One step forward, two steps back—so goes the sorry arithmetic of the fight against political correctness on college campuses. The now-famous letter from John “Jay” Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, has provoked a response from more than 150 faculty members. They are not happy. You don’t want to see them when they’re not happy.
Ellison’s letter, addressed last month to incoming freshmen, made a bunch of noise because it seemed so contrary to the spirit of intolerance and intimidation that seems to be growing on campus, not just at UC but also at … well, just about every campus in the country. (Not you, Hillsdale!) Gently as possible, Ellison told the youngsters that they were about to enter an environment defined by a “commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” As a result, Ellison said, “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’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
The horror. While a heartening, if not overwhelming, number of academics expressed support for Ellison and his letter, a more typical reaction came from a writer for the magazine formerly admired as Slate: Ellison’s letter sent “a message that certain students … (i.e. white men) are more welcome than others.” The logic here seems to be that certain students (i.e. non-white men and women) are more intellectually fragile and less robust in their commitment to elementary freedoms than others (i.e. white men?). Aside from being plainly untrue, Slate’s point raises the obvious question: Then how the hell did such people get admitted to the University of Chicago?
And now the indefatigable Scott Jascik of Inside Higher Ed brings news of the faculty letter, addressed to the new class of 2020 and published yesterday in the campus paper. The faculty want the kids to understand that Ellison’s advisory was a pernicious attack, disguised with platitudes, on students’ perfectly appropriate sensitivity to ideas they don’t like or agree with. As for the safe spaces and trigger warnings that Ellison abhors—bring ’em on!
With unsurprising pedantry, the professors pretend to peer deep into American history—all the way back to the 1960s! “The history of ‘safe spaces,'” they inform their young scholars, “goes back to gay, civil rights, and feminist efforts of the mid–20th century to create places protected from quite real forces of violence and intimidation.” Leave aside the clumsy syntax; leave aside the dubious moral equivalence among the movements for gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights. The upshot of the faculty letter is that the University of Chicago is itself a place wracked with “quite real forces of violence and intimidation.” Only safe spaces and trigger warnings can keep them at bay.
The faculty letter weakens its case by failing to mention the events that inspired Ellison to write his letter. Those events have been duly recorded in the campus paper: in the last academic year, at least three invited speakers were shouted down and forced from the podium by protestors. Presented with a resolution affirming the campus’s condemnation of anyone who “obstructs or disrupts” free expression, the student government voted it down.
Admirable as it was, Ellison and his letter are unlikely to improve the spirit of free speech on campus without the support of faculty and students. The letter released yesterday, and the vote of the student government last May, suggest he doesn’t have it. The smart freshmen at U of C might want to wait a while before unpacking their bags.
