Run, don’t walk, (or click rapidly) to read Harvey Silverglate’s new essay on Minding the Campus. Harvey details the critical cultural and legal link between the speech-code culture and the increase in abusive prosecutions based on highly ambiguous statutory language. Speech codes use intentionally vague terms that give maximum power to university authorities and teach students (our future leaders) that ambiguous language can be the key to highly flexible and seemingly arbitrary exercises of power. Harvey puts it like this:

As federal guidelines shape speech restrictions, a related trend — that of campus groupthink spreading to the real world — has developed. It goes without saying that tomorrow’s leaders are molded on today’s campuses, so it should come as no surprise that political leaders, many of whom were educated in the 1980s when speech codes began to become all the rage, show little compunction about enacting and enforcing dangerously malleable laws. Perhaps this explains the current disrepute into which the idea of clarity of legal requirements, an important aspect of “due process of law,” has fallen: Students have been taught by example that precision of language is best to be avoided. Vagueness, after all, can serve a number of purposes—none of them salutary.

Please, read the whole thing, and learn (once again) that when it comes to campus authoritarianism, the virus can’t be contained.