Veronica Rollin, a staff columnist for San Diego State's student paper, The Daily Aztec has a lot of good things to say about campus speech codes. Beginning with the confession that despite being an avowed liberal, she holds unorthodox positions on gay adoption, immigration, and feminism, Rollin reflects on both the explictly censorious mission of speech codes and on the stifling atmosphere of self-censorship that such codes create:

I find it ironic that at the national level, Republican congressmen have far more important things to do than silence some newbie college columnist - such as myself - while at the state, and more importantly on a campus level, the opposite is true: The iron fist is attached to the arm of the most liberal left.

I'm specifically referring to university speech codes, rules that exist to punish the inevitable school bigots and quash hate speech. However, hateful speech can be a subjective term. To most it usually means mocking a culture, using stereotypes or epithets, etc., but this is not always the case.

The term hate speech can and has been applied to a person who endorses the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage or argues that illegal immigrants have no right to driver's licenses. If enough people complained, a columnist could be put in the hot seat, or worse, expelled from his or her university.

I wish I were simply paranoid, but this has happened. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Law School adopted "Sexual Harassment Guidelines" to punish sexist speech after a controversial article promoting a gender-related view of the nature of law was published in the Harvard Law Review. Subsequently, these guidelines were extended to racist speech.

It wasn't long before two professors were accused of "insensitivity" for simply discussing the issue. The Black Law Students Association called for one accused professor to be banned from teaching first year courses. As a compromise, one professor stopped teaching the course in which the alleged offense occurred. The other professor was forced to tape record all his lectures so students who were "offended by his presence" could listen to the tapes instead of attending classes, according to www.chronicle.com.

At the University of Connecticut, speech codes were enacted to ban "inappropriately directed laughter," in addition to stereotyping, according to The Associated Press. In response to similar university policies, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit educational foundation, has challenged such codes and policies in federal court.

San Diego State has no such codes listed on its Web site or on that of the SDSU Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities. However, I often find myself "staying on the safe side" by practicing self-censorship on perfectly valid, yet powder-keg issues. The cautious self-censorship and censorship in general that university speech codes force on its students are the very reasons why I'm speaking against them now.

One of the fundamental rights of Americans is freedom of speech and of the press, and universities are meant to promote freedom of thought. With speech codes hanging over professors, students and student journalists, these ideals are indelibly compromised and will remain so until people speak out against them. Many have done so before me - it's my turn to rip the duct tape from my mouth.

Thanks to Maurice Black for the links.

I believe the SDSU campus has had previous problems with speech codes and censorship. At one point an ethiopian student fluent in arabic criticized some Saudi students who were praising the 9-11 bombers. Also, IIRC, was also a problem with a independant campus pub criticizing the Aztlan organization via parody. I'm surprised that Ms Rollin's didn't mention them especially since, unless she's a tranfer studnet, both happened while she was there.

I'm not surprised. I live nearby the Imperial Valley Campus of San Diego State University, and so we were constantly hearing about the controversy over SDSU's politically incorrect mascot, Monty The Aztec. At SDSU, the PC crowd is even more rabid than is ususal on college campuses.