How GCU atones for Ben Shapiro
Grand Canyon University made one of the great blunders of the year when it denied a podium to Ben Shapiro, a young conservative whose reputation is soaring with exactly the cohort that attends GCU — young Christian conservatives.
Now the university has reversed itself. And Shapiro, after playing coy, has agreed to speak.
GCU has a problem. It looks like it surrendered, if even briefly, to the headwinds of political correctness. There’s a way to solve this. But first let’s unwind what is happening.
Ben Shapiro is a hero to a lot of college students, particularly young men, because he is providing them the language and arguments to defend themselves in a popular culture that grows more hostile to people who are white, religious, conservative and male.
If you have spent any time talking to those young men, they are increasingly on the internet consuming lectures and speeches of a triad of serious thinkers who push back against the numbing conformity created by the academic and media left.
Our universities, and Grand Canyon is a refreshing exception to this, have become hot houses for not merely challenging our traditions – a duty of any liberal education – but despising Western culture, its ideals, its philosophers, its writers, its books.
They fan the flames of white guilt and work to divide people with the skill and intensity of the most dedicated demagogues on the right. The modern professoriate hates Donald Trump. Hell, they are Donald Trump.
Pushing back are three men, not all conservatives:
❚ Shapiro is a Jewish conservative, Harvard-trained lawyer, who has earned the bane of especially the gayrights community (judging from our phone calls) because he thought a couple thousand years of traditional marriage shouldn’t be upended without a debate. He lost the debate. His victorious opponents, who lack any magnanimity, have decided he is an eternal bigot. He is not.
He’s a provocateur, for sure, a smooth-talking smart-ass in the way that connects with college students, but he’s thoughtful and responsible. Liberals could learn a lot from Shapiro, because he is willing to do what they almost never do — call out the radicals on his own side.
❚ Jordan Peterson is a Toronto college professor and clinical psychologist in full revolt of a university system that long ago stopped pursuing truth and started promoting political agendas. Peterson seems to eschew the label “conservative” for “traditional liberal,” but he a conservative and is very tough.
He made his name under the interrogator’s lamp, the bright lights of broadcast news in which he cleans the clocks of know-it-all left-wing interviewers, who first set out to expose him and only end up undressed before their audiences.
❚ Dave Rubin is a Brooklyn-born reformed “left-wing progressive” who, like Peterson, describes himself as a “classical liberal.” He is more broadly described as libertarian.
He is a gay man, comedian and sharp-eyed commentator on the modern world. His Rubin Report, a talk show about “free speech and big ideas” reaches roughly 1 million viewers on YouTube. He has featured Shapiro and Peterson as guests. His voice is there, he says, because “the modern left has lost its way.”
The big problem in our universities and the reason these voices have emerged is not the stupidity at Grand Canyon U., which for a blinding moment bought into the popular culture and forgot who it was. The problem is that too many of our universities have stocked themselves with like-minded people who want to play politics.
There is no contest of ideas because the professors all think alike and hire carbon copies of themselves. Too many universities are no longer arenas to test competing ideas, but stultifying salons of group-think that teach young people they must be cosseted from the big bad ideals coming mostly from the right.
Grand Canyon got into this mess by thinking like traditional universities. It can solve it by pushing back against their worst impulses.
GCU should set the example. Make the university again a place where competing philosophies are welcome. Teach that students are not to be shielded from challenging ideas but to be thrown in front of them. To be tested. To learn. To build the confidence they’ll need to confront all of the challenging ideas that await them in the real world.
Grand Canyon can show other universities how the academy is supposed to work. Open up the guest lecture hall to many competing ideas, so long as they are presented in serious, intellectual ways. And so long as they are not violating universally held standards — such as promoting violence (aka Aryan Nations or Hezbollah).
Get in front of it. Invite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to talk about neo-socialism; invite Megan McArdle to counter. Bring in big thinkers, big ideas, new ideas, and be fearless.
We live in a nation that is highly diverse, bubbling with creativity. To cope and prosper we need to engage, but we also need the courage of our convictions. If our convictions are never tested, we'll never have confidence to stand for anything.
The university should be so thoroughly committed to challenging its students that no student group with a speaker's calendar can keep up. Next year, invite Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson before the kids even think to. But then bring in Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders.
If one of your conservative parents complains about leftists on campus, explain politely, but firmly, that the left used to reliably defend free speech in America, but that’s no longer the case. Traditionalists must now keep the flame lit.
The academic left simply doesn’t have time. It’s too busy crushing speech.