“Many American pundits seem to firmly believe that the country stands at a precipice in which young, left-wing college students and recent graduates are the leading edge of a rising tide of illiberalism that comes in the form of ‘political correctness’ and poses a clear and present danger to free speech and rational discourse,” Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias wrote in March 2018. “It is so accepted that there is a growing climate of authoritarianism,” he continued dismissively, “that whether or not individual examples are true is fundamentally irrelevant.”
Fast forward to June 2020: “I am going to have to admit I was wrong and the excesses are spreading,” Yglesias wrote this month in a series of now-deleted tweets. “I stand by a lot of my criticisms of the anti-PC discourse of five years ago. But I wrongly thought the most egregious excesses of campus activists would stay on campus when they have instead spread as people age into other roles.”
The debate is over about whether there is a campus free speech crisis. There certainly is, and now, it’s metastasizing into a national speech crisis. The cancer of campus intolerance is attacking the whole body of the American republic.
There could be no more thorough vindication than the societal hysteria of the last three weeks for those of us who have spent years warning against malignant illiberalism, perverse safetyism, and intellectual protectionism being spoon-fed to undergraduates. “Remember all those commentators and journalists who smugly informed us that the Woke craziness and suppression of campus speech was being overhyped and it was just a few overzealous students?” mused the Brookings Institution’s Shadi Hamid on Twitter. “They’ll never admit they’re wrong. But they were very, very wrong.”
All of which presents conservatives with the extraordinary challenge of saving the American project. All 330 million citizens are now living in a campus culture. Liberals were wrong to dismiss conservative and classical liberal fears about the state of higher education. The idea, held mostly by older generations on the Left and Right, that students would shed campus craziness after they graduated, left their cloistered universities, and hit a cold, hard wall of reality, was also wrong.
Look around. Large swaths of American life are indistinguishable from the frenzied exertions of our woke universities. As of this writing, a mob of wannabe anarchists is play-acting Lord of the Flies by attempting to erect a utopian “protest society” within a handful of blocks in downtown Seattle. Twenty-somethings and 30-somethings calling themselves residents of the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” have occupied an area that encompasses the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct building in an effort to protest … well, something. Indeed, pretty much everything. It’s not just about race, as many people like to pretend. When asked, protesters cite all sorts of other evils, such as capitalism, which is the Marxist word for what happens when free people run their own lives.
Social media reports suggest that the demonstrators have run out of food. But they have not run out of complaints and demands, which range from “abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus” to rent control, free college across the state, and reparations “in a form to be determined.” The only thing distinguishing this display from commie-lite campus occupations seen at Ohio State, Evergreen State, Howard, and other schools in the past few years is the very real threat of violence — in this case, likely at the hands of the armed, newly self-appointed “citizen police force” and its local rapper/warlord.
The ritual expurgation of thought crimes follows the example set on campus. For instance, Gordon Klein, an accounting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been placed under “involuntary administrative leave” after denying a student’s request to alter or exempt final exams for minority students following the killing of George Floyd. The university has also launched a formal discrimination investigation into Klein after a Change.org petition calling for his termination and including his private correspondence with the student was published online. Klein, for his part, is now living under police protection after receiving threats of violence, according to the Malibu Police Department.
A couple hundred miles east on I-10, Arizona State University rescinded a job offer to its incoming dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Sonya Forte Duhé, after she was accused of perpetrating “microaggressions.” In a now-deleted post, Duhé tweeted last Tuesday “for the family of George Floyd, the good police officers who keep us safe, my students, faculty and staff. Praying for peace on this #BlackOutTuesday.”
This tweet prompted outcry from former students who claimed the professor “committed several acts of microaggressions” and “racist commentary,” such as telling certain black students that their hair was not appropriate for television. Duhé’s offer was revoked after more than two dozen faculty members, including veterans of the Washington Post and New York Times, sent a letter to university president Michael Crow and a student-led Change.org petition circulated online.
Invocations of “microaggressions” and punishment of those refusing to bow before the image of Nebuchadnezzar are now standard operating procedure within the academy. Dismaying yet unremarkable examples of cancel-culture extremism stain most of our institutions of higher education. But they now stain not only our colleges and universities. In the past fortnight, there has been a bevy of such firings and public shamings for sins in the world of work, in fields beyond academia.
Grant Napear was fired from his radio station and resigned as play-by-play announcer for Sacramento Kings basketball, a position he had held since 1988. Why? Because he tweeted “All Lives Matter” in answer to a question about his views on the Black Lives Matter movement. Hundreds of poets are calling for the ouster of the president of the U.S. Poetry Foundation after it released a statement declaring that it “stand[s] in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce[s] injustice and systemic racism.” The open letter’s signatories described this as “worse than the bare minimum.” In the new order, insufficient zeal is itself a crime.
Perhaps nowhere is the state of affairs more clear than in journalism. Stan Wischnowski was forced to resign this month as top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper he had worked at for 20 years and shepherded to a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011. Staff outrage exploded over a tone-deaf headline, “Buildings Matter, Too,” on a column about the effects of property damage inflicted by rioters following the killing of Floyd.
And, most infamously, there was James Bennet’s public departure from the New York Times. The former editorial page editor for this once-great newspaper resigned after a public mutiny by Times staff over the publication of an opinion article by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. On June 3, the Times ran Cotton’s provocative piece, which was given the fitting headline “Send in the troops,” arguing that the government should deploy federal troops to quell rioting that had broken out in several cities.
In response, the union that represents Times staffers, the NewsGuild of New York, published a statement falsely accusing Cotton of wanting the military to subdue protesters (as opposed to looters and rioters) and alleging, among other things, that “his message undermines the journalistic work of our members, puts our Black staff members in danger, promotes hate, and is likely to encourage further violence.” Numerous Times staffers, most of whom represented the news side of the Times, scurried to Twitter to protest the op-ed’s publication. They had a coordinated message: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” After initially defending the publication, Bennet caved, and on June 5, the Times appended a lengthy “Editor’s Note” above the essay decrying the text below. Its stated justifications, as Will Saletan pointed out at length, were nothing more than an obvious pretext concocted post hoc to renounce the piece. Both Cotton’s argument and the editing process underwent the normal procedures and met the standards for the Times. What’s more, a follow-up story in the Times published on June 7 covering Bennet’s resignation repeated the lie that Cotton had “call[ed] for military force against protesters in American cities.”
The actions of Times staff who attacked the publication of the article come straight out of the campus activist playbook. It wasn’t enough to say that the piece should not have been published. It escalated the charge to say publication threatened their personal safety, which would be laughable if it were not so dangerous. Such emotional messaging skips the need to formulate an argument, marshal evidence, or persuade an audience. Genuine discussion is ruled out of bounds simply because certain people feel it should be.
The messaging of safetyism was also a cynical workaround of the Times’s internal policies regarding public statements and the use of social media. According to the Times’s media columnist, Ben Smith, “The NewsGuild of New York later advised staff members that that formulation was legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety. ‘It wasn’t just an opinion, it felt violent — it was a call to action that could hurt people,’ one union activist said of Mr. Cotton’s column.” At colleges and universities, the offended and aggrieved have learned to use Title IX and other such safety-focused policies as a bureaucratic cudgel to silence and punish opposing views with little to no consequence. That such a tactic can also work at legacy institutions such as the Times and the Atlantic, where a similar pretext was used to get conservative writer Kevin Williamson fired in 2018, should give us all pause.
The death knell for the Times’s institutional credibility came after Bennet’s resignation. Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, reportedly told news staffers that “anyone who sees any piece of opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos — you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.” As the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams wrote recently, “The New York Times’s effort to placate its increasingly illiberal workforce looks more like a failing hostage negotiation.”
In essence, the Times has rewarded the outspoken illiberalism of its most intellectually fragile staff, a group, according to the first-person quotes in Smith’s piece, that no longer sees its role as bothering with objectivity. Smith writes: “But the shift in mainstream American media — driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives — now feels irreversible.”
As his column makes clear, this new journalism is being practiced by young staff members in their 20s and 30s who were reared on social media and are focused on narrative self-expression. As Yglesias pointed out, it is the excesses of illiberalism learned at woke “elite” colleges and universities that are being imported into these institutions. Soon, the generational divide between the “old-school” liberal management and the new-school woke activist-journalists will disappear entirely, as the elder cohort among them will take its place in roles in middle and upper management. There, they will be all the more attuned and receptive to the values and agendas of younger colleagues, until the old way has been altered irreversibly.
One of the major lessons from the power struggles within higher education institutions of the past few years has been the culpability of the administrative and leadership class. Rather than do the difficult, steady work of shaping undergraduates for intellectual exploration or civic virtue, college and university presidents and administrators repeatedly cave to the demands of the petulant children in their care. Higher education’s shift from the pursuit of truth and inculcation of knowledge toward a credential-administering service aimed at consumer satisfaction has accelerated this process. Fearing the ire of the campus mob, or worse, that prospective students might not view their school as “supportive” and thus not pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend, feckless administrators abandon their duties and join the insurgents. The result is a less emotionally disciplined, less intellectually humble undergraduate population exercising far more influence over campus ideology and decision-making.
Beyond whatever piddling knowledge students manage to take with them after graduation is the consistent, practical lesson that if they push hard enough, the powers that be will fold. As the New York Times shows, it’s not just campus mandarins who bow to Young Turks in their midst. Rather than lead and mold, those in charge will go along, if only to avoid getting eaten first.
The challenge remains. If we are going to defend our founding virtues of republican civility, the free exchange of ideas, and liberal tolerance; if we are to avoid falling off the precipice, our institutions must start to fight back against those who would destroy them.
J. Grant Addison is the deputy editor for the Washington Examiner Magazine.
