Education

College Professor Says Speech Codes Discriminate Against The Disabled

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Campus speech codes not only suppress free speech and creativity, but they also discriminate against those with disabilities, NYU professor Geoffrey Miller wrote in a July essay.

In his essay “The Neurodiversity Case For Free Speech,” Miller said that censorship kills rational culture by silencing anyone who’s different. The essay argued that campus speech codes — rules that restrict speech beyond the freedoms of the First Amendment — may have originally been well-intentioned, but they discriminate against anyone that can’t understand what appropriate speech entails.

Miller wrote his essay after discerning that an atypically large portion of college students with learning disabilities, Aspergers, ADHD, mild forms of autism and other disabilities were subjected to disciplinary action from their colleges, according to PJ Media.

Speech regulations at universities were created by and for normal brains and unfairly assume that every student can interpret verbal cues equally, Miller said. The regulations take for granted that not all college students and professors can anticipate if their words will hurt someone else, because non-neurotypical brains have an extremely hard time doing so.

“Speech codes are also intentionally vague so that anyone who’s upset by someone else’s speech can make a complaint, with the subjective feelings of the listener as the arbiter of whether an offense has occurred,” Miller wrote. “In most campus speech codes, there is no ‘reasonable person’ standard for what speech counts as offensive. This means that even if an Aspy or schizotypal person develops an accurate mental model of how an average person would respond to a possible speech act, they can’t rely on that.”

Miller noted that university administrators may not be scared of losing a few free speech lawsuits, but they would probably balk at the prospect of several hundred Americans With Disabilities lawsuits. He indicated that the prospect of these suits may help bring disability rights to the forefront of the free speech conversation.

Almost 40 percent of colleges in the U.S. impose “severely restrictive” speech codes, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s 2017 report.

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