats rule in drivers license photos.

What’s so harmful about that? Doesn’t this promote tolerance and a pluralistic society and the beautiful mosaic of human diversity?

The short answer is simply ‘no.’ The long answer would take a full volume, like “The Closing of the American Mind,” to fully answer, so I’ll stick with the short.
As with all flawed theories, the fundamental issues are worth pointing out first.  Multiculturalism arose as an idea in the wake of a generation characterized by ethnic and racial strife, both at home and abroad, and the philosophy grew from within the political movement doing most of the ideological combat, those whom we would today call “liberals.” Against discrimination in spirit, multiculturalism is, at its essence, the proposition that we should treat people differently based on their racial or ethnic background.

Notice a problem?

A deeper issue lies in the movement’s proclivity towards what is known as moral relativism, the idea that moral truths are subjective and that no one is really in a position to praise some action as “good,” or to decry another action as “bad,” in any kind of binding fashion. Sam Harris gave an example of just such a mindset in his TED talk, describing how many modern intellectuals couldn’t bring themselves to say there was anything objectively wrong with throwing battery acid in the faces of women suspected of less-than-perfect chastity.

“Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this?”

It’s a distinction of Western academia in recent years to be unable to distinguish, in the words of Winston Churchill, the firefighter from the fire. Such is the case with such outspoken dissidents as Noam Chomsky, who to this day proudly claims that 9/11 was not the result of radical religious extremism, but rather defends the actions of Al-Qaeda as justified acts of retribution against American terrorism in the Middle East in prior years.

For decades now, American and British journalists, philosophers and social critics have warned of the dangers of multiculturalism, and the threat it poses not merely to the national identity, but to the very soul of the nations’ people. Such is the case in much of Europe, where anti-semitism is back on the rise, where different cultural groups are treated differently and where hate speech laws are becoming increasingly broad in scope and rigorous in application. If an 18-year old white girl vanished for a week to have her genitals sawed off, for example, there would be a national outcry and harsh justice rained down on the perpetrators of such a heinous crime. Not so if said 18-year-old girl happened instead to be Pakistani. The tragedy isn’t that this is happening—it’s that the intelligent, educated citizens have been robbed of the ability to see the evil lurking in their midst, and worse, have been convinced that those who notice these problems are themselves the evil ones. Usually, this manifests in accusations of racism or intolerance.

The harbingers of such a mindset have been in place in the American intellectual culture for a while now, and the natural outcome is slowly beginning to come to fruition, albeit slightly behind Western Europe. A brow-beating attitude towards “tolerance” and “diversity” is one such sign. We should support diversity, given the value of different perspectives and experiences to our shared future, but we should be extremely wary and suspicious of the newfound obsession with diversity that is creeping into universities and colleges more forcefully, both at Bellevue College and elsewhere around the country. The difference in mindset is subtle but important, not merely for ourselves, but for the future of our nation.

The Merits of Rigorous Coursework

January 28, 2013

Nothing demonstrates the spiritual gutting of the purpose of education as thoroughly as the proliferation of online accreditation “courses.”  If we look at a brief history of education, it becomes apparent that we’re living through a remarkable paradigm-shift in the perceived purpose of education, where the end goal is no longer education at all but merely the paperwork claiming to have received one.

Academic circles are replete with commentators who complain about the passive role students are taking in education today.  Ken Robinson’s TED talk from 2006 describes how our current education model kills creativity.  The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, well known for his Stanford Prison experiment, has done recent research showing a continuing trend of disengagement in school, particularly in boys.  And it’s hard, of course, to imagine the protests and cultural challenges that framed the academic culture of the 60’s and 70’s taking place in today’s generation. Grades take precedence over learning.

This isn’t, of course, something intrinsically “good” or “bad,” but it does have consequences on how our society works.  More importantly, it has a dramatic effect on how classes are run because students’ incentives have changed.  Instead of striving to learn, they’re striving to attain acknowledgement of learning.  Learning, as it turns out, that didn’t happen in the first place.
Lack of economic incentives might not be a problem we as a society can solve at all, since industries are becoming more specialized by the day.  The lack of education, however, is something we can change.  Cultural shifts have happened in the past, and societal values are often as arbitrary as one small group’s preference.  America’s fascination with football, for example, isn’t any more or less “rational” than the rest of the world’s equally rabid obsession with soccer, and it would be a tall order to deny the impact of these arbitrary cultural phenomena.

Why not make this decision with education?

Taking an active part in the educational process doesn’t only make students better citizens by making them more informed about important issues; it makes them fundamentally better professionals in their respective job field by transferring habits of reasoned skepticism, attention to detail and proactive learning to the world of private industry.

There are two major ways students can make this happen: class selection and active dialogue.  Choosing classes that challenge preconceived notions of how the world works opens up students to new perspectives.  From my own experience, Dr. Chace Stiehl’s class on the economic history of the United States and Michael Korolenko’s class on the techniques and technology of propaganda have been exceptional examples of just this variety of class, and I’ve heard (almost) nothing but good things about BC’s sociology department.  The number of students talking about how their minds were blown certainly exceeds the number of students claiming the same thing out of 100-level English and math courses, as important as those are.The second part—taking an active part in the process by asking difficult questions—makes the knowledge more thorough and memorable.   Why do we think evolution is true?  How sure are we that the holocaust really happened?  How would you beat a Flat Earth Society member in a debate?  These are arguably the questions that generate the most genuine understanding of the material.

While the temptation to take easy, straightforward classes and to passively swallow and regurgitate the course curriculum is strong, especially due to parental expectations and college competition, it seems that people are losing more than they gain in this trade-off intrinsically.  However, with colleges and hiring businesses increasingly looking more at portfolios and activities and less at perfect grades, the loss in intellectual rigor and the actual education students are paying for outweighs the ease and security of vanilla classes occupied by vanilla students by leaps and bounds.  Don’t be afraid to grab your learning by the horns and demand your money’s worth.  After all, it is your money.

Killing Diversity with Diversity

January 22, 2013

“I sat in my chair, stated my opinion and then I shut up,” said Aaron Malec from his office chair in the Veteran Office in Student Programs last December.  “I can pull up the email right now, she kicked me out of the class for basically exactly what I was saying earlier, telling someone that if you come to this country, and you become a citizen…this is your country, because nobody’s from here…Now this is your country.”

Apparently, such conversation is fast becoming off-limits territory in the classroom environment, where diversity of opinion is viewed as antithetical to the diversity universities and colleges nation-wide are promoting so vigorously. The email read: “If you act as disrespectfully again in class as you did today when you questioned a student’s contribution based on her ethnicity, I will ask you to leave.”  Regardless, whether the professor misinterpreted what Malec was saying, or if he had, in fact said, something that intimidated a student, what is clear is that he was forced to drop the class and switch to an independent study based on something that he said.

In a different scenario from two weeks ago, a video was uploaded onto YouTube entitled “Testimony,” which caught a verbal altercation between several people. According to Carlondo Dudley, an eyewitness from the video, the unidentified white male in his 40s walked in front of a black student who was looking down.  After bumping into each other, the man said something along the lines of “I’m an American, I walk on the right side of the road.” This speech, as it turns out, is also off-limits.

“Here’s my situation,” says Dudley to the man in the video. “This is an international environment. You can’t say things like ‘are you an American?’ because not everyone can say that.”  If that had been all, it might have simply been a gruff exchange of perspectives prompting no need for an opinion article, but many students felt that this speech was aggressive enough to justify seeking administrative help in punishing the man for his comments.  Given that a bias incident is “conduct, speech or behavior motivated by prejudice or bias towards another person that does not rise to the level of a crime,” a description which itself is determined by the victim’s perception, punitive action seems to be likely.

It’s difficult to imagine that great American whose life we celebrated yesterday would have been thought of as sensitive and respectful by the standards of his time, or, for that matter, by the standards of our time within campus boundaries. But historical speculation aside, the idea that certain speech is “off-limits” defeats the very purpose of protecting individual rights on campus.  In fact, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) gave Bellevue College a “red-light” rating, as a campus with policies that are in the words of its president Greg Lukianoff, “laughably unconstitutional.”

It’s worth pointing out that the reason FIRE became involved in BC in the first place was over the suspension of a math teacher in 2006 for putting a question on an exam that asked students to do some calculations based on Condoleezza Rice dropping a watermelon off of a building. While FIRE proudly announced victory for free speech at BC in February of 2007 (finally overturning the suspension more than five months after the event itself occurred), the voices that vilified the math professor haven't become weaker; they've become enshrined in actual school policy.

This is not how a free-society works, and certainly now how students can experience the marketplace of ideas. If BC students and staff value diversity as much as they say they do, they must be willing to value diversity of opinion, especially, in fact, of opinions they disagree with or find offensive. True diversity of ideas is being killed on campus in the name of multiculturalism, and not only does it defeat the very purpose for which it was designed - to make students feel safe to be themselves - but also defeats the principles of education and our country's constitution. You simply do not have a right to not be offended.

This idea is fast losing support on campuses however, where the price of having a thin skin can include your own ideas and convictions. Think "hate-speech" codes will protect your political views from criticism? Ask a college Republican how easy it is to get support for speakers and events, whose views are often inaccurately called "fascist" and "idiotic" by their own teachers and very often don't receive as large budgets as their liberal counterparts. Confident school policy will keep others from insulting your faith, or at least your race? Tufts University has banned the recitation of several verses of the Quran for inciting hatred and the same push for diversity has spawned Palestinian "apartheid wall" demonstrations on campuses across the country, often blatantly anti-semitic.

If we value diversity, we have to stand up for our ability to be who we are on campus, no matter our race, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics or opinions. No idea, no conversation and no words can be "off-limits" in an institution designed to teach its students not only how to interact with other people coming from different worlds, but how to function as informed citizens in a democratic society.

“Dangers of Reality and Imagination”

January 14, 2013

The casual phrase “it’s that time of year again,” betrays something of a cultural dismissal of the seriousness of the flu virus in the United States; ‘oh, it’s just the flu.’  No big deal.

While gun violence steals our headlines and late-night TV news time, less visceral but equally dangerous problems like the flu remain largely ignored.  Last Tuesday’s USA Today, for example, ran front page stories about both Gabriel Gifford’s new anti gun-lobby lobby group and the Newton School shooting, with just a side-bar story about the flu hitting with “deadly force,” having already killed 18 children this early in the season. The following day, the Seattle Times had not one, not two, but three front-page stories about gun control.  The entire paper didn’t mention this year’s particularly early and lethal flu season at all.

It should be pointed out that according to the Center for Disease Control, gun violence resulted in just over 12,600 deaths in 2007, while the 2009 flu pandemic, also known as the “swine flu” has resulted in the deaths of over 18,000 people.  It’s also worth noting that gun violence, though severe, has proven to be very, very difficult to mitigate without causing even more significant problems.  Preventing deaths from the flu, by contrast, is not only very easy in logistics, but politically and financially easy as well.  We simply need to walk over to the local drug-store and pick up a vaccine, often for just a few bucks.

So why aren’t we doing it?

It doesn’t take a PhD in social psychology to understand that we don’t make our decisions as rationally as we like to think – a problem that has vexed economists as well as health-care providers for as long as we’ve been managing our money and our bodies.  We make a lot of our decisions based on our fears, which are very often poor reflections of the actual dangers that we face. Based on the number of guns, number of swimming pools, and number of children annually killed by both, Economics Professor Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago calculated that “on average, if you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”  And yet, we very rarely hear of worried citizens fighting for more restrictive laws on swimming pools.

While there is a small fringe group of people who don’t understand medical technology perpetuating some bad science (like the claim that vaccinations cause autism, or hurt your immune system), the main problem with the flu, as with swimming pools, seems to be that it lacks agency – it’s not a person doing something to you, it’s simply a hazard.  The more primitive parts of our brain are programmed to fear predatory animals and, more importantly, other people.  It’s only natural, biologically speaking, that something like a gun-wielding person inspires more fear and political action than something even more dangerous and more preventable like influenza.

However, as educated people (you’re reading the newspaper, after all), we have a responsibility to set the bar higher, to do our best to match our fears with reality, and to match our preventative action to the threats that actually endanger people the most.  It would also pay huge dividends in safety for us to try to deal with the easy problems first.  So if we really want to make society safer, let’s try to ensure as many people as we can get vaccinated this year.  When we finally send the flu the way of smallpox, we will be in a more rational position from which to worry about the more sensational dangers like firearms.

Constitutional Controversies on Campus

January 7, 2013

Coming to school after a long and hopefully relaxing Christmas Break, talking about politics, law and freedom may seem to be kind of an agonizing prospect; perhaps not unlike being asked to do something unpleasant just after waking up without even the decency of a shower and a hot cup of coffee.

Oh, I meant to say “holiday” break.  There is, sadly, no escape from issues of free speech by hiding our heads in the sand during whatever ethnically, religiously and culturally neutral festive holiday you may or may not celebrate.  I actually tried it with snow, and while my ugly little igloo was sound-proof for the duration of the camping trip, it was hardly what you might call a sustainable practice for peace of mind.  And returning to school, we are once more confronted with these stubborn issues – the only difference is that we’re forced to be a bit more aware of them.  Ignorance is only bliss in the unenlightened short-term where such matters are concerned.

If you are lucky enough to be enrolled in a political science class, these problems may even affect you in the more visceral, offensive way it affected Bill Neel in early September, 2002.  President Bush was touring through Pittsburgh on Labor Day, where Neel was planning on greeting him with a sign that read, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.”  The local police created an ad-hoc “free speech zone” on a baseball field more than a quarter of a mile away, and ordered Neel and other wavers of critical signs to move (though supportive signs were, of course, perfectly acceptable outside this free-speech zone).  Neel was arrested for disorderly conduct when he refused to move.

Such was the case for students Marco Valdez, George Miller, Jon-Mycal Panattoni, Ally Mcgill and Kayla Jeppeson last quarter for their class Indecision 2012.  For their political action assignment, they chose to stage a protest of Bellevue College’s own free speech zone; outside of said free speech zone, of course.  Unfortunately, the students chose to start the protest by camping out overnight by the R-building, which violates a more mundane and perhaps more reasonable rule about the schools hours of operation.  When they talked to security about the possibility of future protests with better times however, things didn’t look any better – even during normal school hours, such activities must be confined to the so-called free-speech zone.

Do we lose our constitutional rights outside of the fountain plaza?

School is, and generally always has been, centered around the classroom.  Let’s face it: no one really cares that much about whatever group happens to be tabling or petitioning in front of the fountain around lunch time on any given day.  The threat is not that the administration won’t let you hold a sign saying you dislike Bush’s policies regarding poor people, but that they won’t let you hold that sign where it actually matters, and where you should be allowed to by the First and Fourth Amendments – that means in the classroom.  It’s condescending and evasive lip-service given to free speech, allowing people to say that they support free speech without actually having to.  You know you’re talking to one of these people when they say ‘I support free speech, except when…’

Valdez and his classmates started their protest primarily as a school project, but started to care more about the issue when they realized that they actually were, essentially, being censored, and that other students who wanted to make similar use of their intellectual freedom could be similarly silenced.  The problem isn’t that most students like the idea of these sorts of impositions on their rights: in a recent project for one of my own courses from last quarter called Techniques and Technology of Propaganda, all but a couple of the dozen or so students we interviewed supported absolute freedom of speech on campus, and said they would be extremely upset if they were limited in what they could hear or read, since when you silence one person, you simultaneously cut off everyone else’s ability to hear their ideas.  Two even said they’d rebel (violently!), if such censorship were revealed to be happening.

As Valdez and his group demonstrated, the problem isn’t attitude, but awareness of the state of things, and our present status quo’s adverse affect on not just student freedom, but the very education these rules were designed to protect.  When students can’t express themselves – when we’re so limited by unnecessarily stringent rules of conduct and Orwellian rules of political correctness that we can’t even ask difficult questions, education is adversely affected indeed.

In short, students need to follow the advice of Dr. Bernard Franklin – perhaps not to the extreme of overflowing the college sewer-system in protest, or yelling at the dean of the school from atop their own desk, but at least standing up for ourselves and demanding more for our money.  College, for most people, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for growth, education and intellectual stimulation, and it would be a personal and national tragedy for us to throw it away out of apathy or blissful ignorance.

For more information about the student protests against BC’s Free Speech zone, see “Students Protest Free Speech Zone” by Erin Hoffman on page 1.  To get involved, contact Marco Valdez at mrc.vldz@gmail.com.