Will Universities Stop Bullying Students for Exercising Their Free Speech Rights?
We have ceded all power at the university to aggressive and emotionally unstable bureaucrats. Is this really the educational culture we want to live in?
Alex Shieh conducted a very simple experiment: Email every administrator on the address book of Brown University with a simple question, “What do you do?” Instead of receiving responses, he received threatening feedback from campus student resources and directly faced campus discipline for his crime of exposing Brown’s bloated reality.
“When you investigate the administration it turns out they investigate you back,” Shieh said at a House testimony before Congress. In an interview I conducted with him, Shieh told me that Brown tried to force him to delete his emails of administrative staff that he scraped from the internet, citing unauthorized use.
“[The Dean] was rude and aggressive” at his hearing, he told me, and “attempted to bully and intimidate me.” Eventually, thanks to a neutral professor who judged his case, Shieh was cleared of all charges.
However, Shieh encountered what assertive students routinely face on campus: bossy, hostile, and aggressive personas who think that their job is to police students, not help them develop truth-seeking instincts.
Shieh, who organically unveiled the administrative rot at Brown University, a university that charges up to approximately $93,000 per year per student, became persona non grata with the Brown University administration by demonstrating the one trait that modern American universities no longer tolerate and definitely do not teach: Assertiveness.
He was a staff writer with the Brown Spectator and a budding journalist and leader. He has the traits a university is supposed to encourage in everyone. But because he threatened the university’s position, he was told off for his actions.
The modern university chills justified student expression and limits student debate in order to overprotect students, reads the core thesis of the famous 2015 Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” But the thesis needs to be revised. What the Brown University incident and like trends show is that at least today, it’s not about the students at all—it’s about the administrators and their jobs.
Attached to every parent’s bill for the tuition and costs of sending their kid to university is a stipend for these university’s squeamish, poorly trained, and out-of-touch academic bureaucracy—who intentionally limit criticism of their jobs while feasting off the paycheck that gets passed onto each student.
This is an especially grating feeling for students, who came to college to be treated like adults—and instead feel like they’re being treated not even like children—but rather as some sort of pet.
At least children talk. At Davidson College, where I head up the nonprofit Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, we found in the latest survey by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights In Education) that 64 percent of our students feel uncomfortable with stating their unvarnished opinion in a written assignment on campus, while 32 percent believe they are unable to express an opinion because of how other students, a professor, or administrative staff would respond.
That feeling at Davidson was only reinforced when Cynthia Huang, a student at Davidson, was targeted by administrators for passing out pamphlets that labeled Hamas a terrorist group and, in the administrator’s eyes, “promotes Islamophobia.” In the name of the “Student Code of Conduct,” Davidson student life officers asked Huang to sign a statement that agreed to disciplinary consequences for her actions.
Sound familiar? Bullying students into signing documents and otherwise waive their legal rights of representation has become a common tactic in a suddenly litigious campus environment. She refused, instead challenging the administration to directly find culpability in her actions. Her refusal caused a major embarrassment for Davidson College, causing the college to be criticized for going too “woke.”
Neither Shieh nor Huang were ultimately disciplined. They both have the trait assertiveness—also known as disagreeableness, one of the core traits that are sorely needed in the country more than ever. Their assertiveness is so needed because universities have spent the better part of thirty years systematically snuffing out such attitudes—in the name of social justice, in the name of campus safety, whatever you want to call it. It’s all wrong.
I propose that universities learn from their failed attempts to discipline students, instead of causing themselves national embarrassment and harming student experiences, by doing the following:
- Exclusively hire administrators who understand the fundamental right of free expression—and the university’s crucial role in protecting it.
- Encourage student agency by answering questions that students have that might be critical of the university, as they often are directly relevant to university public trust and function.
- Conduct orientation practices to all staff and students that affirm the value of truth-seeking over all other emotional, identity group concerns. The university is place to develop truth-seeking instincts, not hamper other people’s right to speak.
Shieh may have had the last laugh. This week, Brown sent out a campus-wide email where the university agreed to make campuswide staffing “changes” for greater efficiency and to better the student experience. It turns out, in this age of abuse of authority, it’s worth listening to the principled challenger, rather than try to go for their throat.
If our next generation doesn’t fix our institutions, we all lose. If our next generation doesn’t work against bureaucratic authority, America as we know it loses its value as the greatest country in the world. That is ultimately what the need to re-cultivate independent thought and inquiry is about—restoring American greatness.
(READ MORE: To Avoid a Harvard-Sized Endowment Tax, Universities Should Avoid Harvard’s Actions)
