It was common sense, of course. But our now-former department secretary calmly approached me the next day and asked me not to talk about my opinion columns in her presence (I also wrote a column about the racist poster advertisement). I refused to back down and instead asked her exactly what views she was trying to prevent me from expressing. Like any good feminist, she ran out of the office crying. She never played the “I’m uncomfortable” card with me again.
The common theme in all of these cases is unmistakable. The person trying to suppress speech in each of these cases was cool as a cucumber. None, not even the secretary who ran crying out of the office, was the least bit unraveled at the time she made the initial declaration of personal offense. In other words, it was a calm, cool, and calculated effort to restrict free expression.
Note that none of their efforts were produced by a simple lack of emotional stability. They were ultimately produced by a lack of humility. The central idea was that their personal comfort was more important than the ideas of another person. And that is in itself a dangerous idea – one that did not subside after they calmed down from their initial feeling of offense or discomfort.
There is another word for what these individuals did. It’s called bullying. And it’s time that liberals began to take an interest in it. They can start by repealing campus speech codes that promise a right to be unoffended to all those who darken the doors of the American college classroom.
Of course, by repealing speech codes, administrators would be admitting that they have not delivered on their promise to produce a more civil academic environment. That would require the kind of humility that few academics possess.
Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Letters to a Young Progressive: How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand.
