The silencing of Chanel Miller may not be political, but it’s no less a crisis of free speech than Stanford attempting to censor Dinesh D’Souza or the Heritage Foundation.
Miller, previously known to the world as “Emily Doe,” recently identified herself to the world as the woman who survived a horrific sexual assault by Stanford undergraduate Brock Turner. Miller’s victim impact statement had already been read by the world by tens of millions of people by the time she put her name to the story, but Stanford can’t fathom the notion of letting her tell the truth on their territory.
As a private university, Stanford is under no legal obligation to allow Miller to speak. But the school itself offered Miller a space in the garden where one of its own attacked her for her to provide a quote from her victim impact statement. Once they offered the initiative, Miller gave them an excerpt that they rejected for not being “uplifting and affirming” enough.
“We consulted with sexual violence counselors and others who work with Stanford students who are survivors of sexual assault,” provost Persis Drell wrote in an expert distillation of safe-space insanity. “They advised that rather than creating a healing environment for survivors, the quote could have a serious, negative impact for some survivors of sexual violence.”
From the outset, Stanford didn’t owe Miller any money publicizing her voice in the literal sense, though given the university’s checkered past with sexual assault, it would have been an ethical right to combat a laundry list of wrongs. But as a matter of principle, they initiated the offer, and the student body clearly supported it. To then retract her platform is, well, deplatforming, plain and simple.
Even more egregious is the quotation in question:
If Stanford had an iota of understanding or concern for sexual assault victims, they would understand that Miller’s chosen line absolutely is “uplifting and affirming.” It’s the former because it shares the reality of the isolation of trauma, and it’s the latter because it’s honest in the determination that even from her nadir, Miller survived and now, she’s thriving.
Liberty lovers in Stanford’s orbit ought to respond to the school deplatforming Miller with as much outrage as they would for any other political figure. To allow them to erase a narrative that’s shaped its student body for years is an act of censorship antithetical to the liberal values supposedly at Stanford’s core.
