There is truth to the cliché that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. But the stakes might not be as low as we think. Recent polling data from the Brookings Institution suggest that a near-majority of college students don’t believe hate speech is protected by the First Amendment (it is). Sixty-two percent of students who identify themselves as left-leaning agree that silencing another person’s speech through protest is acceptable. And one in five college students believes it is acceptable to use violence to stop speech with which they disagree.
The growing power of these views on the campus left has many principled liberals (or classical liberals, as they often call themselves) worried. On June 15, Heterodox Academy (HxA), an organization founded in 2015 by academics to advance “viewpoint diversity” and tolerance on college campuses, met in New York City for its inaugural Open Mind Conference.
Jonathan Haidt, one of the founders of HxA and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, opened the gathering by parsing the challenges to liberal education posed by what he calls viewpoint orthodoxy. He identified and rebuked “call-out culture,” wherein students gain prestige or status by trying to appear more radical than their peers. “You say it’s white supremacy, I’ll raise you fascism [or] Nazism,” Haidt says, describing the phenomenon. In this climate of woke one-upmanship, many students end up self-censoring, fearful of reprisals in the form of online harassment or ostracism by their peers. This call-out culture can only thrive in an environment of intellectual homogeneity, Haidt says, where orthodoxy is more powerful than inquiry.
Heterodox Academy wants to change that. The organization boasts over 1,800 members committed to viewpoint diversity. HxA’s statement of principles includes a vow to “support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university, my department, and my classroom.” Some of the organization’s members have done so at considerable professional and personal cost.
Allison Stanger, a political scientist at Middlebury College and outspoken liberal, had to leave Middlebury during the spring semester of 2017 to recover from a concussion she suffered at the hands of an angry student mob that was trying to prevent her from interviewing the scholar Charles Murray. Another panelist at the conference, Alice Dreger, a historian and bioethicist, resigned from the faculty of Northwestern University in 2015 after her dean censored her work. Professor Heather Heying, a biologist, was effectively run off campus and out of her job at Evergreen State after her husband, also a professor, ran afoul of activist students. She now calls herself a “professor-in-exile.”
All three of these academics are stalwart progressives, but because they attempted to defend free speech and open inquiry, they ended up on the wrong side of the campus left. During a conference panel discussion, Heying points out that it’s not solely students who are running amok. In fact, the protests targeting her and her husband “weren’t led by the protesters. [They were] initiated by, basically, a cabal of faculty and staff behind the scenes,” she says.
HxA is fighting back with an impressive and prolific group of scholars. In his new book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind (out in September), Haidt argues that despite avowedly good intentions, campus faculty have weakened the emotional and intellectual capabilities of their students. Haidt and Lukianoff describe three “Great Untruths” that have spread on campus in recent years: the “Untruth of Fragility (What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker),” the “Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (Always trust your feelings),” and the “Untruth of Us Versus Them (Life is a battle between good people and evil people).” They urge university administrators, faculty, and students to reaffirm their commitment to free speech and free inquiry on campus.
Nadine Strossen, former ACLU president and HxA booster, echoes this theme, describing to conference-goers how she was “no-platformed” at American University after being invited to speak about Title IX. In her new book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship, she eviscerates the misguided view that hate speech (however offensive) is not protected by the First Amendment. And Zachary Wood, a recent graduate of Williams College and author of the new book Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America, received an award for his efforts as president of the campus group Uncomfortable Learning, which brings controversial speakers to campus for lectures. Wood tells me that he wished his campus administration and college president had been more supportive of the viewpoint diversity he brought to campus.
HxA drew a lively audience of conservatives and liberals to New York, but the focus of many of the panels also highlighted one of the organization’s biggest challenges: moving beyond discussions of the form campus debates should take and into the more vexed question of the substance of the ideas being debated. Most of the panelists at the conference agreed that people invited to campuses to speak shouldn’t be disinvited as the result of student pressure and that students shouldn’t be allowed to stifle speech by shouting each other down in public settings or in the classroom. Most also agreed that to be offended or uncomfortable in the classroom is part of what it means to be educated.
But the greater challenge is assessing the quality of speech on campus.
“Why are we spending university money on non-intellectuals?” Alice Dreger asks, no doubt thinking of the clownish radicalism of publicity-seekers such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Should such views be added to the mix simply for the sake of diversity or should additional quality standards apply, even among those who rightly disdain orthodoxy? If so, who is qualified to set those standards and how can campuses be sure they are applied fairly?
“If we’re going to pursue justice, we have to care about truth,” Dreger says. How does the ideal heterodox campus deal with issues such as climate science, which draws both vehement skeptics and supporters to the debate, all of whom justify their arguments by citing scientific proof?
In other words: Heterodoxy is all well and good, but who decides the limits of heterodoxy on campus, and which standards apply?
For the moment, it’s enough of an achievement that HxA has succeeded in creating a movement to restore civility to academic disputes. As the lively debates among panelists and audience members in New York attest, disagreement doesn’t have to be vicious or ideologically driven; it can be passionate without becoming violent.
