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In recent years, college students across the country have demanded that their institutions create systems for reporting “microaggressions�Ũ�Ĕsubtle and often unintentional slights against another based on a person’s status in a minority or marginalized group. Faculty, too, taking this step. As FIREand other free speech advocates have written before, such systems threaten to and even shut down precisely the sort of conversations from which college students can learn the most.

Now, Derald Wing Sue and Christina M. Capodilupo, scholars of the microaggression phenomena and professors at Teachers College, Columbia University, are the way campus community members have been using their research to justify censorship or the encouragement of self-censorship. The two are co-authors of “,” a chart illustrating some of the many ways one could commit a microaggression that has been shared widely on the internet and even posted to some institutions’ websites.

According to , Sue intended to spark dialogue, not provide an avenue for punishment:

Mr. Sue said his goal had always been to educate people, not punish or shame them, if they engage in microaggressions.

“I was concerned that people who use these examples would take them out of context and use them as a punitive rather than an exemplary way,” Mr. Sue said.

Capodilupo, too, emphasized that identifying microaggressions should be a step to more speech, not less.

Now that the research has made its way into popular culture, Ms. Capodilupo said, some people use the word to shut down conversations instead of reflecting on the situation.

“It was never meant to give a vernacular that then makes it OK to stop talking,” Ms. Capodilupo said. “It was to ask people to be flexible in their thinking and to be open-minded to the concept that we don’t all walk through the world in the same shoes.”

FIRE is glad to see this clarification from Sue and Capodilupo. We hope more students, professors, and administrators will take care to halt the abuse of the professors’ writings in order to inhibit honest questions and conversations on campus. For more remarks from Sue and Capodilupo, click over to .