Florida Southern College students are some of the best mannered I’ve known, across several institutions of higher learning as a professor, and with a backward glance at my own experience as a graduate and undergraduate student.
As a class of people, they are polite, respectful, civil and generally plain nice. I’m not sure if its our recruitment strategy, that we are a private institution, or our proximity to the Methodist Church, but they seem, on reflection, to be a pretty well-mannered group.
The kids from Southeastern University, Polk State College and Florida Polytechnic University all seem similarly disposed to good manners. So it's not just “us.” Rumor is that Tampa and Rollins students can hold their own on the well-mannered scale.
But apparently this general politeness does not extend to all places, or my knowledge of college students is narrow, because we’ve seen the blossoming of reservations for free speech.
The establishment of “free speech zones” and “safe spaces” bifurcate the constitutional dictum of free speech in ways that should alarm and irritate thinking people from far left to far right and everywhere in between.
The first are spaces or places where one may express one’s thoughts; the second are places where such utterings are curtailed, sometimes severely.
I have ranted against outsiders crawling onto campuses who might potentially cause violence, but the free speech zone/safe space issue is something quite different and potentially quite disturbing.
This is not directed at outside ideologues with cemented, idiotic positions, but at the community of scholars itself: students, faculty, staff, coaches and administrators.
For all of the above, the rules already apply when it comes to calls to violence or harassment (sexual or otherwise), or “fighting words.” Anyone is fair game to be disciplined on these kinds of utterances.
Safe spaces are seemingly established to prevent students — and presumably other members of the campus community — from voicing “potentially” hurtful, offensive or otherwise “triggering” speech.
Free speech zones are apparently places where they may speak freely, saying whatever comes into their heads. The absurdity of this situation is obvious and silly: one envisions a marked off lawn wherein students, faculty and staff hurl profanity, insults, slurs and the like at one another — and a similar place (perhaps with smiley-faced signage) where silence rules supreme (for surely almost anything is unpleasant to the ears of someone).
There are saner voices.
Inside Higher Ed reported this news from Britain: Jo Johnson, the universities minister, said universities "should be places that open minds, not close them, where ideas can be freely challenged and prejudices exposed. But in universities in America and increasingly in the United Kingdom, there are countervailing forces of censorship, where groups have sought to stifle those who do not agree with them in every way under the banner of ‘safe spaces’ or ‘no-platforming.’ However well intentioned, the proliferation of such safe spaces, the rise of no-platforming, the removal of ‘offensive’ books from libraries and the drawing up of ever more extensive lists of banned ‘trigger’ words are undermining the principle of free speech in our universities."
Amen, Brits. I won’t forgive you for Brexit though.
While the usual source of censoring seems to come from the right, much of this is clearly from the left, and just as bad. Ideological justification is just as worthless from the left as it would be from the right.
Students, whatever their ideological leanings, are on campus to learn who they are, and how to think, not what to think.
They cannot be effective citizens if they can’t learn to tell the basic differences between valuable comments, reasoned positions and gibberish. Unfortunately, they need to hear a lot of both before they can discern them one from another.
Students learn at least as much from each other as they do from the professoriate, particularly when it comes to specific policy items. We can teach them any number of models for testing the reliability, efficiency or effectiveness of a given plan, but actually filling these spaces needs to be up to them.
They challenge each other, they challenge their professors, and we all challenge each other. And sometimes the topics of discussion are tough.
In my first year classes, I can easily remember dozens of conversations among students or raised by students with me that would not pass a correctness test. I refuse, on principle, to “edit” my students. We should never simply declare a subject off limits because it might offend someone.
Democracy is risky. Democratic discussion is sometimes rough. Argument is how we resolve things. Herding this central discussion to a single space on campus is ludicrous; it damages the learning process and turns out clueless citizens.
R. Bruce Anderson (randerson2@flsouthern.edu) is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.