Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his June 8, 1978 commencement address at Harvard, observed the following about American intellectual culture:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.  Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.  There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.

There is (as Solzhenitsyn surely understood) a certain inevitability to one form of this phenomenon, for it is never the case that simply any postulate is allowed to freely travel in an intellectual community that is defined by certain commitments.  The irony is introduced, however, when a dogmatic and censoring atmosphere characterizes a society or institution that advertises itself as open-minded and oriented to seeking the best answers wherever and however they may be found.  This is the tension characteristic of enlightenment liberalism, embraced in the modern American university.  Western liberalism is at least as territorial and exclusionary as any of its competitors, but pretends otherwise—which pretending is one of its principle features.  (Stanley Fish, for one, has made much of this.)

Our educational institutions have made systemic the exclusion of outlooks that deviate from their shared rigid definition of acceptable rationality.  As one prominent example, the Rawlsian ideal of “public reason”—as ubiquitous in its dominance as encompassing in its prohibitions—forbids Christian and other religious presuppositions from participation in public discourse.  That this involves de-privileging a framework of understanding that historically informed Western Civilization seems, for that reason, a considerable affront.  But it is just there that its explanation is found.  An intellectual rival has gained ascendancy, and is not inclined to give any latitude to its vanquished—and loathed—predecessor.

The new managers enforce worship of the idols of current intellectual fashion (to draw from Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor) often through a social pressure, rather than an intellectual one.  And that brings us to the title of this blog post.  A number of months ago, ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom director David French, writing at Phi Beta Cons, observed that the right-think enforcement environment at our universities is not one characterized by logical justifications.

In the battle of ideas, stigma always beats dogma. In other words, through stigmatization, one can defeat a set of ideas or principles without ever “winning” an argument on the merits. . . .  Why convince when you can browbeat? Why dialogue when you can read entire philosophies out of polite society?

This technique is surely effective.  But does its utility alone explain why this mode of enforcement is the contemporary means of keeping the herd fenced in?  Or does the New Vision, with its diligent avoidance of truth claims and metaphysical foundations, necessarily require non-rational enforcement measures?  When consensus rather than justifications is the foundation for the preferred creed, we should not expect the shoring-up of support for it to be an exercise in analysis.

French philosopher Chantal Delsol has given attention to this issue in her Icarus Fallen:

[O]ur era is singularly dogmatic, in spite of its slogans of relativism and tolerance.  It not only forbids certain opinions but mandates the acceptance of certain ideas.  One might well wonder how to explain the fact that in a world where each is free to decree his own good, strange unanimities have developed that function as categorical imperatives and have the power to function as a veritable moral terrorism.  Orthodox thinking does indeed exist today, in spite of the banishment of all objective truth and of an objective good.

With the exile of objectivity, on what grounds is unanimity attained?  She later elaborates:

Today’s moral message is not explanatory, as it was [in other settings].  Our message, on the contrary, is loud and repetitive.  It is proclaimed vehemently and always carries a threat against its adversaries.  It creeps in through all the cracks of social life because to be convincing it must be constantly repeated.  It compensates for its lack of justification by its ubiquity and omnipotence.  Its “human rights”-ism is incantatory to the point of inducing nausea.  It disguises the lack of crucial backdrop by hogging the stage, leaving no space for rival.  What it is unable to obtain through persuasion or debate, it obtains through the stifling of adverse ways of thought, which are vilified as soon as they dare to show their faces.  Evil is not rejected by reason, but hated out of indignation and denounced through invective.  At the same time, discourse about the good is set to the tones of panegyric and the smell of incense.  Because the morality of complacency is unaware of its justifications, it attacks its critics not through arguments but through ostracism.

Elsewhere she explains:  “We brandish the arms of invective, disdain, repetition, and force, for we simply have nothing else to say.”

Has the stigmatizing efforts of the secular catechizers been successful?  You bet.

In the desert now uninhabited by truths, ethical universals create obligations only because most people share them.  The “good” appears as a necessity without a reason for being.  It is everywhere at once even if it has been deprived of legitimacy and imposes itself self-righteously.  We may therefore quite appropriately speak of a common agreement about certain values, without their being at all objective.  In Western societies we see a convergence of subjective norms.  A certain moral consensus is emerging, without reference to truth.  The indefinite repetition of the same subjective intuitions is creating an ersatz objectivity.  The repetition of sincere feelings is creating a substitute for moral truth.

This provokes the uncomfortable observation that thereby not only is the dissenter finding his maneuvering space increasingly cramped, but concurrently the community is losing both the mental habits and vocabulary whereby to comprehend his right and reason to dissent from the consensus. 

At the college campus, in addition to the social atmosphere which serves the stigma-method of buttressing uniformity are the omnipresent institutional forms, including: mandatory thought-reform programs, speech codes, nondiscrimination policies applied against student associations, and the unstated faculty career advancement requirements.  These reinforce the prevailing dogma by removing from subversives their avenues of expression, access to resources and position, and other benefits that allow distribution of an alternative voice.

But if the heterodox evade these restrictions and present their unsanctioned messages, unleash the scorn.  The Order must be maintained.

Kudos to our friends at Pacific Justice Institute and its affiliate attorneys who recently settled a student prayer case against Peralta Community College District in Alameda, California.  According to PJI, the College of Alameda (a campus in the District) punished two students for praying with a sick instructor.  Here are the basic facts:

The incident that ignited the case happened in December 2007 when an instructor at the College of Alameda complained about a private, consensual prayer in a shared faculty office between a student and a sick teacher. The administration swiftly reacted by issuing formal notices of intent to suspend both the student and a fellow bystander student, holding disciplinary hearings, and imposing written warnings.

The students filed suit, and the College moved to dismiss the case.

[The College argued] that prayer is akin to protests or demonstrations and presumptively disruptive. But federal district court judge Susan Illston disagreed, ruling that prayer is protected speech under the First Amendment. After the students appeared on Fox News in April 2009, the College also asked the court to censor the students from disclosing information about their case. The court refused. After these rulings the College eventually agreed to back down and also pay attorney’s fees after two years of litigation.

Among other points, the settlement contains an express acknowledgment that prayer on campus is protected free speech and free exercise of religion.

I find it most interesting that the College not only punished the students for their on campus prayer, but also that during the litigation it sought to further silence them in the media.   The ruling requires the College to protect student prayer on campus and to pay $90,000 of the students attorneys’ fees.  Censorship carries a heafty price tag.

On December 22, 2007, two students—Kandy Kyriacou and Ojoma Omaga—at the College of Alameda received letters from the Vice President of Student Services notifying them that the College intended to suspend them. What did Ms. Kyriacou and Ms. Omaga do to deserve suspension? Did they assault someone? Did they verbally abuse a fellow classmate or faculty member? Did they destroy property or commit some campus crime? No. They prayed.

Besides the self-evident absurdity of this situation, the details reveal a more troubling institutional problem. According to court documents, the students prayed with each other outside of class during class breaks, prayed silently to themselves in class, and on one occasion, engaged in a consensual and student-initiated prayer with an ill faculty member in her office. For these actions, Mr. Kerry Compton, the Vice President of Student Services at the College, informed the students that they were being charged with violating school policy against:

Disruptive or insulting behavior, willful disobedience, habitual profanity or vulgarity, or the open and persistent defiance of the authority of, refusal to comply with directions of, or persistent abuse of, college employees in the performance of their duty . . . .

So according to the College, engaging in student-initiated, private, and consensual prayer is the equivalent of disruption, insults, profanity, vulgarity and abuse. Really? While this charge alone is ridiculous, it is perhaps more astonishing that the College held its ground. After Ms. Kyriacou and Ms. Omaga explained their actions to Mr. Compton, he banned such “disruptive” behavior and issued an official warning that any similar actions in the future “may result in further disciplinary action, including, but not limited to suspension or expulsion.”

In light of this overt threat by a high university official, the students sought relief in federal court to protect their constitutional rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion, among others. But even then, the College would not back down. Instead, the College sought to throw the case out of court on the grounds that its actions were necessary to prevent a government endorsement of religion. The Court wisely rejected this argument, because it has been well-understood for decades that there is a “crucial difference between government speech endorsing religion, which the Establishment Clause forbids, and private speech endorsing religion, which the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses protect.” See Bd. of Educ. of Westside Comty. Sch. v. Mergens, 496 U.S. 226, 250 (1990).

In the wake of the Court’s strong decision rejecting the College’s motion, the College agreed to settle the case. But what is telling here is how far the College was willing to go to resist clearly protected speech and the reasons for its resistance. Engaging in a year and a half of litigation is not the reaction of a university welcoming of its students’ religious freedoms. Instead, its actions reveal a deep, unsettling hostility to religion that is all too prevalent at America’s institutions of higher education.

John Carpay, our Canadian friend who leads the Canadian Constitution Foundation, gives a chilling report today about the University of Calgary in Alberta punishing eight students after they refused to turn their prolife displays inward so no one could see them.  The prolife students had erected this display eight times before, but the university chose this time to order them to make the display difficult to observe in order to hamper its message.  University officials had never told any other group to turn their displays so that people could not see them.  You can find out more information about the case here.

The Center for Academic Freedom at the Alliance Defense Fund has fought similar efforts to censor prolife speech at universities in the United States.  Students have the right to express controversial ideas without censorship from government officials, and that includes university officials.

Within the past few weeks, the topic of prayer—particularly public prayer—has appeared regularly in the headlines.  Last Thursday was the National Day of Prayer, which the majority of Americans support, despite Judge Crabb’s ruling that this tradition, which dates back to 1775, now violates the Constitution.  And as graduation season returns, the issue of prayer in schools and at graduation ceremonies returns to people’s minds.

What many people, including many university administrators, do not realize is that federal appellate courts have repeatedly upheld prayers at university graduation ceremonies.  In fact, this was news to officials at Mohave Community College, which had removed the traditional prayers from the pinning ceremony for its nursing graduates.  As a result, the ADF Center for Academic Freedom sent the officials a letter, explaining that the United States Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Seventh Circuits have both upheld university graduation prayers.  Both courts recognized that university graduation ceremonies involve adults, thus eliminating any remote chance of coercion or indoctrination.  And as the Sixth Circuit noted in its 1997 Chaudhuri decision, “[t]he people of the United States did not adopt the Bill of Rights to strip the public square of every last shred of public piety.”

To its credit, Mohave Community College responded to this information by assuring ADF that the pinning ceremony prayers would continue and that student speakers would be allowed to include religious remarks in their speeches.  Hopefully, more colleges and universities will follow this example and recognize that the Constitution protects religious speech and does not require them to purge it from every public ceremony.