The New Campus Censors

8/30/2018 The New Campus Censors - The Chronicle of Higher Education
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
The New Campus Censors

Students are leading the assault on free speech — and faculty members and
administrators are enabling them
By David Bromwich NOVEMBER 05, 2017
 PREMIUM
T
hree or four years ago, in the early days
of campus protests against unwelcome
speakers, the censors sometimes said
in their own defense: "This isn’t about free
speech." The disclaimer served to lighten the
Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review
burden of apology for crowd behavior that most
Americans distrust. As the protesters saw it, the
speakers who got shouted down or who canceled engagements under a threat of violence
were opportunists of free speech. But this was apt to sound evasive. What honest
intellectual forum ever subjected speakers to a test of motives?
In any case, the argument that "it isn’t really about free speech" has largely been dropped
by the censors. They are now likelier to say that there never was freedom of speech,
anywhere, and that we shouldn’t expect to find it in colleges. The primary duty of
institutions of higher education is rather to create a space for qualified speech; and we
should be aware that a wrongly chosen or unqualified speaker may stir up controversy
and "stifle productive debate." That phrase comes from a campus letter circulated by a
group of Wellesley College professors after a speech by Laura Kipnis. By this logic,
productive debate is to be understood as quite a different thing from open debate. But
who, then, is qualified to speak on campus?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 1/11
"Productive" is a term from the business world, specifically the business of corporate
group facilitation. Corporate facilitators and human-resource managers were channeled
into the academy throughout the 1990s and 2000s — having practiced first at places as
foreign to the college milieu as NBC or Nabisco — and their language and mentality have
made deep inroads in higher education. Impassioned disagreement, according to
facilitation doctrine, causes tension in the workplace, which in turn causes anxiety,
which is bad for the bottom line. A fractious workplace may be riven by internal
complaints and suffer diminished profits.
Academic morale in previous generations was rooted in a "clash of ideas" that was
supposed to involve just such abrasions. Conflict was said to be essential to the purpose
of education, one of the things that distinguished a campus from a factory floor or a
public-relations office. That understanding, however, has been displaced to a significant
degree. A campus is regarded today as a friendly "community," a "home" away from
home, to cite words that appear with some regularity in college brochures. It is a place
ruled by a spirit of comity and cordiality. Any word or gesture that implies disharmony is
frowned on. The corporate-university presentation draws much of its incidental
effectiveness from appearing to go hand-in-hand with democracy. No one in the campus
community, it suggests, should ever be made to feel less comfortable than anyone else.
What's Fueling the Campus-Speech Wars?

David Bromwich argues that students are leading an assault on free speech, and that faculty members
and administrators are enabling them. Agree? Disagree? We wanted to know what Chronicle readers
think. Here is a selection of responses we received to a brief survey.
Comfort is a good thing, generally speaking, even if it tends to sedate rather than
promote thinking. But there are other reasons for the emphasis on making students feel
comfortable or at home or "safe." At a crossroads of disintegration and chaos in
American politics, when our national leaders offer little semblance of reasoned debate, it
may seem plausible to establish on campus a well-understood regime governing the
manners of speech — a regime that should be as free as possible. Of course, the freedom
to speak is not experienced equally by all persons, any more than the freedom to breathe
or the freedom to live. But the right to speak your mind may come as close as we can get
to a touchstone of equality. And in the past, the use of free speech by dissenters and
oppressed minorities has yielded their surest opening to other rights.
The puzzle, for administrators who think along roughly those lines, is how to reconcile
such freedom with the growing determination by universities to divide students into
racial, religious, and cultural groups and encourage students to feel especially at home in
those groups. There are visible and invisible constraints that come into play as soon as I
say to myself (and am asked to indicate to others) that I speak as a Jew, a gay man, a
Latina woman, or some other classified social specimen. I must take into account the
"subject-position" I occupy and that of the person I address. Universities have lately
promoted this form of group consciousness by subsidizing of what are euphemistically
called "affinity groups." But here, the forms of membership and self-respect fostered by
the university run up against an older American pattern of feeling. In ordinary
encounters with another person at an airport, a pub, or a town meeting, one speaks as a
person. Students are asked instead to care minutely for the way their speech will be taken
in view of their membership in a group.
Universities have traveled a different path from American society at large in other ways
besides the discipline of speech. The dominant politics in the academy since the
mid-’60s has been liberal, welfare-statist, dedicated to the expansion of the rights of
minorities and to remedies of social injustice. Those emphases are by no means alien to
the rest of the society, but America is also a country that elected Ronald Reagan for two
terms, George W. Bush for two terms, and now Donald Trump. Before the campus
troubles of 2015 at the University of Missouri, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Dartmouth,
Oberlin, and a dozen other colleges, one would have been justified in saying that political
discourse was freer on campus than anywhere else. "Disinvitation" appeared in retreat as
a tactic. Right-wing speakers might be skeptically received, but there was no thought of
silencing them, no pre-emptive threats or violent reaction. Left-wing speakers were
heard more frequently and were more indulgently received, but it was not forbidden to
ask them a sharp question without a prefatory assurance of solidarity.
The attitude toward free discussion on the campus left began to change with the mass
protests in Ferguson, Mo., and events in their aftermath: the church massacre in
Charleston, S.C., the videotaped killings of black men by police officers, and the
successive protests in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, New York City, Dallas, and elsewhere.
Students went out to demonstrate and brought back to campus the spirit of resistance.
With the election of Trump, the pace of the change accelerated. Any doubtful name or
monument, any verbal or gestural or symbolic entity associated with the injustices of
American society, past or present, came to be looked on with emotions of raw suspicion
and horror, as if it embodied a kind of sepsis or pollution.
Though students took the lead, activist professors, too, were part of the momentum — a
fact well documented in the shutdown at Middlebury College of an invited talk by
Charles Murray. The nativist messaging of President Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon,
and the broad adoption of the catch-all term "alt right," led by traceable steps to a
suddenly expanded application of the term "white supremacist." Once confined to the
Ku Klux Klan and their direct or doctrinal offspring, the epithet could now be leveled at a
conservative sociologist like Murray or at the undergraduate who questioned the tactics
of Black Lives Matter in a student-newspaper column at Wesleyan University.
Probably the largest influence in the move toward repression has been the rise of social
media as a facilitator of protest. In the era of the landline telephone, it could take days or
weeks to organize a march. Now Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest can work up
a sudden consensus and a plan of action that gets relayed to thousands between
breakfast and dinner. The virtual sight of the crowd in online hashtag swarms inevitably
adds to the impression that "we" represent a unanimous and inclusive community,
entirely composed of persons of decency and goodwill.
Yet the widely publicized incidents of racist violence, the rise of social media, and the
election of Trump, taken together, cannot explain the moral authority that has lately
been conferred on the reports of tears and traumas on campus. These quasi-medical
confessions are also an emanation of the therapeutic culture, which has tactical value in
the academic setting. An argument is refutable. A symptom is not.
A
t Claremont-McKenna College and Reed College, among others, student
protesters at public events have jeered to disrupt an appointed speaker, or they
have read in unison from prepared scripts and held up phones to record their
collective experience. On September 27, an ACLU lawyer at the College of William & Mary
had her talk disrupted and finally shut down by students who credited the rumor that the
ACLU, because it had defended the constitutional right of assembly of far-right
demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., was a white-supremacist organization.
Against the mob politics they associate with Trump, the students at those places had
organized to act as a mob. Administrators have been reluctant to enforce rules of
conduct. And yet, as recently as a decade ago, such disruptions would have been
considered an infraction on a par with vandalism and plagiarism. Given the educational
aim of a university, participation in a vigilante attack on an unwelcome speaker is the
worst of all these offenses. The plagiarist betrays his inability to perform intellectual
work; the vandal shows a criminal contempt for property. The person who joins a crowd
in the deployment of coercive force declares his membership in a mob. To cede one’s will
to a mob is among the most indelible human experiences, and among the most hostile to
the spirit of education. A mob removes all responsibility from the thinking self. It lets me
say: "I did it because we did it."
In defense of the coercive protests, it has been pleaded that the participants have noble
intentions. But all we know for sure is that people who have bossed other people against
their will have had a taste of power; and if they are like most human beings, their first
success will give them an appetite for future attempts. There must be pleasure of some
sort in the denial of rights to an opponent, just as there is in other exercises of power. The
wish to repeat the experience carries a germ of tyranny. What, then, can administrators
be thinking when they pander to this mood by telling the students who have shown a
disposition to bully that an irreproachable idealism shines through all their actions? The
students are young — many as young as 18. This wheedling reassurance can only confirm
a delusive self-image. Even as they rely on force instead of persuasion, they think of
themselves as the vanguard of true progress, bearers of an achieved innocence, well
equipped to reform a corrupt society and to judge its guilty past.
The pressure for campus censorship has much to do with the confidence of students that
they will not be held to account. They are in the position of customers, and they have
rightly guessed that educational institutions act on the assumption that the customer is
always right. Administrators know how bad it looks when a mob shouts down a speaker,
and if they are helpless in the face of serious infractions, the reason is that they respect
the customer more than the customer respects them. An institution that conceives of
education as its central purpose — education, and not the experience of a homelike
community where learning is one of the things on offer — might clarify the issue with a
simple explanation: "Allowing the expression of opinions you disagree with is part of
education. If you stop someone from speaking, we will take it to mean that you aren’t
ready for college, and we’ll send you away to cool off for a year, at which point we will re-
evaluate your maturity." As for the right-wing students who stir the pot by inviting a
showman-provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos: "You are supposed to be thinking
persons. Is that really the best you can do?"
College administrators — with rare exceptions, such as Carol Christ, the new chancellor
of the University of California at Berkeley — are reluctant to back the principle of free
speech without a supplementary clause that gives equal weight to feelings of community.
They often go further and signify, to those who cite altruistic motives for breaking
campus rules, that deep down they sympathize with the rule-breakers. And,
sentimentally speaking, they do. At elite colleges, anyway, administrators are apt to share
the general views of activist students; elsewhere, they may hope to inculcate such views.
So when students testify to an emotional bruise as if it were a physical injury, or
complain that they find it "hard to focus" and suffer "panic attacks" from the visits of
obnoxious speakers, it seems the path of least resistance to agree. John Stuart Mill’s
warning about the posture of orthodoxy toward alien ideas has somehow been forgotten:
"Every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer,
appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate
opponent."
T
he practice of free speech has been through hard times before. The prudent
strategy for college authorities, it could be argued, is just to ride out the storm.
Take one event at a time; act with expedience and a show of concern; do not
invoke principles that may seem abstract and vaguely disagreeable.
The loss incurred by such a prudent policy can be measured in the arts and habits the
students of this generation may fail to acquire. A 19th-century schoolmaster, William
Cory, once made a list of such arts and habits: "the habit of attention," "the art of
expression," "the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts," "the habit of
submitting to censure and refutation," "the art of indicating assent or dissent in
graduated terms." We have begun to teach, instead, the habit of minimal attention; the
art of expressing oneself in slogans; the art of excluding thoughts that don’t resemble our
own; the habit of issuing censure in place of refutation; the art of indicating assent by
"likes" and dissent by slander and accusation.
Students, to say it again, have been the leading actors in the pressure for campus
censorship, but they take some of their cues from activist scholars; and the censorship of
opposing views is an always dangerous professional deformation in every walk of
scholarship. An egregious recent example is the coerced withdrawal of an unwelcome
article, "The Case for Colonialism," by Bruce Gilley, published in the journal Third World
Quarterly. When the article appeared, two petitions were rapidly circulated online, one
demanding its withdrawal and an apology, the second also demanding retraction and
apology but adding a demand that the journal remove anyone who approved the article
for publication.
The facts here turned out to be as spurious as the rumor at William & Mary that the ACLU
was racist. The accusers had initially charged that the article was accepted by editorial
circumvention of the normal process of approval. The publisher, Taylor & Francis,
checked and found that the normal vetting procedure of approval by scholar-referees
had, in fact, been followed. Nevertheless, 15 of the 34 members of the editorial board
resigned in protest, the two petitions together collected more than 17,000 signatures, and
eventually the article was withdrawn, owing to "serious and credible threats of personal
violence."
The crisis of free speech thus extends to academic publishing as well as the toleration of
speakers on campus. It may also cross the boundary separating publication and teaching.
When two law professors, Larry Alexander and Amy Wax, published in The Philadelphia
Inquirer an op-ed in praise of the discipline of bourgeois manners and morals — which
contained a provocative paragraph beginning, "All cultures are not equal" — 33 of Wax’s
colleagues signed a statement formally dissociating themselves from her views, and the
students at their respective law schools, the University of San Diego and the University of
Pennsylvania, demanded that a restriction be placed on the range of courses Wax and
Alexander are permitted to teach.
Articulate dissent from the censorship agenda has been left to scholars with the courage
not to live a quiet life. Noam Chomsky, a member of the editorial board of Third World
Quarterly, took a principled stand against the push for withdrawal of the Gilley article,
saying that refutation and not retraction serves the cause of truth in open debate. A
curious logic, however, has evolved to extenuate the clamor for retractions and
restrictions. One of Gilley’s accusers, Farhana Sultana, an associate professor of
geography at Syracuse University, explained the reasoning as follows: "The petition was
about upholding rigorous academic scholarly standards, integrity, and ethics by the
journal; it had nothing to do with curtailing the author’s right to free speech."
Yet Professor Sultana had solicited signatures for a petition whose text ran in part:
We do not call for the curtailing of the writer’s freedom of speech. We

instead hold ourselves and our colleagues in academia to higher standards
than this. ... We thereby call on the editorial team to retract the article and
also to apologize for further brutalizing those who have suffered under
colonialism [italics added].
Doublethink is the technique, explained by Orwell in 1984, by which one can hold in
mind simultaneously two propositions, "A" and "Not-A," and stop the mind from
noticing the contradiction. The italicized sentences above illustrate the propositions "A"
and "Not-A" in the cause of intellectual cleansing.
The bursts of slander that mark a controversy like this might be described as a remote but
predictable consequence of the invention of social media. The transition from
groundless rumor to conventional wisdom can happen now in a matter of days. Given a
lively intellectual setting, questions or jokes or experimental challenges will punctuate

the process, through the give and take of conversation. But today, in the coffee shops
around any campus, it is commonplace to find several tables occupied by students who
are wadded in by the triple seal against the physical world: laptop open, iPhone on,
earbuds in ears.
Students raised from a young age in the total surround of the digital world are susceptible
to unprecedented anxieties when faced with spontaneous conversation or argument.
Sherry Turkle, in Reclaiming Conversation (Penguin Press, 2015), brought forward
impressive evidence to show that a great many people under 30 are morbidly afraid of
such encounters. In the circumstances, speech lessons may be more in order than speech
codes.
The censorship movement has picked up its share of admirers in the polite left-wing
media — a disturbing fresh ingredient in the mix. For in every previous generation of
liberals, the defense of free speech was an article of faith; men and women of the left
carried a vivid memory of the persecution of opinions like theirs. But students and young
professors in college have no such memory. They cannot recall a time when most of the
people they meet did not think as they think, or when opinions like theirs were
vulnerable to persecution.
A recent column in The Guardian by David Shariatmadari, "No Crisis of Free Speech,"
epitomizes the new attitude. It was published on September 19, when threats of disorder
seemed on the point of closing down scheduled speeches at Berkeley by Yiannopoulos
and Ann Coulter. Shariatmadari was not impressed by the outcry against censorship.
This concern, he said, "should be taken with a pinch of salt" when speakers themselves
choose to cancel the engagements. Conceding that some classes, too, were canceled
because of the threat, he asks: "Is this censorship, or opposition?"
The answer is that there are forms of opposition that permit an opponent to speak.
Censorship wins out most tellingly, after all, not by the exclusion or the prohibitive
harassment of a set of speakers or the confiscation of thousands of forbidden books. Its
triumph comes with its success in discouraging writers or speakers from testing their
thoughts by speaking their mind.
The First Amendment is under attack from both extremes in American politics today,
each of which firmly believes it can rally the necessary forces to take control of the
country and scour the public culture of undesirable elements. "Network news," tweeted
President Trump in October, "has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses
must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked." Professional de-licensing was,
coincidentally, the solution proposed by a number of the anti-Gilley petitioners, for
whom the retraction of the article was not enough. They wanted him sacked by his
employer, Portland State University, and stripped of the degrees that qualified him to
teach anywhere.
A response favored by constitutional liberals has been to argue that the new wave of
academic censorship will ultimately fail because the Constitution forbids it. This tactical
line is followed, up to a point, by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in Free
Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017), but they also believe it would be wrong,
even if it were possible, to enforce a regime of campus censorship. Their argument is
moral as well as tactical, and it calls attention to the fact that constitutional law allows
more freedom of speech than is likely to be experienced in universities today.
Might colleges think of aiming even higher? If they care about education as the first of
their concerns, they should aspire to be not just as free as the First Amendment permits,
but the widest-open of all environments for political and cultural debate. Such a renewal
would have practical value. Though a vein of anti-intellectualism may be part of the
national character, Americans like to think of universities as places where good minds are
at liberty. They are willing to believe there is such a thing as intellectual virtue, and the
stature they accord to higher education is connected with that belief.
The fortunes of free speech and the fate of the universities have been intertwined for
most of a century. If, by a series of expedient adjustments, the universities now weaken
their claim on intellectual prestige — a prestige associated with the idea of free inquiry —
they will give up the authority they can still command in arguments about justice, peace,
and human survival that have an impact far outside education.
David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Politics

by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (Yale University Press, 1992).
A version of this article appeared in the November 10, 2017 issue.
Copyright © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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8/30/2018 The New Campus Censors - The Chronicle of Higher Education

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW

The New Campus Censors

By David Bromwich NOVEMBER 05, 2017

What's Fueling the Campus-Speech Wars?

invoke principles that may seem abstract and vaguely disagreeable.

We do not call for the curtailing of the writer’s freedom of speech. We

lively intellectual setting, questions or jokes or experimental challenges will punctuate

David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Politics

A version of this article appeared in the November 10, 2017 issue.

Copyright © 2018 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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