The Tolerance Con.

Tolerance is the space between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

As Glen Reynolds notes with respect to sexual harassment codes on universities:

It’s worth noting that — as Wendy Kaminer pointed out in The Atlantic last week — this is a claim based almost entirely on free expression that some don’t like:

What accounts for such feminine timidity, this instinctive unwillingness or inability to talk or taunt back, without seeking the protection of university or government bureaucrats? Talking is apparently beside the point. “I just want to be able to walk back to my dorm at night without hearing all this crazy stuff from these guys,” one student complains. I sympathize (I was a young woman once, too), but “hearing crazy stuff” from people in public is part of life in a free society, a society in which you enjoy equal rights to say crazy stuff.

Putatively progressive feminists might agree, if only they regarded women as equal to the task of talking back, if only they distinguished between men who “say stuff” about women and men who “do stuff” to women. In the feminist view reflected in the Yale draft complaint, the misogynist rants of some undergraduate men (perhaps a relatively small percentage of them) is not speech. It’s a series of “dangerous,” “sex-discriminatory threats” that “intimidate” and “terrorize” women, constituting a hostile environment (or “rape culture”) that causes sexual violence.

See, you used to be able to punish the sort of behavior complained of here on the ground that it violated general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior. But after a half-century or so of attacking even the notion of general principles of decency and acceptable public behavior — especially where sex is concerned! — that doesn’t work.

Universities have long told the larger culture that it must simply put up with whatever is said, however offensive, in the interest of free expression. Now we see more evidence that that was always a lie, a self-serving cover story that was really meant simply to protect speech that the larger culture didn’t want to hear, with no intention to protect speech that people at universities don’t want to hear. Universities, meanwhile, have become some of the most hostile environments for free speech anywhere in America.

That repression, of course, merely empowers such antics — or, if one wishes to play the usual leftist game, it could be argued that their very crudity is evidence of authenticity in response to repression. At any rate, at a time where the nation is rethinking the value of higher education generally in the face of straitened financial circumstances, this hypocrisy will not go unnoticed.

Meanwhile, I note that the investigating committee is stacked 3-1 women against men. Though this is probably meant as a signal to the complainants — and to the Obama Administration educrats — that the complaint is taken seriously, it also sends a signal that satisfying the complainants is more important than fairness. Bad move, Yale.