An op-ed in the Georgetown Hoya entitled "GU Must Protect Students, Not Offensive Speech" defends the recent theft from a freshman residence hall of newspapers containing "personal slurs":

The university needs to address this whole issue of ìoffensiveî speech. And it is time to jettison the platitude that ìbad speechî is only or best corrected just by ìmore speech,î and not by ìcensorshipî or, in the worst cases, just by ìeducation.î That non-policy was never more than an evasion by the university of its responsibilities.

Personal vilification, slurs and the like have no place at a Catholic university and they are clearly not correctable by just ìmore speechî or by ìeducation.î

[...]

Iíd like to hear from the Georgetown administration how ìmoreî speech could ever undo the damage of the dissemination of such ìbadî speech.

Like it or not, this university has a duty to do what it can to prevent the dissemination on its property of personal slurs.

Of course, that is often not easy. And, of course, different kinds of ìbadî speech call for different kinds of university responses. But the mindless repetition of that ridiculous mantra ìbad speech is to be corrected by more speechî is an insult to everyoneís intelligence.

Read the article to get the details of what was printed in the student paper. I don't recount them here because the details do not matter. What matters is how the author of this essay uses a single episode of inter-student nastiness to 1) excuse the crime of newspaper theft (he even puts the word "stole" in quotes; and 2) to call for sweeping, censorious, ultimately unenforceable speech codes on Georgetown's campus.

Georgetown is a private university, and that means it can have whatever speech code it likes. At present, it does forbid "offensive" speech, stating in its formal policy that ìexpression that is indecent or is grossly obscene or grossly offensive on matters such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation is inappropriate in a university community and the university will act as it deems appropriate to educate students violating this principle.î In practice, Georgetown has held to a relatively liberal position on speech--when confronted with complaints about the paper in question, Vice President for Student Affairs Juan C. Gonzalez said that the best course of action is to ìdrown it with more speech of your own making, not steal it.î This is commendable, and reasonable. But as we have seen countless times, it does not satisfy campus crusaders for forced sensitivity. The author of this screed, for example, comes right out and says he feels censorship is a right and necessary thing. He's tired of "the ridiculous mantra" known as the First Amendment. He's had it with "education." He wants people to be expressly forbidden to say unpleasant things, and then he wants to see those who say such things anyway be punished. This fascistic procedure, he seems to believe, will make the Georgetown campus a kinder, gentler place to be.

Never mind that it is not possible to define "offensive speech" in a way that will hold up under scrutiny--or creativity (I recall Andrew Dice Clay's appearance on Saturday Night Live back in the spring of 1990; my brother and I watched him absolutely confound the censors who were ordered to make sure none of his legendary profanity made it onto the air, simply by coining his own cache of dirty words as he went. His monologue was filthy--and yet, by network standards, squeaky clean).

Never mind, either, that you simply cannot force people to be nice. You can't even force people to agree that "being nice" is a worthy behavioral goal. Nor can you legislate sensitivity--not least because attempting to do so is itself a profoundly insensitive, not to say offensive, act. In its punitive fantasies, refusal to condemn theft or even call it by its name, and irrational belief that "bad speech" could be an operative disciplinary category, the editorial quoted above makes that abundantly clear.

I am struck, lately, by how often the concept of community standards is raised to defend restrictions of campus speech. Tuesday, also in The Hoya, a student wrote that the reason it was important to denounce Bat Ye'or and David Littman's invited talk on dhimmitude is that the opinions they expressed "threatened more to polarize our campus community than to educate about and debate a difficult topic":

While it is our job as students to bring to light difficult realities about our world that many people might not like to hear, we also have a responsibility to ensure that peace and civility are maintained within our classrooms, sponsored events and campus community at large. These goals can only be pursued in a respectful and cooperative environment that reflects Georgetownís values of interfaith dialogue and diversity of thought. Any incident that threatens this environment is detrimental, particularly to the Jewish students we have been elected to represent.

Similarly, the uproar about blackface at UT Knoxville and the recent cancellation of Tom Paulin's poetry reading at Harvard both center on the perceived threat unpleasant expression might pose to the sanctimoniously invoked "campus community." Lawrence Buell, Chair of Harvard English, explained that Paulin's visit has to be cancelled because it was causing "widespread consternation;" Twenty-one UT faculty signed a letter stating that the blackface incident was a "threat to the very fabric of our intellectual community," adding that "This needs to be a place where students can feel comfortable and safe - not just physically, but intellectually as well."

It's worth noting how coercively the nebulous concept of "community" operates in such moments (I myself have never felt that I belong to a "campus community," but I have been accused more than once of "shaming," "menacing," and "threatening" that same entity by people who want me to shut up). Community is a happy concept, seemingly innocuous. But it gets invoked on campuses as a means of making a call for censorship seem kindly and necessary. "Protecting the community" thus becomes a code phrase for enforcing conformity to a narrow and self-serving behavioral norm. Saying that a university "needs to be a place where students can feel comfortable and safe" is saying that a university must not be a place where students ever feel challenged or provoked. It is saying, in other words, that the university is not about education but the pursuit of a quasi-intellectual utopia where everyone pretends to think, study, and learn but the real priority is never to step on anyone's toes.

To speak of "feeling intellectually safe" is to utter oxymoronic nonsense. You can be committed to a collectivist ideal, or you can be committed to ideas. You cannot be committed to both--not, at any rate, in the current campus climate.