“Toughen up, kids, free speech is good for you”
Nothing more clearly illustrates the polarised nature of American campus politics, said Robby Soave on Reason.com, than the hysterical reaction to the letter that the dean of students at the University of Chicago (U of C) sent out to the new intake last month. Yet what John Ellison, the dean, said seemed no more than a standard defence of the free speech principle. Although “civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us”, he wrote, “we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate… this may challenge you and even cause discomfort”. He went on to inform the first-year students that Chicago rejects the culture of political correctness which has stifled free speech at campuses across the nation, advising them that the university does not support “trigger warnings”, and does not “condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own”.
Ellison’s scornful manifesto “isn’t about academic freedom”, said Professor Kevin Gannon on Vox.com. “It’s about power.” The clear goal of his letter was to spark a national backlash by the privileged elites and send a warning to all black, minority, feminist and LGBTQ university students who have the temerity to challenge existing power structures, both intellectual and institutional. Right-wingers scoff that trigger warnings are just an excuse to shield delicate little snowflakes from troubling material, said L.V. Anderson on Slate.com. That’s nonsense. Like “content warnings” preceding violent or sexually explicit TV programmes, they’re intended to warn vulnerable students to steel themselves for the emotional impact of a given text – informing, say, students who have been sexually assaulted that the text includes graphic descriptions of rape, or black students that it includes racist language. As for “safe spaces”, students from historically marginalised groups are simply asking that colleges make them feel as accepted, as “welcome and, yes, safe” as white, straight students. Is that too much to ask?
Of course it isn’t, said Emily Willingham on Forbes.com. The black, Latino, gay and feminist activists who Ellison is implicitly reprimanding are actually asking for more free speech, not less. They want colleges to be communities where they are safe from the “pressures or oppressions” that silence their voices in the outside world. What Ellison was really doing, said Jay Michaelson on Thedailybeast.com, was addressing the U of C’s wealthy, conservative alumni rather than its students. Alumni at many universities are up in arms over the uppity minorities and women challenging the white male hierarchy, and have withheld cheques to show their disapproval. But now that Ellison has become a hero on “the right-wing blogosphere”, U of C donors will open their wallets.
Ellison’s letter “could have been a little less provocative”, said Jesse Singal on Nymag.com, but his essential point needed to be made. Some 80% of undergraduates, according to a recent poll, favour the “liberal conception of campus free-speech rights” he champions. “The problem is that the loudest students’ voices frequently win out”, intimidating other students into silence, and college officials into cravenly banning provocative figures from speaking on campus. Let’s hope this letter nudges “other, more timorous university administrators to stand up and do their jobs”. The U of C has an honourable tradition of defending free speech, said the Chicago Tribune. Back in 1932, its then president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, defended the right of a communist presidential candidate to visit the campus and talk to students. The “cure” for repellent ideas, said Hutchins, “lies through open discussion rather than inhibition”. Amen to that. Ellison, with his message of “toughen up, kids, free speech is good for you”, is following in Hutchins’s footsteps. From now on, U of C should stand for “University of Common Sense”.