Speech codes and our 'culture of comfort'

The most recent abuse of student academic freedom was perpetrated by the University of Prince Edward Island, which censored a student paper that dared to publish the Danish cartoons.

Perhaps the Danish cartoons controversy, coupled with the extreme culture-of-comfort reactions of some of those "hurt" by the cartoons, may finally lead more people, especially academics, to act to restore the freedom that Canadian culture appears to have been losing over the last two decades.

Canadian universities have, in the past 15 years, adopted a culture-of-comfort approach to academic freedom, with speech codes that conflate offensive behaviour with offensive speech on almost all campuses. These codes allow, at least in principle, abuses of the academic freedom of both students and faculty.