Signifying Nothing

In grad school, back in the postmodernism-soaked ’90s, floating signifiers had a moment. The idea behind a floating signifier is that it’s a reference that has broken free of its referent and taken on a life of its own, popping up in places that made no sense in the original meaning. The idea escaped its own theoretical grounding, fittingly, and became a sort of shorthand for a cultural artifact seeming wildly out of place.

I usually notice them in the context of popular music. For example, at TB’s college graduation, while the crowd waited for the graduates to walk, the venue piped in “Girlfriend in a Coma,” a minor mid-’80s hit from the Smiths. The song came from before most of the graduates were born, and the lyrics … um … let’s go with did not fit the occasion. I’m guessing it was just supposed to be a pleasant aural wallpaper, but the juxtaposition of the lyrics and the occasion was jarring.

In Utah, now, the idea of conscientious objection has become a floating signifier. The Legislature there has passed a law allowing college students to claim conscientious-objector status when given any reading assignment or class assignment that they claim violates their beliefs.

The concept has lost any connection to its origin.

Conscientious-objector status comes from the military. The idea was that soldiers who had been drafted—key point—were put in positions that required them to violate their religion. (Later court decisions expanded the concept to include deeply held beliefs that weren’t theologically based.) Someone whose conscience or religion wouldn’t allow them to kill someone might instead be assigned ambulance duty. They couldn’t escape service, but they could be assigned to roles that didn’t involve inflicting violence.

In the context of a military draft, the concept makes sense. The soldiers don’t choose to be there and don’t have the option of just walking away.

In the context of K–12 education, parents have increasingly been given analogous options for their kids. When school attendance is mandated by law and the students don’t have the option of just walking away, some accommodation for conscience makes sense. The parallel isn’t perfect, of course; children have a different legal status than adults, for instance, and parents have the option of pulling their kids out of the local public school altogether. They could switch to a private or religious school, move to another district, or homeschool their kids themselves. Those options aren’t equally available to everyone, but folks who switch schools won’t be executed for desertion, either.

College is not mandatory. Students can choose among colleges, or choose to skip college. If they decide after enrolling that college isn’t for them, they can leave. There’s no law against leaving one college for another, or dropping out altogether. Exit is an option. And because college is built on the assumption that students are adults, they don’t need parental permission.

There is no draft for college. Since college is truly voluntary, the concept of conscientious objection doesn’t apply. Students can ask professors about assignments, and try to persuade them. If that doesn’t work, students can object by dropping a class, changing a major or leaving a school. They can vote with their feet. And as any college administrator can tell you, they do. I’ve seen them vote with their feet in consistently picking one professor over others teaching the same course. It happens routinely.

Implementing something like conscientious objector status at scale in higher ed would be a nightmare. Imagine that a student claims that, say, their Christian beliefs forbid them to acknowledge homosexuality, and to claim on that basis that they should be exempt from any material that references it. Then imagine that the administrator in question denies the request, noting correctly that Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality. Now we’re having taxpayer-funded religious battles. What could possibly go wrong?

No. The concept of conscientious objection has no home in higher education. People are here because they choose to be here. The mission of higher education is to pursue the truth, even when people find that truth distasteful, objectionable or unsettling. If you don’t like the truths being found, dig deeper and find better ones. Make your case. Of course, as any lawyer can tell you, the best way to make a case is to understand the other side. Allowing people to opt out of any aspects of a discipline they don’t like, while still offering them a credential signifying (!) competence, is lying. If you can’t play by the rules, choose a different game.

Institutions that are all about truth should not lie. If we reduce degrees to floating signifiers, we lose our reason to exist. We would go the way of postmodernism, floating away to irrelevance. Colleges may be full of sound and fury, but they aren’t idiots, and they signify something. This law is a direct threat.