I knew the room looked familiar.
Five years ago, almost to the day, I watched my peers shout in the face of an 89-year-old Phyllis Schlafly as she entered the very lecture hall I stood in on Wednesday night, watching another critic of feminism stroll calmly through the movement’s myriad failures for a room full of curious students.
Though Christina Hoff Sommers, hosted by the George Washington University Young America’s Foundation chapter on Wednesday, was not greeted by a fuming mob of radicals, as Schlafly was, her detractors opted instead to clot in the back of the room, expressing opposition by way of frustrated whispers and exasperated eye rolls.
Of course, college campuses have long been breeding grounds for young liberals, but Schlafly’s visit to GW during my freshmen year came in the earliest days of a period we still inhabit – a time where free expression, a pillar of higher education, is crumbling before our eyes.
But Sommers, for whom I interned after hearing from Schlafly, has been fighting to fortify that pillar for decades.
Armed with a PowerPoint bearing such offensive contents as facts and figures, she played professor for the evening, attracting a rapt classroom full of students who could easily have used the temperate spring evening to do anything but attend another lecture.
Yet they listened eagerly as Sommers debunked myth after myth, not at all daunted by the task of correcting the mountain of errors found among what she referred to as “30 years of scholarship that has not had the benefit of peer review.”
It wasn’t until the longtime American Enterprise Institute scholar moved to address the so-called wage gap that students started to squirm. The eye rolls intensified. The whispers sharpened. A hand shot up in the back row. “You have got to be kidding me,” one student exclaimed.
Later, during the question and answer session, several attendees vocalized those concerns from a standing microphone in the middle of the room, challenging Sommers’ statistical analyses with palpable confidence. One student, in an ironic rendition of Kellyanne Conway’s infamous “alternative facts” gaffe, suggested Sommers’ data were no more reliable than the data she was questioning. At one point the student cried, “There is no objective reality!” Like Tomi Lahren before her, this young woman was simply invoking her own version of the truth as a mechanism of defense when faced with disagreement.
In an interview after the lecture, I asked Sommers if that student’s almost casual denial of “objective reality” was something of a touchstone for her generation.
“When the GW student denied the existence of objective reality,” she quipped, “I thought to myself: I’m going to try that out on the IRS.”
Reflecting on the years since I watched Schlafly grin and bear the jeers of my contemporaries on an equally pleasant April evening, still in President Obama’s first term, long before anybody knew much about Billy Bush, I wondered if Sommers saw signs of improvement on the horizon.
A former professor herself, she travels frequently from campus to campus, an even-keeled evangelist for logic and reason at a time when both seem to be falling out of fashion.
For her part, Sommers argued that things seems to be getting worse. “You would think that media stories about fanaticism and violence at Middlebury and Berkeley would help turn things around on campus,” she said. “But look what just happened to Heather MacDonald – she was silenced by mobs at UCLA and Claremont.”
The women’s movement’s insistence upon adhering to a philosophy of “intersectionality,” Sommers believes, makes impossible any turn back towards moderation.
“Intersectionality is the reigning philosophy in today’s campus diversity movement. It’s an illiberal doctrine that views society as a network of interlocking, mutually re-inforcing oppressions (racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism—the list keeps growing). Ideals like free expression or due process are dismissed as ploys used by oppressors to maintain power,” she told me. “Students who have imbibed their intersectional catechism feel virtuous when they stop someone from an oppressor group from speaking.”
“Until that theory goes out of style,” Sommers said, “campuses will remain hostile environments for freedom.”
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
