In last week’s issue, Mark Hemingway highlighted the efforts of a few brave college administrators who are attempting to push back against the demands of petulant college student protests that roiled campuses last year. In particular, the University of Chicago and Purdue—where the university president is former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels—have taken concrete steps to make sure their campuses continue to foster an environment of free speech and free inquiry.
The University of Chicago attracted national attention when it sent a letter from the dean of students to incoming freshmen last month saying, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces.’ ”
Predictably, at Chicago there is now pushback to the pushback. More than 160 faculty members have signed a new letter objecting to the school’s stated opposition to trigger warnings and safe spaces.
The letter is as turgid and, at times, nonsensical as you might expect from academic consensus. “As teachers, we understand ourselves to be engaged in a collaborative experiment in the classroom,” they write. “For that to work, mutual respect is indeed indispensable—all the more so since the practice of academic freedom can sometimes be contentious, difficult, perhaps even painful.” While that’s not disagreeable, even commendable, the fact is that collaboration and mutual respect often stand in opposition to explicitly stated goals of trigger warnings and safe spaces.
Of course, the signers of the letter have made it clear they “may also disagree as to whether free speech is ever legitimately interrupted by concrete pressures of the political.”
That’s all well and good, but what happens when concrete political pressure is directed at making some ideas impossible to express? It is undeniable that student protests across the country have been deliberately designed to shut people up. Hemingway noted that last February at the University of Chicago, student protesters shouted down a Democratic politician speaking on campus and chased her out of the room where she was speaking. The fact is that, on some level, these professors are endorsing this troubling new strain of Maoism. The letter concludes this way:
The right to speak up and to make demands is at the very heart of academic freedom and freedom of expression generally. We deplore any atmosphere of harassment and threat. For just that reason, we encourage the Class of 2020 to speak up loudly and fearlessly.
Setting aside the absurd implication that the Chicago administrator’s letter opposing safe spaces is somehow threatening, how do these disapproving University of Chicago faculty square this with their previous claims that higher education is premised on “collaborative experiment” and “mutual respect”? Or do they ultimately think it’s acceptable for a small and obnoxious student bloc to “make demands”—even when those demands include things such as running speakers off campus?
In fact, this contradiction has some relevant echoes to what happened at a recent meeting Mitch Daniels had with student protesters at Purdue. “I said to them, ‘You know, in a few years, you’ll be leaders of various organizations and businesses,” he told The Weekly Standard, “and I promise you, you’ll respond a lot better to suggestions, recommendations, and proposals than demands.’ ”
That’s good advice. But if Chicago students are willing to shut up a Democratic politician on their campus, we can only imagine the angry paroxysms if a former Republican governor from another campus showed up and told them something they desperately need to hear.
