Where academics fear to tread

Visiting US author Nadine Strossen compares today's social censorship on campus with the McCarthy era.

- JANET WILSON

Ask New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen why free speech is now more threatened than ever and she'll compare today's issues with the anti-communist zeal of the McCarthy era.

Conceding that "particular ideologies differ but the methodology is the same", she says the effect is also similar, "in terms of people looking over their shoulders - feeling that they cannot express certain views or even discuss certain topics for fear of having an adverse impact, socially".

Back in 2015, she gave examples during a speech at Harvard University of how sexual harassment law had been used to discipline academics for talking in class about sexual topics, prostitution, pornography and adult films. In one case, a professor of early childhood education was fired for using vulgar language and humour about sex when teaching sexuality to university students. Another academic was punished for requiring his class to write essays defining pornography.

A committed anti-censorship advocate and feminist, Strossen says the current era is in fact worse than McCarthyism, with studies showing faculty members self-edit their research subjects. "And many of them are saying that there are certain subjects that are okay... but others are taboo."

Strossen, who was in New Zealand this month at the invitation of the Free Speech Union, opposes all forms of censorship, whether that's cancel culture or hate speech inciting violence towards certain sectors of the population.

Her German father was a Holocaust survivor and her maternal grandfather was a conscientious objector in World War I, forced to stand against the Hudson County, New Jersey, courthouse so that passers-by could spit on him.

Strossen became the American Civil Liberties Union's first female president in 1991.

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