The University of Northern Colorado (UNCO) has decided it’s time to prohibit “Bias Motivated Incidents.” When you hear about a “bias motivated incident,” maybe you’re thinking about a cross burning, or something of that nature. But at UNCO the “bias motivated incident” could simply be an “inappropriate joke” that is motivated by some form of bias.
The UNCO policy also says that “Any discriminatory act is a violation of the Housing & Residence Life Student Code of Conduct.” Well, what do they mean by “any discriminatory act”? According to the UNCO handbook this includes, but is not limited to, “racism, ageism, sexism, and/or homophobia.” And (get ready for this!) included in the definition is “intentionally, recklessly or negligently causing physical, emotional, or mental harm to any person.”
In my view, there are at least three fundamental dangers associated with the UNCO speech code.
First, and perhaps most obviously, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by simply becoming offended. So it really protects and defends the speech of those least able to protect and defend their own speech through reasoned discourse. It is not often that the speech of the emotionally frail has much merit. People who fall apart emotionally in response to protected speech are unlikely to have the intellectual firepower needed to articulate ideas from which the rest of us can benefit. They are simply being empowered to trump the speech of their emotional and intellectual superiors.
Second, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by pretending to be offended. When this occurs, the speech code is rewarding more than just the intellectually inferior – it is rewarding the morally inferior. It is using faux outrage to cancel honest opinion.
Finally, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) points out, laws must “give a person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he may act accordingly.” Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108-09 (1972). If people do not know what is prohibited there will be a dramatic chilling effect on free speech.
Those who must live under UNCO’s policy cannot know what could cause another person “emotional” or “mental” harm. That is because the policy does not require that the speaker intends to cause the alleged harm. The fact that someone subjectively feels “emotionally harmed” by the speech is enough for UNCO. So the speaker who correctly imagines that just about any idea is bound to offend someone, somewhere, is deterred from speaking on any potentially controversial topic.
This reminds me of a university, which formerly had a speech code banning “challenging” speech. That university apparently wanted students to go off to school for four years without ever being challenged. Does UNCO want an educational environment characterized by, and only by, discourse that could never be deemed controversial by anyone?
College administrators often fail to distinguish between speech that is severe and persistent enough to constitute harassment and simple isolated expressions of protected speech. It appears as if they are utterly unable to write a code that could pass constitutional muster. More likely, they are fully aware that they can sustain the code through the twin threat of internal formal sanction and social stigmatization. Many would like to defeat such a patently illegal policy. Few wish to be dubbed racist, sexist, or homophobic in the process.
There are many things that can be done to defeat such a policy. I intend to start by sending the following “inappropriate joke” to the Dean of Students at UNCO.
Q: How many UNCO administrators does it take to unravel a logically coherent and constitutionally permissible Code of Student conduct?
A: Ten. You need nine to write the code and one to take offense at logical coherence and constitutional orthodoxy.
But there is something serious that students at UNCO can do about this policy. They can begin to bombard the Dean of Students with all kinds of inappropriate jokes. For example:
Q: What do you call an Irish communist?
A: O’Bama.
Hopefully, someone in the UNCO Dean of Students Office will be Irish, communist, or will simply have made a public profession of faith in Barack Obama as his Lord and Savior. In other words, hopefully someone will be offended. And, hopefully, UNCO will decide to bring charges against the offender!
When that happens, you can just email me at [email protected]. I’ll make sure you get a lawyer. And for those who believe your college or university should be publicly chastised for an unconstitutional speech code, please e-mail [email protected] with a link to the policy and a brief description of why you think attention should be drawn to the code.
After FIRE is done critiquing the code, I will, if necessary, seek a plaintiff to have it overturned in a court of law. We need both humiliation and litigation to solve the speech code issue. Otherwise, our college campuses will continue to be crude and inappropriate jokes.
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Mike S. Adams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on October 30, 1964. While a student at Clear Lake High School in Houston, TX, his team won the state 5A soccer championship. Mike Adams graduated from C.L.H.S. in 1983 with a 1.8 GPA. Mike Adams was ranked 734 among a class of 740, largely as a result of flunking English all four years of high school. After obtaining an Associate's degree in psychology from San Jacinto College, Mike Adams moved on to Mississippi State University where he joined the Sigma Chi Fraternity. While living in the fraternity house, his GPA rose to 3.4, allowing him to finish his B.A., and then to pursue a Master's in Psychology. In 1990, Mike Adams turned down a chance to pursue a PhD in psychology from the University of Georgia, opting instead to remain at Mississippi State to study Sociology/Criminology. This decision was made entirely on the basis of his reluctance to quit his night job as member of a musical duo. Playing music in bars and at fraternity parties and weddings financed his education. Mike Adams also played for free beer.
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Upon getting his doctorate in 1993, Adams, then an atheist and a Democrat, was hired by UNC-Wilmington to teach in the criminal justice program. A few years later, Adams abandoned his atheism and also became a Republican. He also nearly abandoned teaching when he took a one-year leave of absence to study law at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1998. After returning to teach at UNC-Wilmington, Adams won the Faculty Member of the Year award (issued by the Office of the Dean of Students) for the second time in 2000.
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After his involvement in a well publicized free speech controversy in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Adams became a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia. After making appearances on shows like Hannity and Colmes, the O'Reilly Factor, and Scarborough Country, Adams was asked to write a column for Townhall.com.
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Today Mike Adams enjoys the privilege of expressing himself both as a teacher and a writer. Mike Adams is also an avid hunter and reader of classic literature. Mike Adams published his first book, Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel, in 2004. His second book, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus, was published in 2008.
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