Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-traveling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, and unstable moods. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the “Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”). Newton wouldn’t last long as a public intellectual in modern America. Sooner or later, he would say offensive things that become moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from the academy and would make him a pariah on social media.
On the upside, he’d drive traffic to HuffPost, BuzzFeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s laws of motion.
Let’s take a step back from this alt-history nightmare and consider how campus speech codes and restrictive speech norms impose impossible expectations on many neurodivergent people.
Most of the geniuses I’ve known are not neurotypical. They would have a lot of trouble comprehending or following speech codes.
Ever since the Middle Ages, universities have nurtured people with unusual brains. Eccentrics have been hanging out in Cambridge since 1209 and at Harvard since 1636. For centuries, these eccentricity havens have been our time-traveling bridges from the ancient history of Western civilization to the far future of science, technology, and moral progress. Now our havens are under threat. Censorship kills creativity, truth, and progress in obvious ways. Without the free exchange of ideas, people can’t share risky new ideas (creativity), test them against other people’s logic and facts (truth), or compile them into civilizational advances (progress). But censorship also kills rational culture in a less obvious way: It silences eccentrics. It marginalizes people who may have great ideas, but who also happen to have cognitive disorders, personality quirks, idiosyncratic beliefs, or unusual communication styles that make it hard for them to understand and follow the current speech norms that govern what is “acceptable.” Harvard’s speech codes and Twitter’s trolls may not prohibit anything in Principia itself, but they drive away the kinds of people who write such books in the first place.
Eccentricity is a precious resource, easily wasted. John Stuart Mill warned that “the tyranny of the majority” tends to marginalize the insights of those outside the norm: “The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.” The tyranny of the neurotypical may be the chief danger of our own time.
Campus speech codes may have been well-intentioned at first. They tried to make universities more welcoming to racial and sexual minorities. But a side-effect of trying to increase demographic diversity has been to reduce neurodiversity, by stigmatizing anyone whose brain can’t color inside the lines of appropriate speech. The more “respectful” campuses became to the neurotypical, the more alienating they became to the neurodivergent.
Speech codes and norms are created and imposed by “normal” brains, for “normal” brains to obey and enforce. They assume that everyone is equally capable, 100 percent of the time, of using their verbal intelligence and cultural background to understand guidelines that are vague, over-broad, and euphemistic, to discern who’s actually allowed to say what, in which contexts, using which words.
When universities impose speech codes, they impose impossible behavioral standards on people who aren’t neurotypical, such as those with Asperger’s or Tourette’s syndromes, bipolar disorder, or dozens of other personality quirks or mental “disorders.” Historically, neurodiversity was stigmatized with extreme prejudice, but recently the autism-rights movement, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and other advocacy groups have fought for more acceptance.
A consequence of colleges trying to increase demographic diversity has been to reduce neurodiversity.
Most of the geniuses I’ve known are not neurotypical. They would have a lot of trouble comprehending or following speech codes. I suspect this would have been true for most of the brilliant thinkers of he last several millennia. Consider just a few geniuses who seem, given biographical records, to have been on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum: Béla Bartók, Jeremy Bentham, Lewis Carroll, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Sir Ronald Fisher, Sir Francis Galton, Glenn Gould, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Kinsey, Stanley Kubrick, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Bertrand Russell, Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Aspies like me enjoy making lists.)
On the upside, the civilizational contributions from the neurodivergent have been formidable — and often decisive in science and technology. On the downside, Asperger’s traits seem common among academics who have suffered the worst public outrages against things they’ve said and done, that weren’t intended to be offensive at all. As an aspie, I’ve sometimes posted things on social media that some people found distressing in ways I didn’t predict. For example, one of my tweets four years ago provoked quite a backlash. Some followers saw it as shaming obese people. When I wrote it, I didn’t anticipate how distressing it might be. Within a couple of hours, I realized on reflection that it was a dumb tweet, and I deleted it. But screenshots of it went viral anyway, and it blew up into a media firestorm that’s stymied my career ever since. If I’d been neurotypical, I’d have predicted people’s possible responses more accurately, and I wouldn’t have sent that tweet. But then, if I’d been neurotypical, I wouldn’t have found other humans so exotic, baffling, and unpredictable, and I wouldn’t have become an academic psychologist in the first place.
It’s impossible to follow a rule that doesn’t make sense, and the neurodivergent often find speech codes literally incomprehensible. For example, a typical set of “respectful campus,” “sexual misconduct,” and “antiharassment” policies prohibits: “unwelcome verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature”; “unwelcome jokes about a protected characteristic”; “hate or bias acts that violate our sense of community’; “sexist comments”; “degrading pictorial material”; “displaying objectionable objects": “negative posters about a protected characteristic.”
These restrictions are from the University of New Mexico, where I teach, but they’re pretty standard. I don’t understand what any of these phrases actually allow or prohibit, and I worked on free-speech issues in our Faculty Senate for two years, and in our sexual-misconduct policy committee for one year, so I’ve puzzled over them for some time.
People on the autism spectrum are generally not adept at reading emotions in people’s faces or picking up on social cues. So how can they anticipate what jokes are unwelcome, or recognize when their attempts at connection are making someone uncomfortable? How could a person who struggles to pick up social cues consistently anticipate which speech acts would be “unwelcome” to a stranger, or might be considered “sexist”? Lacking a good understanding of social norms, how could they anticipate what counts as a hate act that violates our sense of community, or what counts as an “objectionable object”? The language of campus speech codes is designed to give the illusion of precision, while remaining so vague that administrators can enforce them however they want to, whenever personal complaints, student protests, lawsuits, or adverse publicity make it expedient to punish someone for being “offensive.”
The result has been that administrators prioritize the alleged vulnerabilities of listeners over the communication rights of speakers. The only lip service given to neurodiversity in campus speech codes is in the (false) assumption that “trigger warnings” and prohibitions against “microaggressions” will be useful in protecting listeners with posttraumatic-stress disorder or high neuroticism. Administrators assume that the most vulnerable are always listeners, and never speakers.
Autism-spectrum disorders are central to the tension between campus censorship and neurodiversity. This is because there’s a trade-off in anyone’s brain between “systematizing” and “empathizing.” Systematizing is the drive to construct and analyze abstract systems of rules, evidence, and procedures. Empathizing is the ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, and to respond with “appropriate” emotions and speech acts. The ways that speech codes discriminate against systematizers is exacerbated by their vagueness, overbreadth, unsystematic structure, double standards, and logical inconsistencies — which drive systematizers nuts.
For example, most speech codes prohibit any insults based on a person’s sex, race, religion, or political attitudes. But aspie students often notice that these codes are applied very selectively: It’s OK to insult “toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy” but not to question the “wage gap” or “rape culture”; it’s OK to insult “white privilege” and the “alt-right” but not affirmative action or Black Lives Matter. The concept of “unwelcome” jokes or “unwelcome” sexual comments seems like a time-travel paradox to aspies — how can you judge whether a comment is unwelcome before you even say it?
To test my intuitions about these issues, I ran an informal poll of my Twitter followers, asking “Which condition would make it hardest to follow a college speech code that prohibits all ‘offensive’ or ‘disrespectful’ statements?” There were 655 votes across four response options: 54 percent for Asperger’s, 19 percent for schizophrenia, 14 percent for bipolar, and 13 percent for ADHD. The results of this one-item survey, from a small sample of my eccentric followers, should not be taken seriously as any kind of scientific research. They simply show I’m not the only person who thinks that Asperger’s would make it hard to follow campus speech codes.
To many STEM students and faculty members, empathizers seem to have forged campus speech codes into weapons for aspie-shaming. In a world where nerds like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are the most powerful innovators, speech codes are the revenge of the antinerds.
When a policy is formally neutral, but it adversely affects one legally protected group of people, that’s called “disparate impact,” and it’s illegal. People with diagnosed cognitive disorders qualify as “disabled” under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other federal laws, so any speech code at a public university that imposes disparate impact on neurominorities is illegal. What is the disparate impact here? Because of speech codes and speech norms, neurodivergent people know that at any time they might say something that could lead to expulsion, firing, or denial of tenure. They live in fear. They feel a chilling effect on their speech and behavior. They learn to self-censor.
Any speech code at a public university that imposes disparate impact on neurominorities is illegal.
Imagine you’re an anthropology professor with Asperger’s. You have trouble anticipating whether students will find your jokes funny or offensive until you tell them. But you get better course evaluations when you try to be funny. Then your university imposes a new speech code that says, basically, “Don’t say anything that people might find offensive.” You need good course evaluations for promotion and tenure, but your brain can’t anticipate your students’ reactions to your quirky sense of humor. As a result, you may withdraw from the social and intellectual life of the university. You may avoid group meetings, postcolloquium dinners, faculty parties, and conferences, where any tipsy comment, if overheard by anyone with a propensity for moralistic outrage, could threaten your reputation and career. I’ve seen this kind of withdrawal happen more and more over the last couple of decades. Nerdy, eccentric, and awkward academics who would have been outspoken, hilarious, and joyful in the 1980s are now cautious, somber, and frightened.
This withdrawal from the university’s “life of the mind” is especially heartbreaking to the neurodivergent, who often can’t stand small talk and whose only real social connections come through vigorous debate about dangerous ideas with their intellectual equals. Speech codes don’t just censor their words; they decimate their relationships, collaborations, and social networks. They can turn an aspie’s social life into a frozen wasteland. The resulting alienation can exacerbate many mental disorders, leading to a downward spiral of self-censorship, loneliness, despair, and failure.
Every speech code and restrictive speech norm is a sword of Damocles dangling above the head of every academic whose brain works a little differently. We feel the sharpness and the weight every day. After every class, meeting, blog, and tweet, we brace for the moral outrage, public shaming, witch hunts, and inquisitions that seem to hit our colleagues so unpredictably and unfairly. Like visitors from a past century or a foreign culture, we don’t understand which concepts are admissible, or which words are acceptable to your ears. We don’t understand your verbal and moral taboos. We can’t make sense of your double standards and logical inconsistencies. We don’t respect your assumption that empathizing should always take precedence over systematizing. Yet we know you have the power to hurt us for things we can’t help. So, we suffer relentless anxiety about our words, our thoughts, our social relationships, our reputations, and our careers.
Yet things are changing. Neurodiversity is finding its voice and its confidence. People with mental disorders and eccentric personalities have rights too, and we will not be intimidated by your stigma and shaming. We will educate administrators about the discriminatory side-effects of their bad policies. We will shatter your swords of Damocles and raise our freak flags to fly over campuses around the world.
Everything is on our side: behavioral science, intellectual history, federal law, public opinion, and liberal academe’s own most sacred values of diversity and inclusivity. The neurodivergent will not be silenced any longer.
If we stand up for our free-speech rights, campus speech codes will go extinct very quickly. In the future, they will be considered a weird historical curiosity of runaway virtue-signaling in early 21st-century America. The freedom to think eccentric thoughts and say eccentric things must be protected again. The freedom to be eccentric must be restored. Newton must be welcomed back to academe.
Geoffrey Miller is an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He’s the author of several books, including The Mating Mind (Doubleday, 2000), Spent (Viking, 2009), and Mate (Little, Brown, 2015). A version of this piece was first published in Quillette.
