What's become of Campus Speech Codes?

When I was in grad school from 1993-1995, policies against “hateful speech” were all the rage on college campuses, especially in the northeast. Respected universities (including the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters) that once had been bastions of free expression and the exchange of ideas, became timid creatures wherein the least off-color remark could lead to firing or loss of tenure or expulsion.

The thinking behind the codes was that sensitive students couldn’t learn if they were in an “oppressive” environment of “hateful speech.” This GD can be about whether that’s a valid position.

By the time the speech code concept had spread to the South and my school, the University of Georgia, the backlash was already beginning, and the local outcry was such that the proposed code was never adopted.

Six years later, are the codes still in place at the schools that had them? I’ve heard nothing about them in years, but my current life is now far from the halls of academe.

Well, many of the public schools that passed speech codes had the codes challenged in courts and lost on First Amendment grounds.

IIRC, in California (where I went to school) a statute was passed requiring private schools to have speech codes no more strict than the public schools. End result, private schools in California don’t have speech codes anymore.

I don’t know what happened in private schools outside of Cal., but I imagine the whole idea has become somewhat passe.

I always thought the codes were crap. Certainly, students should be expelled/professors canned if their racism, sexism, etc., would denigrate the (hypothetical) reasonable student’s ability to get an education, but I don’t think that certain “magic words” automatically make it harder for that hypothetical student. Context, intent, etc. always make a difference, and the codes didn’t provide for that.

Sua