Host a table for Turning Point USA on your college campus—complete with signs and fliers from the well-funded 501(c)3’s Activism Kit—and you’re guaranteed to turn some heads. The progressive, or simply anti-Trump, professors whose disapproval you provoke will wind up with their names and headshots on the Professor Watchlist; if it’s a slow week at the network, you may find yourself making your case on Fox News.
But when your segment wraps, and you go back to class, will speech be any freer at your school?
Organizations like Turning Point and the online publication Campus Reform—an arm of the Leadership Institute—have perfected the art of countering an ideologically liberal campus with the perpetual threat of an embarrassing media blitz or an ever-ready Twitter mob. But these tactics, honed in the exceptionally protest-prone Trump era, worry stalwart defenders of free expression.
Free speech advocates on college campuses were, until recently, accustomed to sticking up for students and professors who’d run afoul of a doctrinaire administration’s more or less well-meaning overcorrections. The new wave of policing campus conservatism is up to something else. And veteran stewards of campus free speech have started to take note.
The Charles Koch Foundation recently denounced TPUSA and its watch list. They’d earlier quit funding Campus Reform, which employs similar tactics. The Koch Foundation’s higher education advisers proposed students should read widely instead, and eschew censorious measures across the board. The idea here is not to indoctrinate—nor, as in TPUSA’s high school summit, to blatantly and preemptively reverse indoctrinate—but to educate.
Condemning the listmakers also comes easily to actual educators. “Publishing lists of names of professors or students potentially for the purpose of castigating them is generally not a good idea,” said the University of Chicago’s Geoffrey Stone, a First Amendment lawyer, legal scholar, and professor who’s long defended the intellectual freedom for which the University of Chicago is known. “It’s meant to be an effort to intimidate and to invite others to engage in intimidation.”
“On the other hand, if students feel there are certain professors who are advocates of certain views a student group finds offensive or irresponsible,” Stone said, “[There’s] nothing wrong with that.” He briefly entertained a comparison to students’ filing and following course evaluations, then adding that, “Everybody knows that’s not what this is about.” TPUSA’s professor watchlist provokes something different from the passive action (not taking someone’s class) that a critical eval would cause. “It’s like putting up lists of people you accuse of being Communists,” Stone said, alluding to an earlier chapter in his university’s history: Stone’s 2012 “Statement on principles of free inquiry,” aka the Stone Statement, crystallized the school’s long-held commitment before campus speech reached the level of a widely perceived “crisis” three years ago.
At Princeton, every student received a copy of constitutional law professor Keith Whittington’s new book Speak Freely this summer. In it, Whittington treats as equal ills the “shouting down” of undesirable ideas and the compilation of lists like TPUSA’s. “They come from different places, but they are both out there and both causing problems on campuses,” Whittington told TWS in a recent interview. “I hope some headway can be made with conservative groups by pointing out the hypocrisy of behaving similarly,” he added. “But I’m not sure they’re going to be persuaded.” The tactics of the campus right aren’t so problematic as their sometimes violent ends, he clarified. “The watchlist, on its own, is fair game in that we ought to be capable of engaging with criticism. They effectively end up encouraging internet mobs in ways that can be frightening and extremely damaging.” Threats they inflame—often from off-campus trolls—imperil to the honest internal debates and discussions that ought to be everyone’s aim.
Debates over multiculturalism and political correctness had seemed to have died down somewhat since the 1990s, when, in the fall of 2015, a viral clip of Yale students shouting down their housemaster bolstered the thesis of psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff’s late summer Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Oversensitivity to heterodox ideas is detrimental to life on campuses, where it manifests as students’ requests for “safe spaces” and increasingly many reports of anxiety and depression. Now, in a book of the same name out September 4, Haidt and Lukianoff—neither of whom is a right-winger—find the conservative mobs policing liberals pose an equal or greater threat to intellectual freedom and students’ open-minded development. After their article came out, “That’s when I think we started to see an escalation on the right that was much more aggressive and sometimes really inappropriate,” Haidt said. College administrators were predominantly at fault for chilling free speech when Lukianoff started studying the landscape, he says. Conservative students, although by different means, also “call out” and “shout down” ideas that challenge them—instead of challenging them in turn and, thereby, growing wiser.
Countering perceived intolerance with intolerance is not a stable long-term strategy for strengthening institutions conservatives claim to care about. Or so says Sandor Farkas, who was until his recent graduation editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review, the alternative paper known for its impish and provocative coverage of campus culture wars from the early 1980s onward—also for having launched the careers of Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham.
His first job out of college entailed tallying liberal and conservative academics for Campus Reform. But if professors are too liberal, Farkas came to realize, it’s conservatives’ fault. “The best way to fix the problem is to go be one,” he said. He’s since left listmaking to pursue a PhD in history. Conservatives may seem to care more about campuses, but, Farkas said, “Caring about higher education translates to giving back to academia.”
