To restore free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas to censorious college campuses, the nation’s liberal thought leaders will have to admit we have a problem on our hands. Events of this week presented some encouraging signs that they’re getting closer. While restless campuses erupted in sadly predictable episodes of students demanding administrators acquiesce to their demands, institutions of the center-left establishment showed a growing willingness to confront the demons now endemic to the bright college years.
For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union—not always exactly an equal opportunity watchdog—condemned the University of California’s submission to a “heckler’s veto” at Berkeley, where Ann Coulter’s on-again-off-again speaking engagement sparked viral debate across the political spectrum. (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren also spoke out against the effort to shut down Coulter.) Shouting down a politically unpopular speaker is an established trend that’s reached new heights recent months. It’s a symptom of “carving out” freedom of expression from the first amendment, the result of a failure to teach civics and compounded by the college-aged generation’s early exposure to social media. Or so argues Jeffrey Herbst, the president of the reliably left-leaning Newseum, whose timely white paper “Addressing the Real Crisis of Free Expression on Campus” published this week:
While Berkeley cowered from controversy, lest it burn again, undergrads due south at Pomona College decided the presence of visiting professor Alice Goffman, a sociologist whose book On the Run inspired criticism of her anachronistic research methods and charges of racism, was the last straw. Speakers swan in and out under siege, but faculty are forever (or at least a couple of years, the undergraduate definition of forever). Students, being sensitive and enlightened beyond any earlier generation, want a voice in hiring from now on. Nothing illustrates Herbst’s appraisal of what’s caused the “crisis of free expression on campus” quite so well as these students’ demand to micromanage faculty selection.
While such dramatic events aren’t culturally representative of the more than 4,000 colleges across the country, Herbst told me, they do illustrate his thesis: Students arrive on campuses already skeptical of the foundational value of free speech, and they come already accustomed to curating all the information they receive. He says in the paper:
He joins the call for a renewed focus on Western civics in secondary schooling and blames modern technology for dulling the adolescent mind and thwarting its capacity to entertain dissenting views. He sounds like a conservative to me, but says the politicization of free speech is a big part of the problem. “If you look back at the Civil Rights movement, they were adamant that all five freedoms which they did use were critical to the pursuit of equality in this country,” he told me, though in subsequent generations free speech has become a conservative cause. In today’s social currency, picking apart micro-aggressions (unintended slights and slurs) replaced the hard-fought case for freedom from macro ones (racial segregation). “Minorities and people feeling alienated, they’ve become more skeptical about free speech, and I think that’s a real issue,” he said, referring to a campus climate in which standing up for disenfranchised groups requires disenfranchising those others that are shallowly reputed to offend progressive mores. Free speech is, consequently, “perceived as a conservative issue.”
The paper published this week is the culmination of a project that began with 50 “student leaders,” undergraduate go-getters who applied to travel to the Newseum to discuss the issue of speech on campus. Herbst, who was president of Colgate University from 2010 to 2015 and previously the provost of Miami University, thought he knew what he would hear.
Instead, “What struck me and my colleagues was they weren’t talking about the administrators at all. They weren’t talking about trigger warnings at all. They weren’t talking about graduation speakers,” he told me. Rather, “their big concern was what students were saying or not saying to each other—and that kind of set me off on this path of saying maybe we’re focusing on the wrong thing.” We’re focusing on ourselves, our generation, in other words, “when the real issue is with the students.”
“Although professors are disproportionately liberal and administrators can certainly be criticized,” laying the blame on spineless adults or Alinsky-influenced professors “assumes that students are mere vessels without ideas of their own,” Herbst wrote. In reality, “young adults come to campus with some fairly well-developed views that explain much of what subsequently occurs as they confront challenging speech.”
It shouldn’t surprise the middle-aged progressives, though, who strain to indulge today’s campus activists but find their demands for social justice always insatiable. And it should also makes sense, I’ll venture, to those of us who qualify for “millennial” status but fall toward the older end of the age bracket. Those who predate the era of shouting down speakers and seeking safe spaces, and just by a couple years even, didn’t quite come of age clutching smartphones. Intensely tribal groupthink and reflexive accusations of racism help reduce the unmanageable greatness of Western history into something small, ugly, and outgrow-able—like a weird old friend of the family, fit to be “unfriended,” as Herbst might put it.
Of course, the authority of feelings over facts, or feelings over foundational freedoms, ought also be traced to the ascendent teaching of an apologetic social history for which the credit (blame) falls to fully grown and politically motivated—”disproportionately liberal,” as Herbst put it—academics and administrators. Kids come to campuses seeing the world through a lens they merely inherited. Adults aren’t off the hook—admitting the problem is, after all, only the first step.
