Data on Campus Censorship Cases

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it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, rage against the academy

I’ve noticed that people tend to only hear about campus free speech cases which fit their particular narrative (either of conservatives censoring liberals or of liberals censoring conservatives). Apolitical cases (for instance, Valencia College’s censorship of students who protested forced transvaginal ultrasounds) tend to become less widely known, as do cases of liberal censorship among conservatives and conservative censorship among liberals. In addition, people hear more about cases of censorship at famous colleges (such as Harvard or Yale) than they do about the less famous colleges that most people actually go to.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a well-respected organization which specializes in campus free speech and other civil liberties. My sample was the list FIRE maintains on its website of cases it has worked on in the past (for instance, by sending the college a letter or engaging in litigation). I took every fifth case and coded it as censorship of conservative, censorship of liberal, or apolitical censorship. There were 88 cases in my sample. I dropped five for being FIRE suing about bad policies with no clear indication of whom they would be used against, four for being sexual misconduct policies (which are not instances of censorship), and two for being miscellaneous instances of inadequate college due process (which, again, are not censorship). This left me with 77 cases.

Of the 77 cases, I coded 20 (26%) as censorship of liberals, 40 (52%) as censorship of conservatives, and 17 (22%) as apolitical censorship. An example of censorship of conservatives is refusing to allow Christians to organize a student group; an example of censorship of liberals is not allowing PETA supporters to hand out flyers; an example of apolitical censorship is suspending a professor for saying, during a review session for a test, that the questions he was asking were so difficult he was on a killing spree.

I made a few judgment calls which I want to discuss. One instance of a hate speech code was coded as “censorship of liberals” because surrounding discussion suggested it was intended to censor pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests. While some people would consider sexual harassment law to be inherently liberal, I classified (for instance) the censorship of a crew team’s shirts saying “check out our cox” as apolitical censorship, since lewd puns are not a political sentiment. (Of course, if sexual harassment law was used to censor a political statement, I classified it as “liberal” or “conservative.”) I classified socialists as liberal and libertarians as conservative, in spite of both groups’ probable objection to such a classification. “Nationwide disinvitation of speakers,” a single FIRE case, was classified as conservative because 9/10 of the most disinvited speakers are conservative, but note that Bill Ayers is also on the list. (It is also a judgment call that I (a) didn’t treat each disinvitation as a separate case and (b) included “nationwide disinvitations” at all.)

ETA: I’d also like to note that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is not a random sample of college censorship cases. Presumably they do not pursue every case brought to their attention, and there may be systematic biases in which students contact FIRE. For example, conservative students may trust FIRE more and be more likely to call them when campus censorship occurs, or conversely FIRE may pursue more cases of liberal censorship to combat its image as a defender of the right wing. These results should be taken with a grain of salt.

In conclusion: there is a definite tendency for censorship on college campuses to be censorship of conservative viewpoints, perhaps because conservative viewpoints tend to be underrepresented in academia. However, about a quarter of college censorship in this sample is of liberal viewpoints and a quarter is of apolitical viewpoints; this suggests it is a mistake to assume that censorship on college campuses is solely of conservative viewpoints. However, given the limitations of my data, I’d strongly advise against drawing any conclusion from it firmer than “censorship of both liberals and conservatives occurs on college campuses, and conservatives probably face more.”

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On Literary Criticism

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ozy blog post, rage against the academy, writing

I think a lot of people are fundamentally confused about what literary criticism is.

Some literary criticism is like TVTropes [content warning: will eat your entire afternoon]. TVTropes is trying to understand how stories work. Its strategy is to catalog all the recurring things that happen in stories, from Asian characters wearing conical straw hats to characters in love sharing an umbrella to a love triangle being resolved by the protagonist marrying both of them. Some literary criticism is intended to do a similar thing: for instance, Freytag’s pyramid, which you were probably taught about in elementary school, attempts to explain how most stories are structured. This is useful for writers: if your plot isn’t working and you don’t know what a ‘climax’ is, learning that stories are generally more interesting if they have a point of great tension can help you write better stories.

However, a lot of literary criticism– perhaps most– is not doing that, and if you think it does you will wind up very confused.

Consider Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, a classic work of queer theory, which argues that much of nineteenth-century literature can be understood as being about homosocial desire and love, often reflected through both men’s putative desire for a female intermediary. If one assumes that the thesis of the book is something like “factually, a lot of nineteenth-century literature is about male-male bonding, and maybe if you put some male-male bonding in your book you should include a female intermediary they can both act like they’re in love with!”, one instantly falls into difficulties.

For instance, there’s the question beloved of high-school students everywhere, which is “did the author actually intend that?” Probably, one assumes, Dickens wasn’t thinking for even one second about the homophobia of empire while he was writing Edwin Drood. Of course, this isn’t a complete disproof: authors were writing rising and falling action for thousands of years before Freytag gave them names; presumably they were not intending to write rising and falling action. But it still feels intuitively that while climaxes, rising action, solving love triangles with polyamory, Asian characters wearing conical straw hats, and so on are all easily identifiable features of various books, the homophobia of empire is not, in fact, an easily identifiable feature of Edwin Drood. In fact, a reader would be perfectly justified to say that there was absolutely no homophobia of empire in Edwin Drood whatsoever.

Books are often assumed to be the product of their authors: the writer puts some words down on the page and the reader sees what they obviously mean and a story happens. The reader does not contribute much beyond basic literacy. But, in fact, the reader plays a huge role in the creative process. Some readers interpret Rorschach from Watchmen as a flawed yet admirable tragic hero who holds to his convictions even in the face of death; some readers interpret him as a Lawful Stupid sociopath who’s proof that moral absolutism cannot deal with the complexities of the real world. Some readers interpret Christian Grey as a sexy, kinky, masculine hero with a tragic past; some readers interpret him as an abuser grooming the naive and easily victimized Anastasia. Some readers interpret the violence against women in Game of Thrones as gratuitously signalling how edgy the writers are; others interpret it as a reflection of what women experience during war under patriarchy. The difference is what you bring to the story: your worldview, your preconceptions, the books you’ve read in the past, whether that one particular character happens to remind you of your horrible abusive ex-boyfriend.

Now, some people feel that their interpretations of texts are objectively correct: by God, Christian Grey really is an abuser, and if you disagree then you are wrong and probably an abuse apologist. But I’m not sure what the ‘real meaning’ of the text even means. If Christian Grey ‘really is’ an abuser, what predictions does that allow us to make? How is anything about the world different if Grey is an abuser, compared to if he isn’t? If the answer is (as seems likely) “nothing”, then it doesn’t really mean much to say that one meaning is objectively correct.

Some people care a lot about authorial intent: if the author intended Grey to be a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, then he is a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, and none of your abuse checklists have anything to say about it. This seems silly, though. Tommy Wiseau appears to interpret The Room as a serious drama; everyone else interprets it as a so-bad-it’s-good comedy. I don’t think that everyone who isn’t Tommy Wiseau is making a mistake.

The Eve Sedgwick kind of literary criticism, I think, is not empiricism: it’s not trying to make predictions about what features stories will have or what characteristics will make readers like stories or whatever. It’s art. It’s a very unusual kind of art that takes other art as its raw material. It’s the task of the reader– interpreting a text, creating a story out of black lines on a page– taken to its highest form. This kind of literary criticism is about making interpretations that are more interesting than most people’s, that make you go “oh! that’s clever!”, that enrich your own rereading of the text and make it more interesting than it previously was. Asking whether or not it’s ‘true’ is like asking whether or not a painting is ‘true’.

Between Men is not TVTropes. It’s not trying to be TVTropes. It’s meta. Does the text actually say that Steve and Bucky are dating? Not really. Does it improve my experience of Civil War to read thousand-word close readings about what exactly Bucky was thinking when he clenched his jaw muscle? You bet your ass.

Of course, this sort of literary criticism should be justified in the text. You cannot say “Hamlet is a Klingon!” without providing some sort of reason in the text of Hamlet for why he ought to be a Klingon– because “Hamlet is a Klingon” is not an interpretation anyone would normally make. You have to lead the reader to be able to see for themselves that Hamlet is a Klingon, to have “wow, this is really something a Klingon would say” wandering across their mind during random scenes– or, for that matter, to see that Steve and Bucky are dating, Tennyson is hella gay, and Edwin Drood involves the homophobia of empire.