How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World

- In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half Rosetta Stone Store of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures.How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real WorldBy Harvey A. SilverglateIn some quarters Im viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: Ive spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half Ive spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express ones true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in Rosetta Stone Cheap language that no one could understand.In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must let meaning choose the word, not the other way around. By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement armscampus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutorsenormous and grotesquely unfair power.In my dual capacities as author and attorney, I have written two books, one on each subject. In 1998, I co-authored (with Professor Alan Charles Kors) The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on Americas Campuses. In that book, Kors and I detailed the absurd and decidedly anti-intellectual spread of campus speech codesstudent guidelines often cloaked in harassment vernacular like emotional harm or demeaning effectthat essentially conflate words and conduct. These codes, by their own terms, claim to protect vulnerable or historically disadvantaged students (and even faculty and staff members) from feeling insulted, harassed or marginalized by having to listen to words that, to someones sensibilities, wound. (That some college administrator in 2010 sees these measures as the solution, Rosetta Stone Italian V3 rather than as a part of the problem, is deeply disappointing to one who saw firsthand the drawbacks of a Princeton Class of 1964 with no women and a single American-born black student. I am startled that, so many years after my own graduation from college, such a demeaning attitude toward students in minority groups is so prevalent in higher education, as if they need special protection from words and ideas.)My most recent book examines an analogous phenomenon in the criminal justice system: vagueness of federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice Rosetta Stone began prosecuting people, around the mid-1980s, under statutes and regulations that even I could not understand; whats worse, federal courts seemed not to recognize this obvious unfairness and convicted people of serious crimes carrying harsh sentences.