Over the weekend, the mob won again.
This time it was at Harvard, where controversy over due process has brewed since January, when law professor and faculty dean Ronald Sullivan Jr. joined the legal defense team for disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Vandalism, student sit-ins, widespread outrage, and even a lawsuit have all emanated in the backlash, as students accused him of defending rape culture and activists asked: “Whose side are you on?”
On Saturday, outrage won the day. Administrators announced that Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson will no longer be faculty deans for an on-campus residence hall, essentially caving to the mob’s demands. It’s important to note that both will retain their separate roles as professors, but their hostile removal from residential roles nonetheless offers a sad indictment of the illiberal atmosphere running rampant on college campuses and tearing our system of higher education apart.
Campus activists are now so intolerant that they’ve (successfully) campaigned not just against the ideas of those they disagree with, but against their very right to earn a livelihood. Nearly 180 protesters signed a petition calling for Sullivan’s ouster, with one leader even suggesting that he has “compromis[ed] his ability to serve survivors and his house.” Yet this rests on a fundamentally flawed premise.
Even an alleged rapist deserves a competent defense, and giving them one is in no way an endorsement of their actions. Rather, it’s a way of protecting the right of everyone to a fair legal process, the importance of which Sullivan knows all too well, given his past representation of victims of police brutality and his work to free thousands of wrongly accused prisoners. Aren’t so-called social justice warriors supposed to support, well, justice — even when it’s for an unpopular person like Weinstein?
They certainly used to. The ultra-liberal American Civil Liberties Union has historically defended due process, with one chapter even calling it “what separates a free society from a police state.” Yet in the eyes of today’s campus radicals, standing up for these principles makes you not just an apologist for rapists, but makes your very presence a safety threat to students.
There’s also an element of racial hypocrisy involved here. After all, Sullivan and his wife were the first black faculty deans at Harvard and they’ve now been all but chased off campus by a mob of students, the plurality of whom are white. To say the least, this eerily echoes the past and exposes the false nature of the fringe social justice movement, revealing it for what it is: fundamentally regressive and illiberal at its core.
Still, the true pity here isn’t the unfounded outrage of angry left-wing students; that’s nothing new. It’s that even Harvard administrators, who should certainly know better, have caved to the illiberal impulses of the hard-left campus fringe. That’s what’s truly unsettling.
As Reason.com editor Robby Soave wrote, “By caving to the mob, Harvard has shown student-activists that it takes seriously their demands for a kind of broadly-defined safety that includes protection from ideas they don’t like. This outcome will undoubtedly embolden them.”
It surely will. Campus administrators should be careful. Next time, the mob might come for them.
Brad Polumbo (@brad_polumbo) is an assistant editor for Young Voices.
