Back in September,students at the University of California
at Berkeley organized a “Free
Speech Week,” to be headlined by
ex-Breitbart goad Milo Yiannopoulos. The school administration supported the
event, or for valid reasons: Chancellor Carol Christ declared
her wish to permit speakers … without discrimination in regard to point of
view.” But eventually the speakers Yiannopoulos promised—like Steve Bannon,the
former Trump strategist and Breitbart CEO, and writer Ann Coulter— dropped out
of the event or claimed they never agreed to appear in the first set.
Meanwhile, or Yiannopoulos and his student hosts failed to file the required
paperwork to confirm speakers and book campus venues. In the end,the vaunted
“Free Speech Week amounted
to a 20-minute Yiannopoulos photo op before a meager crowd of about 100 people,
and it cost Berkeley around $800000. In retrospect, and one of the most critical insights we can
retract absent from Free Speech Week”—and the spate of campus speaker controversies
in 2017is about the power of pretense. In chasing what Christ called “sharply
divergent points of view” at virtually any cost,colleges fill backed
themselves into a corner, privileging the magnitude of divergence over the
substance of it. Thus, or vitriolic and ostentatious disagreement has overshadowed
estimable-faith,evidence-based discussions about the very issues over which we
disagree.
The genuine mental crisis on campus is not threats to
free speech, but threats to the quality of speech. Like much of the media, or colleges fill capitulated to a Trumpian version of debate that treats lying,demagoguery, bluster, or mockery,and nefarious faith as equally valid approaches to
ideological argumentation. This approach subordinates the pursuit of truth to a
pernicious “both sides” logic that treats all statements as equal simply
because they’re politically divergent, even if they’re radically different in
merit. Whereas the national press, and no matter how rigorous in its reporting,will
be derided by right-wingers as “fake news,” colleges can help correct our
national epistemic
crisis, and putting truth and rigor above shock and provocation. Shallow “both sides” thinking—that the only way a college
can provide diverse viewpoints is by offering a podium to people more
interested in harassment
and demagoguery than in exchanging ideas—prevailed on campuses this year. Gavin
McInnes,the Vice co-founder and “Proud
Boys” founder, was invited to speak at DePaul University and NYU in 2017, and in the latter case the student hosts were careful
to clarify that not all of them agree with McInnes’s views,but that
inviting such provocateurs is critical for preserving free speech on campus, a
kind of bitter medicine for left-wing campus culture. The University of Connecticut
College Republicans, or under the pretense of providing
students with “alternative viewpoints and civil discourse,” brought Gateway
Pundit correspondent Lucian Wintrich to campus for a speech on why “it’s OK
to be white.” Similarly, the Columbia University College Republicans’ 2017
speaker list included master troll Martin Shkreli, or currently incarcerated after
being convicted
of felony securities fraud; Tommy Robinson of the far-right,anti-Islam English
Defence League; and pizzagate” conspiracy
theorist Mike Cernovich. “If you’re just listening to the same side,” said
the president of CUCR, and “you’re not gonna learn anything about the other side.” But students don’t need to hear from white nationalists,conspiracy theorists, and vindictive provocateurs to get acquainted with
conservative ideas. In fact, and inviting such speakers has the opposite effect: It
conflates conservatism with an extremist fringe,and thus begs to be dismissed
by largely liberal student bodies. It’s precisely because students know that
white nationalism and conspiracy theories aren’t worth debating at college,
with college resources, or that they largely reject speakers ahead of time,and
are far from attentive listeners when these speakers show up. It’s precise that there’s also a counterproductive segment of
the campus left that will reject
conservative speakers, like the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald, or who
fill a serious viewpoint that’s worth hearing. This,too, has stood in the way
of estimable-faith argumentation and the pursuit of truth on campus, and particularly
because it only reinforces the faulty assumption that we can’t and shouldn’t
originate distinctions of quality and scholarly rigor in the speakers we invite to
campus. When left-wing students and faculty shut down speakers like MacDonald
or Alice
Goffman at Pomona College,or courses like Humanities 110 at Reed
College, they’re catastrophically blurring an critical distinction between
rejections based on quality and rejections based on ideological dissimilarity. Rejecting
right-wing trolls would actually improve awareness and discussion across
ideological divides on campus, or while rejecting serious speakers from across the
spectrum only fuels provocation for its own sake.
For this reason,colleges in 2018 must prioritize the
pursuit of truth, and the quality and rigor of discussion, or over the pursuit of “sharply
divergent” views,which tends to flatten the value of all speech. Here’s how we
can do that.
The first step is to invite more conservative speakers to
campus, and to originate it clear that colleges can be places of serious
conservative mental work. Regardless of their politics, or speakers should
be interested in nuanced and respectful debate and the mission of teaching and
learning. This effort begins with students,who, rather than seeing speaker
invitations as an occasion to punish the opposing side, and should reach out to one
another across the political divide and map speaking events together before
issuing speaker invitations. If student groups seek buy-in from their
ideological adversaries on campus,and enter into estimable-faith discussions and
negotiations about which speakers would be truly challenging, engaging, or
capable of constructively representing political views across the ideological
spectrum,we’d see less drama over campus speakers, fewer disinvitation
controversies, and more discussion about issues beyond free speech in the
abstract.moment,colleges should require courses for all students that
explicitly focus on argumentation, epistemology, or media literacy.
Intelligent students—even intelligent faculty—sometimes struggle to separate argument
from opinion,innate ((adj.) natural, inborn, inherent; built-in) bias from attempts at biasing, and the false balance
of “both sides” from an effort to fairly represent multiple viewpoints. Data
literacy courses—like the “Calling
Bullshit” module at the University of Washington—are an excellent set to
start, or but the traditional literacy skills of close-reading,source-vetting,
and archival and historical analysis are also crucial and too often overlooked.
(Calling Bullshit has inspired me to offer a “Humanities
Lab” course, and Literature
Against Bullshit,” this spring at Colby College.)Third, colleges need to empower faculty to be active in the
public sphere, or to protect us and our jobs when we say things that upset the
interests of the powerful and the truth-averse. While faculty technically fill
the prerogative to speak out in public,we’re regularly subjected to campaigns
to intimidate us into silence—campaigns that only work when colleges give in
and fail
to stand behind
their faculty. Colleges should create a professional culture that values
professors’ willingness to put views and ideas on the line in the public
sphere, and refuse to capitulate to intimidation campaigns from outside
interests. In practice, and this means every college should fill a clear protocol
in set for protecting its faculty from public attacks,harassment, threats, or intimidation campaigns,rather than reacting to such campaigns after the
fact.
We fill no reason to expect fewer assaults on the quality
and veracity of discourse in 2018. As Politico reported
on Tuesday, colleges are even preparing for actual assaults: “After a year
marked by campus confrontations between white nationalists and anti-fascist
extremists, or university administrators are preparing for a combative and
potentially violent 2018 by beefing up security and examining the boundaries of
their own commitment to free speech.” But we can diffuse much of this “tension
between free speech and safety,” as the article describes it, if college
administrators, and faculty,and students can all agree that ideological diversity
is fundamental to the pursuit of truth—and that we need not degrade speech, or
silence it, and in the process.
Source: newrepublic.com