FREEING SPEECH : No Matter What You Think, You Can’t Take the Words Out of Someone Else’s Mouth

There have been societies, so the book lobby insists, where books have started revolutions or have turned people’s ideas of the universe upside down, where books have been of the utmost importance. Well, believe that if you will, but in this society, books have a unique power. Any volume, if its thesis is daring and its prose is remotely readable, can influence an entire week’s worth of bookings on the serious talk shows.

Take the recent example of the book--no need to plug it, the publicity rush is over--that brought our attention to the fact that university administrators are trying to make curricula and student speech “politically correct.” Has the book helped change our campuses? Hard to say, but it did give the producers of “Crossfire,” “Nightline” and “MacNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour” something hot around which to build their programs just about the time the war was growing stale.

That’s an important contribution to this culture--all those Apple, GE and McDonnell Douglas commercials have to be separated by something. But the book and its attendant buzz were so buried in ideological point-scoring that the most obvious fact seemed to escape everyone’s notice: Trying to regulate student speech, to keep it within the friendly confines of good taste and sensitivity, is a fool’s errand because it ignores the nature of the college student.

There have been, to be sure, reports of student statements and behavior that are redolent of ignorance, rudeness and insensitivity. Not even Tom Metzger would argue with that. What’s difficult to grasp is that any college administrator could seriously believe that you can wipe that stuff out with a code of conduct or a “safe speech” diet--94% of the offensive material guaranteed removed.

Remember, these are college students we’re talking about. On commencement day, they’re addressed in all mock seriousness as the leaders of tomorrow, but the four years preceding have probably held their share of ignorance, rudeness and insensitivity for many of tomorrow’s leaders.

I wasn’t a wild man in college, but I knew plenty of people who were or who spent surprisingly large amounts of time trying to pretend they were. From what I heard, the fraternity initiation rites at Tijuana nightspots were specifically designed to increase respect neither for women nor for donkeys. Again, just what I heard. As an editor of the UCLA newspaper, I did attend the weekly staff parties. At 11 p.m., as regular as your late local news, the fledgling hard-drinking reporters would form a lengthy line, after three hours of furious drinking, for the privilege of bellowing into the porcelain canyon.

The intoxicants of choice may change, but the behavior is rock-solid consistent. It seems safe to say, based just on a little MTV viewing, that the college boys on the beach in Fort Lauderdale each spring are not gathered for seminars on changing sex roles in late 20th-Century America. Granted, society is entitled to hope that something of substance, maybe even something ennobling, will rub off in the classroom. But most of a college kid’s time is spent trying on the various garments of adulthood, from the gray suits of respectability to the bikini briefs of libertinism. If you didn’t end up doing something that looks supremely silly from a later vantage point, then you missed a big part of the college experience.

That, after all, is one of the reasons the well-to-do have always sent their young, however addled, to college: It advertises to the rest of the world that they can afford to postpone adulthood for their progeny for four more years.

Obviously flirtations with leftist bohemianism, so appalling to parents in the ‘60s, would scarcely bring an angry letter to a dean’s desk today. But--give these kids credit--a flagrant revival of the racism and sexism that we pretend we’ve surmounted (the spelling womyn is, after all, in the new Webster’s) is a sure way to keep the lights burning late in the administration building.

Of course, you can try, at least for public-relations reasons, to make college students speak and act with discretion and tact. But you can also try to paper-train a coyote. Both projects are marked more by good intentions than by wisdom. And at their best, universities are supposed to be in the wisdom business. They should leave the good intentions to “Crossfire.”