A candid admission from an anonymous academic in Vox—“I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”—has higher ed spectators on all sides of the ideological spectrum concerned that students’ increasing aversion to offended-ness is forcing academics to dumb down their courses.
But while just about everybody agrees there’s a problem, sheer outrage is incapable of solving it. That’s because federal bureaucrats have declared war on campus free speech and universities would be crazy to defy them, short of a Congressional mandate to do so.
Watch what you say didn’t become the unofficial motto of American campuses by accident, and hyper-offended students don’t strike fear into the hearts of the professoriate because they are physically imposing. Rather, it’s the explicit threat of formal, government-backed sanction that gives a minority of easily-agitated agitators veto power over all aspects of campus life, from the classroom to the dorm room to the rec room. (Not even movie night is safe.) . . .
We have the federal government to thank for that.
Specifically, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights—a massive, bureaucratic agency staffed with 650 lawyers. They have one job: punish universities that don’t sufficiently police campuses for harassment and discrimination.
Ostensibly, they do this under the charge of Title IX, a 1972 amendment to the Higher Education Act that prohibits gender discrimination at universities that received federal funding. Initially intended to make sure that female student-athletes received as much institutional support as male athletes, Title IX has been reinterpreted by OCR to apply to virtually all human activity that takes place on campus.
Harassment, according to OCR’s confusing and ever-mutating guidance, is ill-defined and largely subjective.
And it’s all made up as it goes along, without much in the way of statutory language behind it, and mostly even without any sort of actual rulemaking — just administrative “guidance.”