Appropriately, on Halloween night, the University of California-Berkeley’s ghosts returned to its hallowed halls.
A well-meaning and earnest student senator, Isabella Chow, unleashed the specters of Berkeley’s past — the contest between conscience and conformity — by daring to dissent.
Her punishment has been swift: stripped of her student political party’s backing, denounced by the student newspaper, subjected to calls for resignation and recall, and expelled from nearly every student organization she led or helped to lead for the last two years.
Chow’s offense? She stood up in a public meeting and voiced reservations about condemning proposed Health and Human Services guidance defining a scientific, biological fact — sex (not gender) — as such. She rooted her concern in her Christian faith, after a lengthy preamble empathizing with transgender individuals and condemning anyone who would use her faith to bully, harass, harm, or discriminate against them.
Chow did not even oppose the final vote and submission of a letter from the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley’s student government. Instead, she abstained. But the backlash from the mob and its groupthink came immediately. That same night, she was booted from her political party, Student Action, and given notice that those affiliated with her pet project, promoting student publications, wanted nothing to do with her.
The Queer Alliance Resource Center, led by the student senator and letter’s author, has collected thousands of signatures to demand her resignation from the ASUC while others work to initiate a recall of the Christian junior.
A “meme” page, popular with Berkeley undergraduates, has been overwhelmed by ad hominem, personal attacks on Chow of the sort that one expects from Internet trolls. The irony is that supporters of a resolution purported to defend against bullying are its primary perpetrators. The trolls call her a “mental imbecile” and “horrible person.” Chow now needs to be escorted around campus after dark for her safety.
When Chow asked that the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, publish an op-ed she authored to explain her decision, it refused. But they’ve run numerous editorials condemning Chow, demanding her resignation, and saying her Christian beliefs “dehumanize” and call for “explicit erasure of [the transgender] community.”
The deep irony of the campus mobs devouring one of their own is not the what or the why, but the where. Berkeley was the home of the 1964 Free Speech Movement — where the unlikely bedfellows of leftists, anarchists, and even arch-conservative Barry Goldwater backers, came together to stand up for students’ right to protest, speak up, and actively participate in the campus discourse.
But those days are long gone. According to the 2018 Knight Foundation-Gallup Poll, 27 percent of college students believe that simply “expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups” should be restricted. When the speech is “slurs and other language,” almost seven out of 10 college students want that speech banned. Similarly, a 2017 Brookings Institution survey found that 53 percent of all college students want “offensive or biased” expression prohibited, with more than 61 percent of Democratic Party-aligned students agreeing.
Putting aside whether Chow’s remarks constituted offensive speech, let alone “hate speech,” campuses like UC-Berkeley have created a climate of coerced silence. They have enabled the intimidation of viewpoints that differ from the politically correct orthodoxy.
As George Orwell wrote in the original preface to his classic Animal Farm, our intellectuals “have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. … If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
That coward’s consent is as concerning as the heckler’s veto that shuts down conservative speakers and students in public. It erodes the tradition of free expression and dissent that this country and academia’s truth-seeking corridors were meant to protect and should hold sacrosanct.
Though mob action and violence on college campuses make headlines, the trend toward peer-to-peer brainwashing is even more nefarious. The “marketplace of ideas” begins to resemble a Venezuelan grocery store — no staples and only low quality, single-sourced rotten “options.”
Like state-run economies, physical or intellectual terror is enough to enforce compliance on many of today’s college campuses.
UC-Berkeley’s motto, Fiat Lux (“Let There Be Light”), has become a farce. The intellectual spark ignited by competing views is being extinguished.
If Chow’s case is the new normal, then academia’s once great beacons of truth-seeking inquiry have forever descended into darkness.
Mark Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and professor at the University of Michigan-Flint. Sean Kennedy, a Berkeley alumnus, is a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute.
