Greg Lukianoff, the President of FIRE, offers an intriguing hypothesis about the tedious consistency of censorship tactics through the ages:
I have always found it fascinating that colleges and universities–which tend to believe themselves to be centers of perfect open-mindedness and progressive thought–so often end up echoing the censors of bygone eras. As we note in FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, for example, administrators’ justifications for punishing politically incorrect, ideologically incompatible, or simply inconvenient speech at times echo the rationale of southern slave owners in the early 19th century who wished to ban abolitionist speech because it “inflicted emotional injury” on slave owners. As we often have to point out, while politeness is a virtue, it is of minuscule importance when compared with robust debate and discussion.
The pattern that strikes me the most, however, is the tendency of administrators to sound like the censors of the Victorian era–morally infallible, plugged into absolute truths and engaged in saving the country’s soul from incivility or impropriety.
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[T]he idea that education is about inculcating “correct” beliefs to an ignorant public smacks of late 19th century imperiousness. It is true that the similarity between the narrow-minded Victorian censors and those of the present day campus may only exist because authoritarianism manifests in a finite number of forms–the rationales for censorship and repression are predictable, generally uncreative, and tend to repeat through history with the monotony of a terrible skipping record. The results are, also, sadly predictable: crushing dissent squelches innovation and utterly impedes the noble search for truth and greater understanding.
Greg’s full essay is available here.