Cotterell: Free speech may be making a comeback on campus

Perhaps the only lasting legacy of the Donald Trump fad will be the death of political correctness.

The Republican presidential nominee has made it respectable to laugh at “trigger warnings” and “micro-aggressions.” But with typical Trumpian excess, he does so with macro-aggressions of his own, like prompting followers to punch critics in the nose.

But there’s a healthy pushback, finally, in our public discourse – not because of Trump, but coinciding with his rise. It recently surfaced at the University of Chicago, where dean of students Jay Ellison sent a letter informing new arrivals:

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspective at odds with their own.”

It surprising that such a rudimentary defense of academic freedom would make national news. Administrators at few other campuses began showing signs of developing vertebrae.

We had an example of this at FSU last week when campus Republicans shared an amusing hour or so with Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor from Breitbart. His appearance drew loud protests from students who chanted that he was “racist, sexist, anti-gay,” but the show went on.

Yiannopoulos is a professional provocateur, sort of Ann Coulter with none of the warmth and whimsy. You can find his FSU speech on YouTube. He devoted much of it to excoriating Twitter for censorship, and made fun of Black Lives Matter, feminism, the mainstream media and other targets sure to get a laugh from young, conservative Republicans.

But that’s not important. What matters is that Yiannopoulos has a right to be offensive and FSU did not bar him from campus. Nor did anyone interfere with the man in a dress and the woman with the lavender Mohawk who were among the protestors outside.

It wasn’t always like that. In fact, the censorship used to come from the right.

When I was a student at Miami-Dade Junior College 50 years ago, the administration tried to regulate the length of hair on male bands playing on campus. Basically, hair couldn’t touch the collar. Four guys shaved their heads and appeared as “The Four Skins,” ridiculing the rule, and the administration pretended not to catch the double entendre.

Earlier, the Charley Johns Committee had its famous rampage across Florida campuses, supposedly sniffing out subversives but really attacking civil-rights activists and gays. In the early 1970s, the Legislature had a bill forbidding chapters of Students for a Democratic Society on state campuses. (It didn’t pass, because it fairly shouted its unconstitutionality.)

Police monitored speeches by famous figures on the left, like Abbie Hoffman, Dick Gregory and even Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (whom a Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford once suggested impeaching). Powerful legislators warned college presidents that their appropriations would be reduced by the total of salaries paid any professors who encouraged kids to oppose the Vietnam war.

FSU has a pretty good free speech record, while indulging the hot-house orchids who feel they must be protected from ideas they dislike. There’s even a “banned books week” on campus, in which students and faculty publicly read from books that were once forbidden.

It traces back at least as far as the term of the late President Stanley Marshall. He had a simple rule: You have a right to say it, I have a right to think you’re a jerk – or to agree with you – but neither of us may disrupt others’ rights on campus.

Acceptance of self-expression is a strange thing. The parents of the students now demanding safe spaces and trigger warnings were running naked across the quad, back in the happy days of streaking. The enforcers of political correctness seem to believe there is a constitutional right to go through life un-offended – that my taking umbrage at your remark is, in itself, proof that you are wrong.

Yiannopoulos urged the FSU crowd to vote for Trump, whom he said would “be the best thing that could ever happen to free speech in this country.” Like Trump, he recklessly presumed his opinions are facts, but Yiannopoulos was on target in his defense of the right to be offensive.

“You don’t have to like the guy personally to understand that the effect of a Donald Trump presidency is going to be to destroy the power of all the people who want to stop you from saying what you want to say, stop you from reading what you want to read and stop you from doing what you want to do,” he said.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Democrat reporter who writes a twice-weekly column for the paper. He can be reached at bcotterell@tallahassee.com.