As a political-science professor at Central Washington University, Mathew S. Manweller has a personal stake in protecting academic freedom. When the Legislature began this year’s session, Mr. Manweller, who is also a state representative, proposed a bill calling for Washington to strongly defend free speech in two of academe’s most contentious debates, over trigger warnings and microaggressions.
Throughout the nation, instructors are under pressure from students to provide them with trigger warnings — advance notice of instructional material that might cause them emotional distress. Meanwhile, colleges have been adopting training programs intended to discourage faculty and staff members from engaging in microaggressions, generally defined as subtle, and often unintentional, expressions of discrimination.
Both developments are highly controversial, cheered as helping to protect students from real harm, derided as coddling students who complain of being upset when exposed to ideas they don’t like. Fueling the debate are other trends subjecting campus speech to intense scrutiny: the rise of social media, which can rapidly turn campus skirmishes into national controversies; the recent explosion of campus protests denouncing colleges as hostile environments for women or minority-group members; and the emergence of watchdog groups dedicated to monitoring administrators and faculty members for political or ideological bias.
Students appear more willing to favor restrictions on campus speech than they were in the past, according to the results of an annual survey of college freshmen conducted by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, part of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Its survey this year — of more than 141,000 first-time, full-time freshmen at nearly 200 four-year colleges — found that an all-time high of about 71 percent agreed at least somewhat with the assertion that colleges should ban racist or sexist speech on campus. About 43 percent agreed that colleges have the right to declare themselves off limits to extreme speakers.
Mr. Manweller’s bill, which failed in committee but stands a decent chance of being revived as an amendment, says lawmakers need to protect campus speech from new regulations “that are not viewpoint-neutral.” It would ban public colleges from requiring instructors to issue trigger warnings, but leave instructors with the discretion to do so on their own. It similarly would bar public colleges from punishing students or employees for perceived microaggressions, while nonetheless allowing colleges to develop educational programs intended to promote awareness of such actions.
Although Representative Manweller and his bill’s cosponsors are Republicans, he was hopeful that he could get Democrats behind the measure. In contrast to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, in which conservatives accused college administrations and faculties of liberal or leftist indoctrination, the latest free-speech debates are not being waged along neat ideological lines. Some of the students asking instructors to provide trigger warnings have been social conservatives who do not want to be exposed to instructional content they find objectionable for moral or religious reasons.
Among those arguing that faculty members should not be required to give trigger warnings are the American Association of University Professors, other free-speech advocacy groups, and the College Art Association. The faculties of several institutions, including Princeton University and the University of Chicago, have adopted statements emphatically declaring that the need for open debate on campus trumps any student’s desire not to be upset or offended. As The Atlantic reported last fall, some of the sharpest critics of college students’ sensitivities are edgy comedians, who say they either are afraid to deliver their routines on campuses or have found themselves unable to land college gigs.
When colleges have acquiesced to student demands to limit speech, Henry F. (Hank) Reichman, chairman of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, blames a growing tendency of their administrations “to look at students as customers, and hence colleges and universities as places where the customer is always right and needs to be satisfied.”
Advocates of trigger warnings or campaigns against microaggressions, meanwhile, emphasize the need to maintain safe campus environments to foster learning, and accuse critics of exaggerating any threats posed to free speech. Although many faculty members have issued trigger warnings on their own, policies requiring such warnings remain rare.
The fight against microaggressions is being waged not through bans but through training programs promoting awareness of how certain words can offend.
Although the term “microaggression” has been applied to statements that are widely regarded as legitimate expressions of opinion — such as the assertion that anyone who works hard in America can succeed — it also covers remarks that would be widely seen as insensitive. One commonly cited example: a professor who responds to the presence of black students in a chemistry building by asking them if they are lost.
More broadly, defenders of trigger warnings or campaigns against microaggressions argue that their opponents often are motivated by the desire of those in power to avoid engaging the marginalized. In a recent opinion essay in The Chronicle Review, Kate Manne, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, and Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, wrote: “All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, ‘Quiet!’ "
Striking a balance between the two sides remains a difficult task. American University’s Faculty Senate learned as much last fall, after adopting a resolution that treated students’ request for trigger warnings not as an instructional matter to be handled by faculty members but as a mental-health issue best handled by student-support services. The approach got instructors off the hook for judging students’ requests to be shielded from content, but placed new burdens on counseling offices already struggling to meet student demand.
The University of California stumbled last year in an attempt to devise a “statement of principles against intolerance” that would uphold free speech while protecting students from harassment. Its draft statement was widely criticized as riddled with contradictions and as ignoring the problem — hate speech directed at Jewish students — that had spurred the whole exercise.
Colleges that do resolve to protect students from harassing speech are likely to find big holes in their defenses. Anonymous social-media applications like Yik Yak have made it easy for anyone to harass anyone else with impunity, so long as the originator of the post does not admit to giving offense or breaking any laws.
The only real protection students might have is a willingness to tune out, or a thick skin.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
