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Dear Editor:

In 1989, a U.S. District Court struck down the University of Michigan's speech code. In its decision, the Court expressed dismay at the University's "apparent willingness to dilute the values of free speech" through a series of code enforcements that made a mockery of academic freedom (see Doe v. University of Michigan 721 F. Supp. 852).

While speech codes were originally enacted in response to truly ugly incidents, they were soon hijacked by well-meaning, but Constitutionally challenged individuals, to significantly restrict academic freedom. Their goal was to eliminate material from courses that might cause offense - not any offense, of course, but only the sort evoked by material interpretable as showing racial, gender or sexual orientation bias. And offensiveness, it was made clear, was in the eye of the beholder.

Interestingly, the Court's decision against Michigan had little practical effect, because administrators subsequently undermined faculty whenever students claimed to be offended by course offerings. In one instance of complaint, a course was split in half at mid-semester, and the complaining students given a new professor. Thus the speech code, though thrown out by the court, returned by the back door of administrative fiat.

Dean Shirley Clay Scott's ill-considered response to a complaint from Professor Jonathan Bean's teaching assistants has the same effect. The College of Liberal Arts now has its own, back door, speech code. In preempting normal complaint processes to discipline Bean, the Dean has forced professors to consider self-censoring so as to eliminate potentially offensive material from their courses.

Supporters of front or back door speech codes claim to cherish academic freedom, but always with a proviso. That proviso subordinates academic freedom to a regimen of political sterilization that is patronizing in the extreme to those it purportedly serves. While this sterilizing undoubtedly produces a rush of righteousness, it ultimately undermines the foremost value of a liberal education. As head of a college supposedly dedicated to free inquiry, Dean Scott needs to seriously rethink her priorities...or consider stepping down.

Mark Schneider
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Sociology Department