The Intolerant Fifth

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published Speech on campus ing, according to recent survey by the Brookings Institution immediately fifth after the violence in Charlottesville. The intolerant Though outnumbered, this vocal mi- nority can have a chilling effect on what everyone else thinks they can say. At Yale, 4z% of students(and n% of conservatives) say they feel uncomfortable giving their LOS ANGELES AND WASHINGTON, DC opinions on politics,race, religion and gen- American universities have afree-speech problem.But it is not what it seems der. Self-censorship becomes more com- «TIBERALISM is white supremacy!" Illiberal impulses can be found in many mon as students progress through univer- l~shouted the students, as their hap- comers of society. But young Americans sity: 6i% of freshmen feel comfortable less speaker—Claire Gastanaga of the who have attended college are in fact more gabbing about their views, but the same is American Civil Liberties Union (ncLv)— accommodating of controversial speakers, true ofjust 56% of sophomores, q9% ofju- looked on.The protesters at the College of like avowed racists, than the general popu- niorsand 30% of seniors. William_ and Mary, the alma mater of lation is (see chart on next page). Nor has University administrators, whose job it Thomas Jefferson, went further still. "The tolerance of extreme views among stu- is to promote hazmony and diversity on revolution will not uphold the consritu- dents changed much in recent years ac- campus,often find the easiest way to do so tion" they chanted on September z~th. cording to the General Social Survey, is to placate the intolerant fifth. The two "Nazis don't deserve free speech". The which has been asking questions about at- groups form an odd alliance. Contenrious acLu's decision to defend the free-speech titudes to free speech for decades. Press re- campus politics have been a constant fea- rights of white nationalists in Charlottes- ports, which understandably focuses on ture of American life for more than 50 ville, Virginia prompted the students' ire. campus discord more than harmony, can years. But during the Free Speech Move- Because of it, Ms Gastanaga was unable to create a misleadingly gloomy impression. ment in the i96os, students at Berkeley speak,and the event, called "Students and While Charles Murray, a political scientist demonstrated to win the right to deter- the First Amendment",was cancelled. made radioacrive by his wriring on racial mine who could say what from adminis- Given their well-publicised.antics, it is differences in intelligence, got into a viol- trators. Now the opposite is true. Student easy to see why college students can be ent scrape when speaking at Middlebury activists are demanding that administra- tarred as blinkered devotees of political College, he emerged unscathed from re- tors interfere with teaching, asking for correctness run amok.Students at Oberlin, centtalks atHarvard and Columbia. mandatory ethnic-studies classes, the hir- a liberal-arts college in Ohio,revolted over The problem on campus, which never- ing of non-white or gay faculty and the insufficiently authentic Asian cuisine, theless is areal one,is different. A survey of ability to lodge complaints against profes- equating it to "cultural appropriation". 3,00o college students by Gallup for the sors for biased conduct in the classroom. After the campus newspaper at Wesleyan Knight Foundation and the Newseum In-~ This hands more power to administrators. University published an article critical of sritute finds that ~8% favour campuses College-administrators at public univer- Black Lives Matter,students tried to defend where offensive and biased speech is per- sities are subject to the fiill demands of the paper for failing to create a "safe space". mitted. Aseparate study found that even at America's capacious First Amendment, Elsewhere, students have launched cam- Yale, a hotbed of student protest, 72% op- which allows, among other things, hate paigns against invited speakers, setting posecodesthat circumscribe speech,com- speech and Dag burning. Federal courts their targets on.the likes ofJoe Biden, Con- pared with ~b%in favour.Truly illiberal ten- have struck down every speech code en- doleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde. To- denciesare limited to about zo% of college acted at a public university, and the Su- gether, this gives the alarming impression students.This is the fraction that thinks it is preme Court has declared academic &ee- that a whole generation has rejected free acceptable to use violence to prevent a dom a "transcendent value" of "special speech.That impression is wrong. "very controversial speaker" from speak- concern to the First. Amendment'. Private ►► ~~{'#~ t a'., ~'~ ~ _ ,`. ~„°". r ....,ya Z2 .,pUll~ "s.F,~ b'~~'?-ati ~vt~ TIl@ ECOfi0lfllSt OGYOb2~ Myth 'L01J ;

spaces."' There have been comparatively Say what you Like about students fewer clashes between activists and ad- United States, adults.aged 18-30 wt4o think people-with the following views should be allowed to: m x. .. inistrators at the university. give a pubUcspeech teach at a university In fact, the share of schools with "se- College ioo verely Acommu~it 100 restrictive" speech codes has de- Non-college _ . ~ ~Mr~..Sp _ : 50 clined for nine consecutive yeazs, accord- Noo-college o College Q ing tothe Foundation for Individual Rights 1970... 80 90 2000 ]0 ~~~6~ 1970 ~ 80 90 2000 10 ~i6~ . in Education, a pressure gioup. It is now a ~~ ~w shade under 40%. The so-called Chicago A perwn who adwcates ~'+~►~ '~~~'~'"'~_+_ principles have been adopted or endorsed doing away withelections ~ '~~' y~~~tir~ ''^~-- 50 Q;~ 50 and letting themilimry by 3z other colleges and universities, in- run the coyntry... ~ 0 -0 cludingPrinceton and Johns Hopkins. Pur- iao 100 due, auniversity in Indiana that was the AMusfimder~man - ~ -. whoDreachesh#hed ~ ~''tir' 50 - ~ 50 first public institution to sign on to the Chi- ofthe Urrited States ter"` cago principles, has taken a particularly vigorous approach to teaching .students aoo goo A personwhobefieves ~''~.~~~..~.~,, about free speech under the presidency of a4hlacksaregenetically "'•+F"~'Lr'~'T~~ 50- - - '50 ;nfertor Mitch Daniels. Cultural-sensitivity train- 0 0 ings have been a mainstay of orientations Source: Gen¢ral 1970 80 90 2000 10 16 4970 80 90 s«tatsurve~, 2000 30 16 at universities across the country, but Pur- due now includes sessions promoting the value of free expression. "If these other ► universifles are legally much freer to regu- viduals from ideas and opinions they find schools choose to embarrass themselves latethe speech of their students and affili- unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply by forcing conformity of thought, allowing ates. Many find themselves in an uncom- offensive". A letter sent to the incoming diverse opinions to be shouted down or fortable bind. University presidents want class went further: "we do not support so- disinvited, thaPs their problem," says Pur- racially diverse classes of students, all of called `trigger warnings', we do not cancel due's MrDaniels. "However, if they're rais- whom feel welcome.IYustees and donors, invited speakers because theirtopics might ing up a generation of graduates with an sensitive to the critique of campuses as un- prove controversial, and we do not con- upside-down version of our constitutional thinkingly liberal, want intellectual diver- done the creation of intellectual `safe rights, thaYs everybody's problem." ■ sity•Professorswant to beleft alone. As principles go, free speech can also be expensive. Security at Berkeley for Ben Campus activists Shapiro, a conservative speaker, cost the university $600,000. Expenses to secure Psyche protection "Free Speech Week" at Berkeley, which was due to feature a rogues' gallery of alt- P right speakers, were expected to run to utting micro-aggressions.un~er. tiemicroscope $un. The university "hoped for the best but ORE thanigo years ago; john Stuart: that you'no longer feel comfortable in' had to plan for the worst', says Janet Napo- MMill put forward asensible~proposi- you skin;' gays jenny Ghukvtiu, aiecent litano, the president of the University of lion. "The only purposefor which-power graduate:of ttte University'of Chicago California system (the event was cancelled can be rightfully. exereised~overariy whois writing a 600kon~the subject. due to the incompetence of the organisers). member of acivilised community; "The claiiixthatnlicro-aggressions P eople like Milo Yiannopoulos, who seek against tiffs will,is to prevent haazm to result iri gnental't~aUma is supported by out campus speaking gigs less out of a others," he wrotein On~iberty.'Firsf "minimal"research, writes Scottl ilien- burning desire to say anything meaningful Amendment law has hewed closely'to feld;a psychologist ~tEmoryUniversity. than~in the hope of provoking a violent re- M}ll's k~arm principle, permitting ail sorts There are other gaps'in,the theory And . actio~, have worked out a formula for nee- of:disreptuable speech and°behaviour since micro-aggressions aze in.the_eye of dling administrators. Mr Yiannopoulos that do not poseap imminent physical the beholder, they ace close toimpossible has taken to asking student groups at Har- threat:Campus protesters, by Contrast, to measure in a way that would permit a vazd for an invite, according to Conor.Hea- argue thatsome speecH causes psycho- rigorous evaluation. ly, head of the Open Campus Initiative. logical harm, andistherefore covered by -Also beloved of campus activists aze Some of those currently standing up for Mill's dictum.:Do~those.claims withstand trigger warnings, when~instructors pre- free speech aze trying to drain university academic scrutiny? faaepotentially upsetting:texts,such asa resources while gaining personal notori- 1~ke "micro-aggressions"—a partic- novel'with a rape scene, with anote of ety. Berkeley is puzzling over how to cap ulaz concern of activists. Somewhat Caution.Here too,ri gorous evidence oh such spending, without penalising speak- nebulously defined,they canbe thought the mental-health:effects is far from erswith aparticular set of views. of asinadvertentslights, like aprofessor established. "Perhaps'the most astonish- M any other colleges are trying to pre- asldiig a non wiute student, "Where aze ing aspech ofthetrigger-warning dis- empt the protests. Howard Gillman, the youreally from?" The cumulative:effect cussionishow little actual empirical chancellor of the University of California, of these slightsis said to~be psycholog- workhas been:done,"says Ben Bellet, a Irvine, gives students an annual pep talk Scally damaging;so activists gigue for graduate student at Harvard leading a on free speech. Students often come to uni- sensitivirytraining fnrstudents and Srst=of-its-kind stud}rassessing their versity with "no frame of reference" on faculty=andpossible sanctions forun- . imgacG Other psychologists offer a com- free speech and the importance of aca- repentaiCfmicro-aggressors. "In the mo- petinghypothesis: by'treatingstudents as demicfreedom, hesays. The University of ment,youmay not be able to egister fragile, trigger warnings may harmthose C hicago issued a firm statement, since what ishappening. Bit it continues to they aze intended to protect. Some might adopted by other institutions which states slowly chip away at-you,up to the point find that suggestion upsetting. that its role is not "to attempt to shield indi- THE CHEZONICLE of 1 [i~hcr L~:ducation

COMMENTARY Free Speech, Campus Safety, or Both

By Mark G. Yudofand Kenneth Waltzer SEPTEMBER 15, zoi~

oncrete barriers were erected and a security perimeter was created around six buildings, all reinforced by hundreds of police officers. Weapons, backpacks, helmets, and masks were forbidden. This was not some distant capital in a war zone. This was the University of California at Berkeley last night.

The occasion? A speech by the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which attracted an audience estimated by one source to be around 1,000. Newspapers reported a few hundred protesters, mostly peaceful, and nine arrests. On Geoffrey Moss for The Chronicle other parts of the campus, people went about their work.

Given prior outbreaks of violence with other right-wing speakers, the university was adept at handling a volatile situation. Chalk that up to the leadership of Chancellor Carol Christ, careful planning and execution, and the police presence. But, as Shapiro himself noted, free speech is not free. The university estimated that the entire exercise cost over $600,000.

Berkeley is not likely to be an isolated case. Other right-wing speakers will be going there and to other campuses this fall. Some universities have declined to allow such speakers to address campus groups, fearing an outbreak of violence. Some have denied access altogether, resulting in several lawsuits. And the specter of Charlottesville hovers over the academy. The issue: How to honor free speech rights amid the potential bedlam.

To answer this question, one should begin with the constitutional framework. The historic core of First Amendment jurisprudence, applied to regulation of speakers onpublic-university campuses, is that the rules shaping access must be content-neutral. Those rules should neither privilege nor limit speech because of disagreement with the views of the speakers —whether white supremacists or proponents of racial equality, advocates or opponents of boycotting Israel, or support or opposition to the immigration policies of the Trump administration. Even nonviolent hate speech, heinous words vilifyingAfrican-Americans, gays, or Jews,for example, is protected under the prevailing view.

No doubt, hate speech is hurtful and distressing, but that alone does not justify censorship. There must be more for the government to act; abstract advocacy alone does not suffice. There must be an intention to incite immediate violence against specific individuals in a context that makes that outcome likely. If the speakers do not cross the incitement test, university administrators and the police are to use all reasonable efforts to control counterprotesters who may be bent on silencing a speaker or engaging in violence. To say that the First Amendment applies to public-university campuses begins but does not end the discussion. As Robert C. Post, until recently the dean of Yale Law School, has shown, in much of their work universities routinely engage in assessment of the content of speech. One student receives an A for her final examination and another a failing grade. Some professors are granted tenure and others denied it based on the qualify of their work. There are disciplinary truths, though sometimes they are wrong or limited, and yet that is the appropriate framework for making decisions about the quality of research, teaching, and student performance.

The complication occurs because the public areas of universities —Sproul Plaza at Berkeley, the West Mall at the University of Texas at Austin, the Lawn at the University ofVirginia —have long been treated as limited public forums, differentiated from classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. Limited public forums are those set aside for expressive activities in line with the educational mission of welcoming a variety of speakers, ideologies, and ways of thinking.

Some universities have designated free-speech areas, seeking to regulate the time, place, and manner of speech. For example, it is desirable to limit the use of loudspeakers adjacent to buildings when classes are in session. But courts are increasingly skeptical about such zones, and many universities have abandoned them. The resulting situation is precarious and dangerous, both to the physical safety of those on campus and to free-speech values. In the weeks since deadly violence erupted in Charlottesville, Va., five universities have refused access to the white-supremacist Richard Spencer to speak on campus.

Campus leaders in all of those cases are confronted by the prospect of uncontrollable violence —sometimes because of the speakers, more often because of those antagonistic to the speakers. Universities may confront the agonizing choice of mounting a large and costly police presence, as at Berkeley, or else becoming vulnerable to lawsuits by those who are barred from access. Such a lawsuit had already been filed against Berkeley before last night's speech, and at Michigan State University. The courts will examine whether security concerns serve as a pretext for content discrimination or represent good-faith efforts to ensure order in volatile situations.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the current situation. Elements of the left, which are present on many campuses, equate speech that they abhor with action. Their purpose is to protect the campus from such verbal assaults: Freedom of expression must yield to the righteousness of their cause. On the extreme right, with a more limited constituency on campus, agents provocateurs often come from outside, hoping to incite disarray and gain attention.

After the debacle in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia determined to undertake a review of campus rules and security resources to be better prepared to respond. That is probably a notable prelude to what may be a general rethinking among campus leaders about the challenge of maintaining open access. There are several possibilities, none wholly attractive:

• Instead of allowing open access to speakers or renting space to external speakers and organizations, a university might require, in keeping with its educational mission, that only the administration, appointed faculty members, and recognized student groups be permitted to issue invitations to speakers. Inevitably they would be making content-based decisions. They already do —whether the Hispanic-student association invites an opponent of a border wall, the Young Republicans invite an opponent of the Affordable Care Act, or the environmental engineers invite a luminary on global warming. Most campus speakers address curriculum orresearch-related topics, and inevitably the line is fuzzy. One practical issue is that given the range of faculty and student-organization opinion, it is not clear that the array of speakers would change markedly. The Supreme Court in Healy v. James laid down some strictures on the recognition of student organizations at public universities. The courts probably would apply some version of agood-faith test, drawing on prior cases.

• Requirements that speakers and potentially hostile audiences not be armed (guns, knives, brass knuckles) and not conceal their identities by covering their faces are already in effect on many campuses. Berkeley, laudably, embraced that approach. These requirements should be strongly enforced, and could be ripe fodder for state legislatures to consider as they devise rules on the open carry of weapons. • Another approach is to embrace more-careful planning, gathering better intelligence, and enhancing coordination between the campus police and administrators. Many campuses, including Berkeley this week, are doing so. Where the likelihood of violence is high, universities might limit the venues that are available, to ensure the safety of the speakers; facilitate policing of the site; and, alas, make certain that an emergency exit is available if the speaker's safety is threatened. It is not clear how the courts would respond to such moves; there is a difference between providing a more secure site and attempting deliberately to reduce the size of potential audiences.

Many university presidents and chancellors, including Berkeley's Carol Christ, proclaim their commitment to open discussion and the expression of sharply divergent views. We agree. But given the high stakes on campuses in turmoil, there also is an acute need for thoughtful re-evaluation, discussion, and improved planning to find reasonable ways to sustain free speech and also protect campus constituencies.

Mark G. Yudofis president emeritus at the University ofCalifornia and a professor emeritus at the University of California atBerkeleySchool ofLaw. Kenneth A. Waltzeris a professoremeritus atMichrgan State Universiryand executive director ofthe Academic Engagement Network.

A version ofthis article appeared in the September 29, 2017 issue.

11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education

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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW The New Campus Censors

Students are leading the assault on free speech —and faculty members and administrators are enabling them

~~ ,yx~ :a~ + `` ~. By David Bromwich NOVEMBER O5, 2017

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• ., ~ ~' hree or four years ago, in the eazly days of campus protests against unwelcome speakers, the censors sometimes said in :~ ~'~'" ~ their own defense: "T'his isn't about free speech." The ~t'1 ~ disclaimer served to lighten the 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

Kevin Van Aelst for The Chronicle Review speakers to a test of morives?

In any case, the azgument that "it isn't really about free speech" has lazgely been dropped by the censors. They aze 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?

"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 orNabisco — 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 maybe 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 Wazs?

David Bromwich argues that students are leading an assault on free speech, and that faculty members and administrators aze enabling them. Aimee? Disagree? We wanted to know what Chronicle readers thuilc. Here is a selection o[reaponses we recefved to a brief survey.

https:/lwww.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 1/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education 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- understoodregime govemingthe manners ofspeech — 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 offr ee 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 playas 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" Ioccupy and that ofthe person I address. Universities have lately promoted this form of group consciousness by subsidizing of what aze euphemistically called "affinity groups." But here, the forms of membership and self-respect fostered by the university run up against an older American pattern offeeling. 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 caze 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 lazge in other ways besides the discipline of speech. The dominant politics in the academy since the mid-'60s has been liberal, welfaze-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, Daztinouth, 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 heazd more frequenfly and were more indulgently received, but it was not forbidden to ask them a sharp question without a prefatory assurance of solidarity.

The attitude towazd free discussion on the campus left began to change with the mass protests in Ferguson, Mo.,an d events in their aftermath: the church massacre in Chazleston, S.C., the videotaped Idllings of black men by police officers, and the successive protests in Baton Rouge, St. Pau1,lVew 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 honor, 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 Tnunp'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 director dochinal 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 astudent-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 oriline hashtag swanns inevitably adds to the impression that "we" represent a unanimous and inclusive community, entirely composed of persons of decency and goodwill.

hops://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 2/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education

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 teazs 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.

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 constiturional right of assembly of far-right demonstrators in Chazlottesville, Va., was awhite-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 lmow 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 confum a delusive self-image. Even as they rely on force instead of persuasion, they think of themselves as the vanguazd 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 Imow how bad it looks when a mob shouts down a speaker, and if they aze 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,an d 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 yeaz, 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 bethinking persons. Is that really the best you can do?"

College administrators —with rare exceptions, such as Cazol Christ, the new chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley — are reluctant to back the principle offr ee 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 aze 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 "hazd to focus" and suffer "panic attacks" from the visits of obno~ous speakers, it seems the path ofleast 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."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 3/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education he practice of free speech has been through hazd 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 ofissuing 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 scholazs; and the censorship of opposing views is an always dangerous professional deformation in every walk of scholazship. 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 fumed 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 byscholar-referees had,in fact, been followed. Nevertheless, l5 of the 34 members of the editorial boazd 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 offr ee 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, LarryAle~nder 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 aze 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 boazd 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 Gille}~s accusers, Farhana Sultana, an associate professor of geography at Syracuse University, explained the reasoning as follows: "The petition was about upholding rigorous academic scholazly standards, inte~ity, 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 callfor the curtailing ofthe writer's heedom ofspeech. 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 ofintellectual cleansing.

https://www.chronicle.com/articlelThe-New-Campus-Censors/241637 4/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education The bursts of slander that mazk a controversy like this might be described as a remote but predictable consequence of the invenrion 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 aze 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 forwazd 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 offr ee speech was an article offaith; 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 byYannopoulos 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 hazassment of a set of speakers or the confiscation of thousands offorbidden 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 ardicle 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, 201~, 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 thewidest-open of all environments for political and cultural debate. Such a renewal would have practical value. Thous a vein of and-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 — theywill eve up the authority they can still command in arguments about justice, peace, and human survival that have an impact faz outside education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New~ampus-Censors/241637 5/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education

David Bromwich is a professor ofEnglish at Ya/e University. He is the author ofPolitics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (Yale UniversityPress, 1992).

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

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 6/7 11/21/2017 The New Campus Censors -The Chronicle of Higher Education

https:/lwww.chronicle.com/articie/The-New-Campus-Censors/241637 7/7 THE CHRONICLE of Higher Education

COMMENTARY The End of Academe: Free Speech and the Silencing of Dissent

By Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning ~ ~ArvunRv 2i, zoia

n July of 2015, The Chronicle published our essay suggesting that some of the manifestations of a new moral culture emerging at colleges in this country were incompatible with the traditional academic mission. Since then, it has become clear that this is so. In the last few years, activist students and faculty, sometimes with the support of administrators, have increasingly attacked the ideals of free speech.

The new activist culture calls for colleges to confront the small, perhaps unintended slights known as microaggressions, to provide John Tomac for The Chronicle trigger warnings for course material that might offend or upset, and to become safe spaces where ideas go unchallenged. It is characterized by extreme moral sensitivity, and in this way is similar to honor cultures of the past where men were highly sensitive to insults and responded to perceived slurs against their character with duels and other forms of violence.

The new culture is less concerned with slights against individual character than with anything perceived as furthering the oppression of victim groups. In either case, though, eactreme moral sensitivity presents a problem in an academic environment. As we warned, "Honest inquiry and communication are bound to offend someone," so if colleges are to be places of inquiry and communication, "they must have a climate where people are less —not more —prone to outrage than elsewhere."

The dignity culture that began to replace honor culture in the 19th century cautioned against excessive moral sensitivity. People were taught to have thick skins and to ignore insults. Speech and violence were distinct, as seen in the aphorism commonly taught to young children: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

The new activist culture rejects this distinction, as did the honor cultures of old, and this has had major consequences for the free expression of ideas. For instance, in the honor culture of the antebellum American South, it was dangerous to be a newspaper editor. If a gentleman thought the paper had published anything unflattering about himself or a family member, he might challenge the editor to a duel (if he perceived him to be a social equal) or else simply beat him with a cane or whip. Honor could disrupt universities, too, with students turning to violence against their professors. In their book Rot, Riot, and Rebe/lion, Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos describe how honor culture imperiled the University of Virginia in its infancy. In one incident, two recently expelled students horsewhipped a professor who told them they had disgraced themselves. "Neither of them pretended I had done him any injury," the astonished professor wrote. But of course, in the eyes of the two students, the professor's insult was the injury.

Today's campus activists are concerned with different kinds of offenses: statements they see as slighting members of disadvantaged groups or in some other way furthering oppression. But they similarly view such statements as injurious, as akin to violence. Some go further, arguing that speech they view as oppressive is actually violence. And if speech is violence, universities must prohibit it. If they don't, activists are justified in doing so themselves as an act ofself-defense.

At the University of California at Berkeley, for example, after rioters forced the cancellation of a talk by the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the DailyCaJifornian, an independent student-run newspaper, published a collection of articles called "Violence as Self-Defense." The premise was that since Yiannopoulos's speech would have been harmful, rioting to prevent it was appropriate. One protester wrote that "letting Yiannopoulos speak was more terrifying to me than potential injury or arrest." Another proclaimed, "Our shields are raised against you. No one will protect us? We will protect ourselves." And a Berkeley alumna wrote that "asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who literally do not think their lives matter is a violent act."

he same logic has been the impetus behind efforts to prevent or punish dissent at universities around the country. At Yale University, students vilified Nicholas and Erika Christakis, leading them to resign their positions as the heads of one of Yale's residential colleges, because Erika had questioned the university's involvement in policing offensive Halloween costumes. At Middlebury College, student protesters forced organizers to move a talk by the political scientist Charles Murray to a secret location where it could be recorded for broadcast, and then surrounded the participants and assaulted a professor who was there to debate Murray. At Claremont McKenna College, students blocked the entrance to a talk by the police defender Heather Mac Donald. And at Evergreen State College, activists targeted a professor, Bret Weinstein, because of his objection to a "Day of Absence" where white people were asked to leave campus. Atone point Weinstein had to hold class off campus when the police told him his safety couldn't be ensured.

These kinds of events keep occurring as the new culture spreads, but they also provoke opposition from those who still hold to dignity culture and its distinction between speech and violence.

One hopeful sign is the University of Chicago's policy on free expression, called the "Chicago Statement," which 33 colleges have now adopted or affirmed. This commits the institution to "the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong- headed."And it even makes cleaz that while members of the community are welcome to criticize and contest any view, "they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe." The Chicago Statement thus rejects the idea that offensive speech is akin to violence and that the shutting down of speakers is self defense.

The authors of the Chicago Statement on the one hand, and the authors of the "Violence as Self-Defense" symposium in the Daily Californian on the other, draw from different and irreconcilable moral frameworks. Each position has support within their universities, so the campus culture wars are likely to continue for some time. Right now the outcome is uncertain, but what is certain is this: If the activists prevail in blurring the boundary between speech and violence, it will mean the end of academe as a place of serious scholarship and debate.

Bradley Campbell is an associate professorofsociologyatCalifornia State UniversiryatLosAngeles and Jason Manningis an associate professor ofsociology at West Virginia University. They are the authors ofl'lhe Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

A version ofthis article appeared in the January 26, 2018 issue.