East Germany Comes to Mizzou

Earlier this week I wrote a post I called “East Germany Comes to Tibet.”  You can find it, and the reason for the title, here.  Now it appears that East Germany may be coming closer to home.

Following up on everything that has been happening at the University of Missouri, the MU Police Department sent out an email Tuesday morning, with a subject line of “Reporting Hateful and/or Hurtful Speech”:

“To continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe, the MU Police Department (MUPD) is asking individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions to:

• Call the police immediately at [phone number redacted]. (If you are in an emergency situation, dial 911.)

• Give the communications operator a summary of the incident, including location.

• Provide a detailed description of the individual(s) involved.

• Provide a license plate and vehicle descriptions (if appropriate).

• If possible and if it can be done safely, take a photo of the individual(s) with your cell phone.

Delays, including posting information to social media, can often reduce the chances of identifying the responsible parties.  While cases of hateful and hurtful speech are not crimes, if the individual(s) identified are students, MU’s Office of Student Conduct can take disciplinary action.”

When one thinks of East Germany, one immediately thinks of the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security.  In addition to its own agents, the Stasi ran a network of “unofficial informants,” or IMs, to collect additional information on people.

But an article in Der Spiegel, a German newsweekly, last summer reported on a system of informers in East Germany that was even larger than the Stasi and their IMs.  Historians and students of East Germany haven’t focused on this additional spying system because it wasn’t run by the Stasi but by the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police.  Der Spiegel reports:

“Hedwig Richter, a professor at the University of Greifswald, speaks of a ‘stunning reporting machinery.’  Wide swaths of society were a part of it, she says.  ‘There were institutionalized structures outside of the Stasi that produced daily and weekly reports.’  Whether in city hall, at the steel factory or inside the local farming collective: ‘Everyone who had a position with some measure of responsibility filed reports’ for the state, Richter says.”

The system included

“neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.”

Note the language I highlighted.  That sounds like what the MUPD is asking students to do at the University of Missouri.  If somebody is doing or saying something that you think is “hateful” or “hurtful,” the police want to know about – and want you to take a picture of the person if you can do it secretly.  Even though the police admit these “are not crimes,” the police will pass the information on to the University, so the University can take disciplinary action if students are involved.

Der Spiegel reports what could happen to students in East Germany because of such reports:

“[S]kipping a Russian-language class, making an ill-considered comment at the student union or exhibiting a persistent lack of the ‘proletarian point of view’ can all lead to ex-matriculation -- which had profound consequences for a lifetime.”

While the MUPD’s e-mail doesn’t say what kind of disciplinary action the University might take, getting a record of disciplinary action while you are in college can’t help your future prospects.

One final point.  Why did East Germany set up this system (or rather, these systems) of reporting – and spying?  To protect the safety of the East German state – which is also the rationale of the MUPD.  The purpose of reporting things to the police that aren’t even crimes is “[t]o continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe”.

I realize many will think this argument is overstated.  Maybe it is initially, but it is the mindset I am worried about and the direction it would take us.  We are already seeing some colleges limit free speech on the grounds that hearing something you don’t like makes you feel unsafe.  In other cases, people are using disclosure laws to punish, economically, those who don’t agree with them and to try to silence them.

The email from the University of Missouri Police Department takes one more step down that road by encouraging students to report speech or acts that they think are somehow “hateful” or “hurtful,” even though the police acknowledge they are not illegal.  People worry about the NSA checking the metadata on their phone calls and yet are silent about a police department collecting information such as this.

If we are to avoid continuing down the road to what was ultimately East Germany, we need to embrace free speech and understand there is no right to not be insulted or to not have your opinions challenged.  The proper response to disagreement is not to force the other person to be quiet, but to develop a thicker skin.