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By ROBYN BLUMNER
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000
One of the most potent criticisms about an academic world awash in political correctness is that it produces weak, whiney people with hair-trigger sensitivity who don't allow anything to slide off their backs.
Welcome to Christopher Brown's thesis committee.
Everything was going smoothly for the 28-year-old Brown, who was on the cusp of being awarded a master's degree in material science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His thesis committee had signed off on his 73-page effort on the growth of abalone shells, and graduation was in sight. Then, Brown made a serious tactical error: In today's humorless academic environment, he decided to say what he really thought.
Just before Brown submitted his approved thesis to the school library, he added a two-page "disacknowledgments" section. The colorful declaration of disrespect was directed to those "degenerates" who were "an ever-present hindrance" during his graduate career.
To the dean and staff of the graduate division, Brown wrote: "You fascists are the largest argument against higher education there has ever been. Any claims you make as an ally and resource for students is an utter sham." He ranted against the school's Davidson Library for its "incomprehensible fines" and "unwillingness to help." Brown even took a few shots at California's former governor, Pete Wilson, the U.C. Board of Regents and the field of science itself, which he called "a hollow specter of what you should be."
Brown's cathartic exhale may have made him feel better, but it had the opposite effect on his thesis committee. Its members, clearly unamused by Brown's venting, told him to remove the offending pages or he would be denied his degree. Charles Li, the dean of the graduate division and a target of Brown's attack, has backed up this threat, saying the thesis is a university publication and as such the committee has the right to evaluate "all parts." Brown retorts that his thesis is not in any way a university publication."It's my copyright," Brown says. "I can sell it; they can't."
Once again, academe lives up to its reputation as a breeding ground for autocrats. Clearly Brown's thesis was acceptable on its academic merits -- the only legitimate interest the committee should have. But because the young man took a few swipes in a highly personal section of his thesis where authors more typically praise their teachers, the committee has chosen to take its revenge by holding his degree hostage until his abrasive views are eliminated or re-educated.
"It's the new orthodoxy," says Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Inc. (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based organization supporting free speech on college campuses. Halvorssen explains that today's college administrators are more concerned about wounded feelings than sturdy scholarship; their reaction to harsh or dissonant voices is to shut them down. "It's all about whether or not you feel offended," Halvorssen says. "If it offends you, the administrators say it's harassment."
FIRE, which opened its offices in October, is an antidote to that way of thinking. The organization sprang out of the research done by civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate and University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors in their book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. Silverglate and Kors began the group because they recognized the insane extremes of campus speech and harassment codes were smothering individualism and freedom of speech at the nation's universities. In the months since FIRE has opened, Halvorssen says, it has successfully advocated on behalf of more than 100 students and professors who were victims of over-sensitive, censorious and punitive administrators.
In addition to Brown's case, FIRE is now dealing with outbreaks of liberty-snuffing political correctness at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where a Christian group was defunded after it refused to allow a lesbian into a leadership position, and at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, where the school's president sent a student to sensitivity training for his "racial insults" because he was quoted in a student newspaper saying that blocking credit-card salespeople from campus would be illegal, just as "not allowing blacks on campus" would be.
FIRE's goal is to remind college administrators that diverse opinions -- as opposed to just diverse skin colors -- have value and that a free exchange of ideas presumes that some people are going to be offended.
Meanwhile, Brown is still waiting for his master's degree -- a situation that is likely to become a federal civil rights suit. Do administrators at U.C. Santa Barbara really need a federal judge to tell them that Brown's "disacknowledgments" are irrelevant to whether he has produced master's-level work?
Unfortunately, yes.