Free Speech on Campus: ¡Interruption, Yes! ¡Disruption, No!

Writing for the Associated Press, on 11 May 2017, Collin Binkley noted that "First Amendment Backers See Free Speech Fading At Colleges" and looked in some depth at student attitudes.

         In campus clashes from California to Vermont, many defenders of the First Amendment say they see signs that free speech, once a bedrock value in academia, is losing ground as a priority at U.S. colleges.           As protests have derailed speeches by controversial figures, including an event with Ann Coulter last month at the University of California, Berkeley, some fear students have come to see the right to free expression less as an enshrined measure of protection for all voices and more as a political weapon used against them by provocateurs.

         What I can bring to this discussion is the experience of a law-abiding and moderate graduate student activist in "the long 1960s" followed by service as a faculty member in the 1970's onward, specifically service on the Miami University Student Affairs Council as we recommended to The President and Trustees of the Miami University — the University as "a body corporate and politic" in Ohio — rules regarding free speech and disruption.

         Student Affairs Council (SAC) did not deal directly with student attitudes, and if someone had brought up attitudes I might've quoted, "Laws are the great schoolmaster of the commonwealth" — from Francis Bacon or someone like that — and noted that in this instance SAC was supposed to recommend rules governing, first, on-campus behavior and second, behavior by people on campus: students, faculty, staff, and/or visitors.

         Miami University is a public institution and respect for First Amendment free-speech rights were — in theory — part of relevant Ohio law and implicit in our mandate for rules, so we tried to respect the free speech of teachers, speakers, protesters, and what some of us (well, I, anyway) somewhat flippantly thought of as "civilians." And we came up with a fairly simple rule asking that SAC work on the principle of a right to interrupt but prohibition of disruption.

         Teachers were not paid enough and were on campus enough that they shouldn't have to take much shit from their students and none from visitors to their classrooms. But we weren't back in the days of young Hitlerites intimidating professors, and the practical issue was with big-name guest speakers. And big-name guest speakers, especially when well compensated, were professionals, and professional speakers should be competent to deal with hecklers. Indeed, it's part of the gig, and for a long time part of the entertainment value of public speeches, at least of the political variety. And a quick debate could be more educational than the one-way communication of a speech.

         So, no, a guest speaker could not call in the cops to haul out someone who interrupted. And we wrote the rule generally enough that neither could anyone else, even if this meant — and I raised such examples explicitly — that a traditional Christian wedding ceremony in the campus chapel could be interrupted by a radical feminist objecting to "obey" in a woman's vows, and an Orthodox or Conservative service in the campus chapel the afternoon of Yom Kippur could be interrupted by gay students objecting to reading the prohibition of male homosexuality in the Book of Leviticus.

         Interrupted, not disrupted.

         A "group heckle" is not heckling but disrupting, and failing to sit down and shut up after objecting to wifely obedience or prohibitions of homosexual behavior is also disrupting. And disruption was and usually should be illegal.

         We retained the old formulation that the teachers or the sponsors of events should retain their cool and warn people when interrupting was moving into disruption. But if the interruption became disruption, or disruption was the point all along, then we recommended authorizing calling in the cops and the armed power of the State.

         And this was in Ohio, down the road a piece (252 miles) from Kent State University and not long after the 4 May 1970 shootings at KSU. And if anyone had ever asked me — and they didn't — I could tell anti-War stories of Michigan and Balbo in Chicago in the summer of 1968, and the University of Illinois campus and how the two times I was most seriously threatened with serious injury it was by police with clubs.

         (Of course, a big part of the reason I was only seriously threatened twice in my life is because of the strong State with a lot of cops [a "Leviathan"], but that's another essay.)

         So we knew that every law and rule is, ultimately, backed up by force — including our rules on the size of pet fish in dorms — and some of us knew very well that even legal force can get nasty.

         Protesters had the right to interrupt; speakers and their audiences had the right to speak and hear … after a bit.

         I'm sure by now the Miami U Office of Legal Counsel has grown to significant size and rules are written by small teams of lawyers — especially sensitive rules such as those regarding guest speakers. But I like the rule we wrote and recommend our principle: Interruption, sure, especially of over-paid, over-pampered political trolls; disruption, hell no.

         Student attitudes can be worked on later, starting with teaching the simple fact that when speech is restricted, minorities with unpopular views are the first groups to get shut up — and Leftist, radical, unorthodox views are usually unpopular. Then "da older guys," and gals, can tell the young hotheads about the word "provocateur" and the tactic by Establishments through history of provocation to get reaction — and the use of reaction to get activists in jails or hospitals or morgues and the Establishment more firmly in power.

"Yes," "No," "Just Say 'No'" and Sexual Responsibility (29 Aug. 2014)

"our courteous Antony,

Whom ne'er the word of 'No' woman heard speak"

— His aide and friend Enobarbus on Mark Antony,

in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

            I think most of my readers will agree with the formula, "No" means No; "Yes" means Yes; "Maybe" means maybe. Now I'd like you to think about the implications of that formula for young Americans, and especially how we educate and train young Americans.

            First off, if "Yes" is to mean "yes," people have to ask yes/no questions, and other people must be free to answer "yes" or "no." As one of my feminist colleagues put it (I'm quoting from memory), "I tell my students that asking once isn't harassment; it's what he's supposed to do. If he repeats himself after you've said "No," that is harassment. The first one is a freebie."

            And, second off, it's a freebie for everyone, or at least everyone in a voluntary encounter between (or among) people of the age of consent. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is from the early 17^th century, and it's set shortly before the Christian era. Even back then, they had the concept that at least a good looking, imperial-class stud would be asked for sex by women, and he might, in theory, say "No." Antony won't, but (a) undesirable women probably couldn't get near him, and (b) by the mid-20^th century guys had developed the concept of male slut, which we can apply to this vision of Antony, as in the rhetorical question, "Is there anything you won't fuck?!"

            Antony won't say "No," but he could, so his "Yes" is significant.

            And Enobarbus seems convinced that women who want a man might very well ask, which is more significant.

            When I was in high school in Chicago around 1960 and guys would say, "Hey, she really wants me," we could respond, "If she really wanted you, she would ask you."

            Women and older girls, then, need to be able to say "Yes," or their "No" isn't totally convincing. Women and older girls need to be free to ask, and if they do not ask, then guys should assume that these gals might be willing to have sex with them but aren't exactly, let's say, champing (or chomping) at the bit.

            If "Yes" means yes and all, then the old idea of the coy young maid is a bad idea.

            The Machiavellian Duke of Buckingham tells the even more Machiavellian Duke of Gloucester — soon to become King Richard III — that when offered a crown Richard should "Play the maid's part: still answer nay, and take it" (Richard III 3.7.51; through-line 2252). Or as Shakespeare sexistly puts into the mouth of a young woman, "[…] maids, in modesty, say 'no' to that / Which they would have the profferer construe 'ay'" (Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.2.54-55; through-lines 207-08).

            So let us say an emphatic no to the gushy old romantic ideal of the shy maid who cannot say "Yes" but really wants "it." And equally no to the old romantic ideal of the pleading lover who keeps pressing his case; the repeatedly-rejected wooer always was a pathetic schmuck with no sense of dignity, but now we can, and should, see him also as an incipient stalker.

            "No" means no, damn it. Give her your number, and tell her that if she changes her mind to call. Ditto for "him" and all the various variations.

            I would not go so far as to push the case that people engaging in sex should ask permission for each stage of the encounter — each "base" in the sports metaphor — or I won't make that case unless they both get off talking dirty. After the initial "Yes," most couples can get along on body language and monosyllabics like "no," "stop," or "Oh, yeah!"

            (Sometimes, though, it's simply necessary to pause and "Use your words." I have no idea what sort of squeal or grunt I made, but a woman once courteously stopped what she was doing and asked, "Did that hurt?" And I had to think a moment and say, "I … I'm not sure. Do it again.")

            Initial saying of "Yes" or "No" and, if "Yes," some basic decisions — "Your place or mine?" "Do I need to buy condoms?" "You're sure your creepy roommate is out of town and took her iPhone with her?" — initial negotiation, even if quite brief needs some physical and aural space for communication. This is an additional reason why hook-up bars designed for noise and sensory overload are abominations on the face of the Earth. Indeed, some of the customers are in such places precisely because serious talk is impossible, but that's no reason they should be encouraged, or no reason beyond financial gain.

            So: One problem area in serious sex-ed for America's young people is more or less in the political Center and Left: squishy Romance and the subspecies of feminism that discourage  talking about sex, especially guys' directly asking older girls and women for sex. (My colleague had to tell her students that "The first one is a freebie" because other people had told them that any request for sex that turned out not to be desired was sexual harassment.) This problem area overlaps with the Right, and the "Just say 'No'" American puritanical tradition.

            Old-style, capital-"P" Puritans can be seen as generally orthodox Christians, who believed human beings are essentially souls and that the crucial issue is whether those souls are saved or damned. So far as we have any control over our salvation — and we may have none — traditional doctrine taught resistance to the soul's enemies: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

            Souls, in traditional Christian theory, are lead into evil by the bodily sins of Lust, Sloth, and Gluttony, and by the Worldly/Demonic sins of Wrath, Envy, Greed, and Pride. Puritans emphasized the threat of the Flesh, and today many pious Americans put little energy into condemning wrath, envy, or greed. And, with one crucial exception, today's puritans have nearly forgotten that Pride is a sin.

            Young Americans are taught morality mostly in terms of their sexuality and secondarily as an imperative to obey the laws or social conventions governing what drugs they may put into their bodies — variations on that battle against Lust, Sloth, and Gluttony. "Pride is the root of all evils" only when it takes the form of intentional disobedience to adult authority. "Just Say No" means "No" to peers, not to parents, ministers, or the law.

            One student at my university used puritan doctrine to explain the tendency of our students to "Get drunk, get stupid, get laid," without planning and without protection, and certainly without negotiation. One can get drunk, get stupid, get laid, and then get repentant and get absolved and get welcomed back into Holy Church. One can get wasted and sin and remain "a good kid."

            The fleshly sins are deadly, but easily forgiven. Unforgivable, she argued, would be the rebellion of an unmarried 19-year-old's planning to get laid, buying condoms, having sex, enjoying sex, and responding to older-adult accusations with "Yeah, I got laid—So? 'Sex is dangerous'? Skydiving is dangerous! Anything worth doing is worth a little risk to do! You take sensible precautions, which I did."

            If the question is obedience and the soul's salvation, not bodily health, equally unforgiven would be a 19-year-old who says, "No, we didn't smoke pot; we drank dope tea, talked, and took a bus home as a group. Tolerate it." Far better, in terms of obedience, for teens to sneak tequila and beer Friday nights, get drunk, get wild, and meekly repent on Saturdays.

            All the more so if the 19-year-old in question was a young woman. Again, when guys in high school would say, "Hey, she really wants me," we could respond, "If she really wanted you, she would ask you." More exactly, she would ask back then only if she had a lot of guts, and even after graduation, as a legal adult, it would take guts to tell her parents, if asked, "Actually, I planned the date, and the sex."

            Things have gotten better with educating gals on sex. I'm not so sure there's been progress with guys about sex or with either group on the closely-related matter of alcohol and other drugs. When I was growing up, fathers and "older guys" would instruct boys in sexual protocol (e.g., "bathe; take your socks off; spend the night; cook her breakfast"); and both sexes often got informal training in how to "drink like ladies and gentlemen." Bingeing and puking on your date was bad form, to say nothing of a bad introduction to asking for sex.

            Nowadays, chastity training discourages all nonmarried people from asking for sex. "Abstinence Only" precludes discussions of sexual hygiene and sexual manners — and helps makes mutual bingeing, not negotiation, a primary way for unmarried teens to get sex, however sloppily and dangerously.

            "Just Say No" undermines the believability of "No means no" and contributes to alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and morning-after charges of sexual assault. Under "Zero Tolerance," teaching your kids how to drink and throw a responsible party can get adults arrested.

            Under "Abstinence-Only" regulations, straight-talking, honest drug education — "This is what the drug will do for you, this is what it may do to you" — is forbidden.

            "Just Say No," "Zero Tolerance," and "Abstinence Only" cut off debate and forbid discussing relative risks and risk reduction.

            Puritan policies make excellent sense in terms of saving souls and training obedience, but in secular, democratic terms, they have high costs.

            Unless ruthlessly enforced, such policies contribute to teen-pregnancy, venereal diseases, and abuse — as opposed to learning responsible use — of alcohol and other drugs, and of other people. When ruthlessly enforced, Abstinence Only/Just Say No train for submission to power, not ethical choice.


            You want to reduce sexual assault on campus and elsewhere? After you've arrested, tried, convicted, and put in prison a whole lot more of the serial rapists responsible for much of the problem, start working on the cultural issues. Tops among those cultural issues are the people who haven't thought through "Yes means 'Yes' … (etc.)" and have implemented policies they see as solutions but are very centrally part of the problem. 

Frat Boys, Jocks, and Deprecation (23 Oct. 2014 [19 March 2015])

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            Fraternities are/were very much in the news with my reposting this blog — I was one of the bloggers "orphaned" when OpenSalon closed in mid-March 2015 — but the immediate occasion for the original post wasn't immediate at all, but an old memory coming back from early in my teaching career, a memory that sent me down a thread of others.
            I have no idea what we were discussing, but it was probably a class in College Composition (I taught a lot of classes in College Composition), and a student said something about jocks, and I picked up the term — and was interrupted by a student who usually didn't say much with, "That's 'student athletes'. The word 'jock' is usually preceded by 'dumb', and I don't like people just assuming I'm stupid." Or something like that: it was a comment that was articulate, to the point, and heartfelt, by a guy who was quiet but definitely not dumb.
            Seizing a teaching moment when it came along — and responding to a legitimate rebuke — I said that when and where I came from, we could use "jock" neutrally and talk about "math jocks" and "chem jocks" as well as "sports jocks."
            The class said that, nah, their usage usually implied "dumb" with "jock," and we went on from there. I think I had the sense to keep that discussion brief and on-task and end with repeating the basic lesson. "Okay, unless you intend an insult, use 'athletes', and if you do intend the insult, be prepared to defend it, and maybe yourself."
            I got thinking of the "jock" comment again when teaching Michael Moffatt's excellent, Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture (1989). Coming of Age is a popular report by a professional anthropologist about campus life at Rutgers in the 1970s and 1980s (minus use of illegal drugs and details on illegal use by minors of legal ethyl alcohol: Moffatt refused to narc out his subjects — and people he lived with). Even in a book for a general audience, Moffatt tries to be professional and admits to failure —explicitly admits to it — in noting that he just couldn't keep up anthropological cultural relativity in dealing with Rutgers's fraternities and the inhabitants thereof: he classified many fraternity members among the "Neanderthals" in sexual attitudes (apologizing to the literal hominid species of Neanderthals) and anti-intellectual.
            Systematic headhunting in New Guinea, and occasional headhunting elsewhere: "Different strokes / For different folks"; fraternity culture in New Jersey: too close to home, too atavistic among academics, and something anthropologist Moffatt was prepared to judge and condemn.
            Moffatt has some data and some indirect personal experience, but this is not always the case for his negative attitude.
            I recall one instance, if only one, when, as an undergraduate fraternity member, I kind of anticipated my student-athlete student by telling someone, "We prefer 'fraternity men' to 'frat boys'," maybe or maybe not knowing at the time to add, "'Boy' is an insult." I later learned that some guys in the dorms — "residence halls" hadn't come in as the PC usage (nor the term "PC") — I later learned that some of the guys in the dorms had strong feelings about fraternities, and negative ones.
            This was interesting.
            At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the early 1960s, a young bachelor underclassman had four possibilities for housing: (1) living with his parents and commuting, (2) living in a University men's dorm — it was perhaps 1970 before a private, luxury dorm got built — (3) living in "independent men's housing," or (4) living in a fraternity. And that was living in a fraternity for underclassmen: from pledge semester until senior year or so (when an upperclassman could move into an apartment), one lived in, and mostly at, "the house."
            UIUC was definitely a residential campus at the time, with few commuters, so that meant basically dorms, independent houses, and Greek life (fraternity houses and sorority houses).
            The tripartite division, though, got a little blurred, as I had to explain to this nice guy, poor schmuck of a Sociology grad student who couldn't get a study to work.
            The investigator was doing some sort of work on consensus-building in small groups and was looking at how you get consensus among opponents, with two locally-available ones frat-rats and indies.
            So he brought in guys from fraternities and guys from independent men's housing — University-approved private houses for maybe five to fifteen guys — broke us into groups, and set us some issue to find consensus on.
            Which we did, quickly and easily, undercutting his hopes of getting data to get the fucking dissertation done already and get the hell out!
            (I was to go on to write a dissertation, and I'm pretty certain of how he felt.)
            Pitying the grad student, a couple of us stayed after the session and asked, "You thought 'Indies' and 'Greeks' are opposed, didn't you?" And he said "Yeah," and we said he misunderstood.
            First, guys who lived in fraternities and independent houses agreed on most things, starting with not wanting to live in the dorms. Second, neither group thought all that much about classifying people by where they lived, with the frat rats' — initially a pejorative, but one we'd adopted — with frat rats' lack of interest possibly stemming from a bit of snobbery.
            At that time and place, the disagreement among males would be between dormies and frat rats, with the guys in independent housing usually seeing themselves as the true Independents and above such trivial oppositions.
            And the disagreement got emotional tinge mostly from the dorm side.
            Among those of us who thought about it at all, most frat rats wanted the social life and relative community of a fraternity over the impersonality of the University's dorm complexes. Among those of us who'd been raised political, there was also the issue of not wanting the Big U as our landlord. Even back then, the Big U was big and a pretty total institution, supplying not only education (for those interested in such things) and credentialing, but police, fire department, health services, many of the streets and much of the lighting — and, optionally, public housing. Especially since living in a fraternity could be cheaper than living in a dorm (if you "worked a meal job"), fraternity life could be attractive to a nice liberal, at the time, from a big city and — certainly, with what they called at Cornell ca. 1965, "the White houses" — to political Neanderthals.
            ("White" in that context meant WASP: no Jews, just maybe a Catholic or two. Blacks weren't an issue, since — outside of the chapter of my fraternity, at Cornell at the time — the fraternities were at least de facto segregated: all White, plus the one to three Black fraternities.)
            Anyway, to those who cared about such things at the U of IL in the mid-1960s, the key category was "frat rat," and it was not a friendly act of categorizing.
            This attitude has continued, and I think it colors and "inflects" a fair portion of current debates about campus life, in which there is an unhealthy degree of semi-prurient interest to start with. For example, it's significant that a respectable anthropologist like Mike Moffatt had just about nothing in Coming of Age on religion or sports — two areas usually of interest to students of culture — but two chapters on sex. Less sensationally, in MAD Magazine years before even Moffatt's research, Ricky Nelson (renamed something like "Rickety") came home from school and lamented all the extra parties and mixers and other social events he had to attend. A neighbor asks his mother about Ricky's classes, to which his mother, replies, "Oh, Ricky doesn't go to classes; he goes to college." As the sweatshirt on John "Bluto" Blutarsky implies: COLLEGE has been what has interested most people, not, say, college classes and the frequent failure thereof to mean much to products of US education K-12.
            Fraternities offer community, relative democracy, and a good deal of freedom from what Mike Moffatt called "adult authority" — which I saw as mostly advantages at 18, and still see as such; but these aspects are problematic to those suspicious (with some good reasons) of fairly traditional communities, and of democratic decision-making among those who will often choose wrong.
            The current complaints against fraternities center on sexual assaults, and here, as in many places, I'd like to see (1) the numbers, (2) larger contexts, and (3) fairer and more effective law enforcement across the board, emphatically including better dealing with sexual assault, but with less concentration on — occasionally near-obsession with — sex and safety on campuses: as places go, university campuses, like most schools, are safe places.
            On numbers, I'll note that the instances of rape and/or child molestation that have touched my life involved as perpetrators two Black men and a father from a family fairly new to the US, from a non-WASP background. One of the Black men was a student athlete, and serial rapist, and his choice of crime sites tended to apartments, not fraternity houses. The other Black man raped before I met her a woman I came to love; as she told me the story, the rape — a "stranger rape" — resulted in pregnancy and her attempting suicide. I have no direct evidence of the pregnancy, but her left wrist was scarred vertically, so I infer a serious suicide attempt. With the father, I have only the daughter's version, but assume it to be true, as her husband did, on more evidence; I never pressed for details, but I assume the father had emigrated to the US, or was first generation American-born.
            That background is going to "inflect," minimally, my view of rapists, and is a reason why I need the reality check of looking at the numbers. "A 'for instance' is no proof," as the saying goes, and N = 3 proves nothing. I need the numbers, and so — obviously — does everyone else who grew up in cultures and societies with deep currents of racism and xenophobia.
            And if we need the numbers and larger contexts for Black felons and football players and non-Nordic child abusers, we need the numbers and serious sociological discussion for incandescent White lacrosse players, and jocks and frat rats of all hues and levels of privilege.
            I can use the term "jock" as neutrally as I use "frat rat"; but I try to remember my student's objection and not use the term to reinforce a stereotype of "dumb jocks" as a kind of formula — even if we have the concept, as I do, and can contrast it with "serious student athlete."
            Some jocks are dumb, and there are colleges and universities where "student athlete" is a coincidence or a joke: where the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics brings in semi-pro jocks, for whom academic pursuits may be career-endangering distractions. And some jocks and frat rats are rats (with apologies to the admirably resilient rodent): macho assholes (with apologies to the anus).
            Athletics can be good for people, especially athletics that bring together fathers and daughters and those that give big quiet guys a place to assert themselves — especially those organized by participating athletes and not run top-down like a corporation or military unit. And fraternities can be good places to live, and certainly good given most of the alternatives.
            People can argue otherwise, and there are strong arguments to be made: but those should be fact-based arguments, not casual dismissals with "jock" or "frat boy." They should be rational arguments with sound comparative statistics and a sense of proportion: anthropologists who can be open-minded about headhunters can show a little more tolerance for frat rats and at least consider the possibility that intramural athletics may not be as big a part of life in a dorm as sex, but are there.