Bush Decries ‘Intolerance’ to Free Speech

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Decrying “the rise of intolerance in our land,” President Bush unexpectedly propelled himself Saturday into an emerging, angry debate over freedom of speech on college campuses, in the process staking out a position that could prove difficult for Democrats in 1992.

“Freedom of speech (is) under assault throughout the United States,” Bush said in a commencement address at the University of Michigan. “What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship.”

The President’s comments--made earlier in the day before he was hospitalized in Bethesda, Md., for shortness of breath--were aimed at an issue that has caused sharp divisions among students, faculty and administrators over the last year as it has swept the academic world, much as the free speech movement became a cause celebre in the 1960s.

In addressing for the first time the controversy of “politically correct” behavior, Bush placed himself squarely on the side of those who have been attacked for taking outspoken stands that have been criticized as anti-gay, anti-black or anti-female.

Thus, using as a forum the first of several commencement speeches that he is scheduled to make this spring, the President in effect drove a wedge between mainstream voters and the “special interest” constituencies often courted by liberal Democrats.

In Saturday’s address--at the same university where President Lyndon B. Johnson challenged the nation 27 years ago to eliminate poverty and racism and create the Great Society--Bush offered his own prescription for the future: the Good Society.

“We don’t need another Great Society, with huge and ambitious programs administered by the incumbent few. We need a Good Society, built upon the deeds of the many--a society that promotes service, selflessness and action,” Bush said, attacking an approach to solving domestic problems embraced by a generation of Democrats.

The issue of “politically correct” behavior, which only recently began attracting attention outside college campuses, has become a shorthand reference to what its critics see as excessive limits on free speech in the discussion of racial, ethnic and sexual prejudice.

“The notion of ‘political correctness’ has ignited controversy across the land,” Bush said. “Although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudices with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.

“Let us fight back against the boring politics of division and derision. Let’s trust our friends and colleagues to respond to reason,” the President said, warning that past efforts “to micromanage casual conversation have . . . invited people to look for insult in every word, gesture, or action.”

The debate over political correctness encompasses a wide range of issues and incidents. Among them:

--A University of Michigan student who read a limerick that contained a joking reference to homosexuality was ordered to write a self-criticism for the student newspaper.

--Two Harvard students sought to hang Confederate flags in their windows and another student, in an apparent protest, displayed a Nazi swastika. The issue prompted a flood of hostile letters to the student newspaper.

--A student at Brown University in Providence, R. I., was expelled after shouting racial epithets while inebriated in a dormitory courtyard. The university president, Vartan Gregorian, said that the issue was not one of free speech but one of behavior.

Bush said that, in some cases, critics of politically unpopular positions or philosophies “treat sheer force--getting their foes punished or expelled, for instance--as a substitute for the power of ideas.”

As Bush launched into his attack, chants of approval erupted from students graduating from the school of business administration, including shouts of “four more years, four more years.”

Although a few catcalls also echoed through the crowd that filled nearly every available seat of the massive Michigan Stadium, Bush was given a generally warm reception, and only a few students appeared to walk out in protest when he was introduced.

“We all should be alarmed at the rise of intolerance in our land and by the growing tendency to use intimidation rather than reason in settling disputes,” the President said. “Neighbors who disagree no longer settle matters over a cup of coffee. They hire lawyers and they go to court.

“Political extremists roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race. . . . Such bullying is outrageous, and not worthy of a great nation grounded in the values of tolerance and respect,” he said.

Bush called on the nation “to use our persuasive powers to conquer bigotry once and for all,” adding: “We must conquer the temptation to assign bad motives to people who disagree with us.”

In an era when a typical response to misfortune has become “whom can I sue,” or, when would-be Samaritans ask, “will someone sue me,” Bush said that “moral sensitivity” is losing ground and “the rule of law gives way to the rule of the loophole--the notion that whatever is not illegal must be acceptable.”

The Great Society, unveiled on May 22, 1964, was Johnson’s program of urban, rural and environmental improvement and represented the keystone of his domestic policy as he sought to pump federal funds into decayed central cities and pockets of rural poverty.

In dismissing the methods of the Great Society, but not necessarily its goals, Bush said that “we got to the point of equating dollars with commitment and, when programs failed to produce progress, we demanded more money.”

“This crusade backfired,” he said, and prompted animosity rather than racial harmony, and dependency, rather than emergence from poverty.

Bush said that his vision of a Good Society is built on “common decency and commitment.”

“Know your neighbors. Build bonds of trust at home, at work, or wherever you go. Don’t just talk about principles: live them.”