Facebook Faces the Academic Censors

It should not surprise anyone that American universities, run by and for Marxist sympathizers, are eager to censor students whenever they deviate from the party line. The usual way this is done is through so-called "speech codes" which are essentially a codified version of the kind of censorship that academics themselves refuse to countenance when they perceive themselves on the receiving end. But just let a student express a conservative viewpoint or pop off a criticism of any individual other than a white male (the only unprotected species), or, for that matter, act just like the usual college idiot who hasn't quite grown up yet, and you could find that your academic career is at an end.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has now discovered that academic censorship today doesn't just stop at verbal expression. Leftists in academia are now actually going into what amounts to a student's private sphere on a witch-hunt for the politically incorrect. To wit: they're now going through social networking sites like Facebook.com, according to writer Greg Lukianoff:

Looking back on FIRE’s work last year, several trends stand out: the disturbing rise of student-led censorship, the increased public awareness of the importance of the right of private conscience, the continued pervasiveness of speech codes and the often willful misinterpretation of “harassment” to squelch speech. One trend, however, strikes me as being truly unique to 2006: the rise of censorship cases and other administrative abuses involving social networking websites like Facebook.com.

For instance:

...in November of 2006, FIRE witnessed one of the most severe punishments it has ever seen meted out for pure speech. At Johns Hopkins University, Justin Park, an 18-year-old junior, was suspended for an entire year for posting an “offensive” Halloween party invitation on Facebook.com. His punishment also included 300 hours of community service, an assignment to read 12 books and write a reflection paper on each, and mandatory attendance at a workshop on diversity and race relations. The incident also led the university to pass an absurd and wildly overbroad speech code prohibiting “rude, disrespectful behavior.”

Are you kidding? Most kids on most college campuses today live for Saturday night when each and every one of them are ready to indulge in plenty of "rude, disrespectful behavior." Not that we think this is a great idea, but just how is one rude, disrespectful kid more rude and disrespectful than another? If he (probably never a she, since only "he's" are "privileged") runs afoul of politically correct speech codes, no doubt. These idiotic and discriminatory codes are bad enough. But by invading what is literally a student's personal space, by rummaging through social networking sites, a university is vastly exceeding its own legal bounds, we think. Perhaps the "right to privacy" is only reserved on campus these days for Marxist professors who really do have something to conceal.

Meanwhile, seems that the stink raised by the Park incident cited above got him an easier "sentence." But one wonders whether the university had any right to give him a sentence after all. Which is where Lukianoff is going next:

While after weeks of public pressure the university backed away from its original punishment, and reached a resolution that satisfied Park, the fact that any punishment remained at all—and that a ludicrous speech code was adopted—should give any student, parent, or potential applicant serious pause. Can a university that claims to respect free speech be taken seriously if it threatens to essentially expel a student and ruin his academic career for a joke gone wrong? Earlier this week, in large part for its remarkable overreaction to online speech, FIRE declared Hopkins its first-ever “Censor of the Year” for 2006.

It's time America's universities themselves were made as accountable as they seem to want to make everyone else. We'll be getting after them quite a bit more in 2007 than we did in 2006. Clearly, it's the violently anti-American ideology these institutions ceaselessly promote that is proving far more dangerous to the average U.S. citizen than a random juvenile student who hasn't quite yet grown into adulthood. (Something that many professors never fully achieve, I might add.)

As you ponder this interesting conundrum, why don't you read the rest of the FIRE story here?