Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus John Wesley Lowery (bio) Donald Alexander Downs. Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus. Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2005. 318 pp. Cloth: $25.00. ISBN: 0-521-83987. There has been considerable debate over the past 20 years about threats to free speech and civil liberties at colleges and universities throughout the United States. This debate began in the late 1980s with widespread concern about "political correctness." In recent years, groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, led by David Horowitz, have done a great deal to focus public attention on these issues. In Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus, Donald Alexander Downs examines the [End Page 413] nature and evolution of these threats. He provides case study analyses of the specific problems encountered on four college campuses. Lastly, Downs suggests an approach for responding to these threats when they arise on campus. Downs is, by his own admission, a somewhat unlikely author on this topic, having argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should not have supported the rights of the National Socialist Party of America to march in Skokie, Illinois (Downs, 1985) and having voted to adopt the faculty and student speech codes at the University of Wisconsin in 1988. In Part 1, Downs considers the factors that contributed to this retreat from civil liberties on campus. He acknowledges that many of these measures were intended to "foster civility, tolerance, and respect for racial and cultural diversity," (p. xv), but were themselves, in the end, unjust. He cites three major reasons: "changes in intellectual, pedagogical, political, and administrative culture" (p. 13), the failure of faculty and students to mobilize against threats to civil liberties, and a lack of knowledge within the higher education community about "basic constitutional rights and the reasons for taking constitutional liberty seriously" (p. 13). A key change began in the 1960s with the emergence of theories of oppression, which advocated censorship to further social justice. Important scholars advocating this position included Herbert Marcuse, Catherine MacKinnon, and Richard Delgado. As these perspectives gained prominence and were coupled with changes in the culture of institutional leadership at the highest levels, institutions began, in 1987, to adopt speech codes. Within five years, more than 300 institutions had such codes. After examining the emergence of these trends, Downs turns to four case studies in Part 2 to examine in greater detail the cultural and political forces on campus contributing to these threats to freedom and civil liberties. In 2000, Columbia University adopted a radical new sexual misconduct policy which was designed to encourage victims to report sexual assaults to the university administration. The Columbia policy merged the responsibility for both sexual assault education and adjudication of allegations of sexual assault in the same office. During the period of policy's consideration, virtually no one on campus publicly voiced concerns about the proposed policy; and a number of student groups, especially SAFER, worked for its adoption. The most important factor at Columbia University that led ultimately to significant changes in the policy was the involvement of the FIRE, which succeeded in attracting considerable press attention, including coverage in the Wall Street Journal and Village Voice. This coverage created an environment in which both trustees and students began to speak out forcefully against the policy. Downs also considers a series of disputes at Berkeley, including those arising from the decision of the Daily Californian to publish an anti-slavery reparations advertisement funded by David Horowitz. Berkeley's Law School had significant debates, especially regarding affirmative action, in the law school. Downs raises concerns that some with the law school sought to silence views that dissented from their own and that the administration and faculty did not do enough to foster an environment of open expression. In 1993, an undergraduate student at the university faced formal disciplinary charges for calling a group of African American women who were loud outside his residence hall "water buffalos." The chapter on the water buffalo case at the University of Pennsylvania covers ground described by a number of different sources but...