Free Speech at UNC
The next day, Prof. Crystall sent an E-mail to the entire class saying that “what we heard thursday at the end of class constitutes ‘hate speech’ and is completely unacceptable.” She apologized “to those of us who are now feeling that the classroom we share is an unsafe environment,” and promised to do her “best to counter those feelings and protect that space from further violence.” The student’s remarks, she continued, constituted “a perfect example of privilege. that a white, heterosexual, christian male . . . can feel entitled to make violent, heterosexist comments and not feel marked or threatened or vulnerable is what privilege makes possible.”
Upon learning of the E-mail, Crystall’s department chairman met with her and the student, stated that the E-mail was inappropriate, and monitored the remainder of the class to ensure that the student suffered no formal or informal retaliation.
The OCR investigation held that the student was targeted for" criticism in part because of his protected status”—since white and male are"both protected classes under the laws enforced by OCR"—and that such an act “constitutes intentional discrimination.” Additionally, the office ruled that the employer is responsible for"ending the discrimination and preventing its recurrence.” Since it found that the UNC administration had acted properly in this case, the OCR requested no further action. As North Carolina congressman Walter Jones noted, the ruling recognized that “a student's constitutionally granted First Amendment right to free speech was trampled upon by an instructor with the power to intimidate,” and it established a limit on future such acts (albeit a limited “limit,” since faculty ideologues were only prohibited from referencing race or gender when attempting to apply ideological litmus tests.)
The ruling resonates on three broader levels: 1.) Administrations matter. The UNC administration, which doesn’t have the greatest record on academic free speech issues, in this case seems to have acted entirely properly. (Alas, the faculty leadership’s subsequent actions—suggesting that the OCR’s inquiry chilled academic freedom--suggests some backtracking.) And although the department chairman’s response might seem like common sense, it’s not difficult to imagine an opposite reaction. For instance, at my own institution, President C.M. Kimmich received a letter from a women’s history professor denouncing the offering of courses and hiring of personnel in political and diplomatic history on the grounds that such “old-fashioned” topics were of use only for “young white males” of “narrow” intellects. Kimmich not only affirmed the interpretation, but placed the professor on the department’s personnel committee, which controls future hires. It would be hard to maintain that any white male could receive fair treatment in such an environment.
2.) The tip of the iceberg. It’s not as if many professors around the country are consciously imitating Crystall’s e-mail, or my colleague’s remarks on political history, or the justification issued by Duke philosophy professor Robert Brandon as to why his department had no conservatives (“If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire”). But it’s worth pondering about the intellectual environment that produced such transparently absurd statements. Crystal, my colleague, and Brandon not only made their claims believing that they would be persuasive, but assumed that no reasonable person could brook opposition to their positions. Scholars of racial or gender bias speak of the “mirror effect,” in which people like to hire those who resemble them. Certainly this approach holds for ideological bias as well: how could someone such as Brandon, for instance, ever evaluate applicants for a position in his department with a search for merit as his prime criterion?
3.) The UNC requirement. When this story first broke, I had assumed that the course in question was some sort of personal counseling offering, since I found it hard to imagine a normal academic setting in which Prof. Crystall’s question would be appropriate for class discussion. It turns out, however, that the course was an English class called “Literature of Cultural Diversity” that fulfills UNC’s “cultural diversity” requirement, which “explores diverse cultural values and viewpoints within the U.S.,” with a goal of exposing “students to the many facets of a diverse society and to allow self-understanding in the contemporary and pluralistic world.”
It would be hard to contend that this requirement isn’t more political than academic, and UNC’s interpretation of it raises serious questions about the university’s academic values. For instance, what sort of intellectual justification would maintain that a course in, say, “Women of Byzantium” fulfills the terms of this requirement, but a course in, say, postwar U.S. legal history, which would have to cover such topics as the civil rights movement, the ERA, abortion rights, and the gay rights movement, would not fulfill the requirement? Perhaps the university would have less negative publicity in the future if it confined itself to offering courses in academic subjects.