BY JOHN K. WILSON

Colleges are increasingly looking at antibullying policies to respond to abusive treatment on campus. In my article in the latest volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom, “The Danger of Campus Bans on Bullying,” I argue that universities must be wary of such rules. My argument is not that bullying on campus is nonexistent or harmless. Instead, I question whether regulations on bullying solve the problem.

In 2018, the Justice Department sued the University of Michigan over an antibullying policy because “it offers no clear, objective definitions of the violations.” The University of Michigan quickly changed its policy to sharply limit it. The fact that the Trump Administration opposes antibullying policies might be seen by many as an argument in its favor. But the reality of antibullying policies is that they can pose a danger to any critical voices.

One example of this was the administration of Chicago State University, which was trying to shut down the CSU Faculty Voice, a blog that criticized top administrators. A top administrator who had been fired revealed that the campus cyberbullying policy had actually been enacted as a method to try to stop the faculty from denouncing the administration. In this way, antibullying policies can be a favorite tool of bullies.

A concept such as bullying with no clear legal meaning, one that is most closely associated with how children treat other children, has no place in higher education as an enforceable rule.

I argue that we need to deal with bullying on campus by enforcing well-established standards of harassment and by protecting the freedom of everyone to speak out against the bullies who threaten them, instead of relying on new and dangerous rules that give administrators more power to decide which views will be protected on campus.

Read the complete volume of the 2019 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.