The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a great friend for those of us who believe college should honor their commitments to freedom of speech, especially in California where it is the law.
To be sure, David wasn't happy about the flyer, as he makes clear in his own post. But he's not about jumping on the Claremont censor bandwagon. Charles and David are willing to give Gerbick more credit than I am. Gerbick may not have used the same strong wording that Wood did in the "white party" incident above, but he is still using Harvey Mudd's illiberal policies to demonstrate to students that speech permissible under the First Amendment (which, as a college in California, Harvey Mudd is legally bound to uphold) is prohibited. Gerbick even counts such speech as discriminatory harassment when one individual subjectively feels offended!
Of course, this also illustrates the blindingly obvious point that these policies can easily be taken advantage of by anyone claiming, rightly or wrongly, to be offended. If a group of, say, five students made it their business to complain about everything on campus that could possibly offend them, they could completely paralyze the college administration under these absurd rules. It's kind of surprising that this hasn't already happened as a method of proving to everyone the ridiculousness of these policies.
Back to Gerbick's e-mail:
I also hope that you don't lose sight of the feeling of hurt that these types of incidents cause. We can often get tangled in discussions of rights and forget about the people who are truly hurt by the insensitivity of others.
Yeah, those silly "discussions of rights" are a real distraction from the real issue: hurt feelings. Gerbick has adopted an insultingly paternalistic manner to talk about the adults attending HMC. There's apparently good reason that HMC is the only college in the Claremont Consortium ranked as a red-light school in FIRE's Spotlightdatabase of speech codes.
