Only We May be Intimidating, Hostile or Offensive

I fear that someday soon a law of physics will be violated, creating a singularity that will swallow the earth and eventually the entire universe. And this singularity will be formed, not in a super conducting super collider as some fear, but in a university administrator’s office. Because only in such an alternate universe could the proper conditions exist that would yield the irresistible force that goes nowhere.
In 1949, George Orwell imagined a world where a governing elite would endeavor to control the thoughts of their inferiors. The results were the timeless classic, “1984” and “newspeak.” Newspeak was a synthetic language that made it impossible for its users to put subversive thoughts into words that could be shared with others. The goal of the Orwellian all-powerful state was perfect uniformity and conformity of thought. Who would have imagined that Orwell would have become a model for regimenting the minds of Washington State University students?
Sadly, WSU is considering a speech code, meant to create a supposedly non-threatening environment. That the university would attempt this again, so soon after getting its fingers burned in its attempt to use “dispositions theory” to cleanse its education college of students who did not adhere to the orthodoxy of the far left, exposes both the tenacity and short memory of these people.
Just last year, the WSU College of Education tried to run undergraduate Ed Swan off campus for his conservative political and religious beliefs. For example, Ed Swan opposes racial preferences. According to dispositions theory, those who oppose granting preferential treatment to favored ethnicities are unfit to teach. If you can recite the leftwing orthodoxy catechism, you’ll get 100% on your dispositions exam.
WSU’s thought police had to back down from that one, as they did when they tried to censor a play written by student Chris Lee. The WSU Office of Campus Involvement purchased tickets for 40 students who shouted the play down.
Undaunted or unteachable, WSU is now considering a new student conduct code that includes speech restrictions. After grudgingly admitting that students “have the right to freedom of speech,” WSU inserts a big but and states that students may not engage in free speech that interferes with others’ rights. If one takes the time to read the tedious document, one learns that one right that supercedes freedom of speech is the right to be “free of an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment.”
Now anyone who has spent time at a university knows that an “intimidating, hostile or offensive environment” is just about anything that a complainant wants it to be. Ed Swan intimidated one of his teachers by wearing a camouflage hat to class. WSU has whole courses of study intended to teach its students how to be more easily offended.
In reality, if WSU wishes to clear its campus of intimidating, hostile or offensive environments, it should start by policing its own faculty.
A couple of years a go, I ridiculed a new Washington state law that banned the word, “oriental” from official state documents. As words go, oriental is not especially useful and is etymologically obsolete, but it is not a slur. But, compassion fascists seeking to create a sense of victimization among Asians have invented an historical fantasy regarding the word’s origins and meaning. One author of these myths is currently, if tenuously, a faculty member at WSU. He took great umbrage at my column and sent me a long dreary e-mail filled with the historical fallacies that he claimed to teach in his class. He also said that he expected his students to sign a contract obligating them to march in ideological lockstep with him. He invited me to sign his stupid contract.
If he accurately described the conditions of his own classroom, I would have to say that he had created an intimidating, hostile and offensive environment. Perhaps that explains those dreadful student evaluations he received that now make his continued employment uncertain.
I did accept one of this professor’s challenges though. I asked a few graduate students from Taiwan, Japan and Korea if they found the word oriental offensive. The question was met with wide-eyed, jaw-dropping amazement. Of course they did not find it offensive. What could possibly be offensive about that?
I guess no one ever taught them how to bully others by pretending offense.