Faculty should encourage listening to opposing views
All who cherish free expression, especially on campuses, must combat the growing zeal for censorship.
Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas that they don’t like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.
I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row in April, the more serious incident at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and a less virulent one at UCLA.
Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk about my book, “The War on Cops,” on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.” A Facebook post from “we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges” announced grandiosely that “as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.”
A Facebook event titled “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald” and hosted by “Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists” encouraged students to protest the event because “Mac Donald condemns (the) Black Lives Matter movement,” “supports racist police officers” and “supports increasing fascist ‘law and order.’”
When I arrived on campus, I was shuttled to what was in effect a safe house: a guest suite for campus visitors, with blinds drawn. I could hear the growing crowds chanting and drumming, but I could not see the auditorium that the protesters were surrounding.
Just before 6 p.m., I was fetched by an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-theway elevator into CMC’s Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with students for dinner before my talk, was empty — the mob, by then numbering close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows.
The administration had decided that I would livestream my speech in the vacant room to preserve some semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to the agitators.
I completed my speech to the accompaniment of chants and banging on the windows. I was able to take two questions from students via livestreaming. But by then, the administrators and police officers in the room, who had spent my talk nervously staring at the windows, decided that things were growing too unruly outside to continue. I was given the cue that the presentation was over. Walkie-talkies were used to coordinate my exit from the Athenaeum’s kitchen to the exact moment that a black, unmarked Claremont Police Department van rolled up. We passed startled students sitting on the stoop outside the kitchen. Before I entered the van, a student thanked me for coming to Claremont. We sped off to the police station.
An ever-growing part of the faculty is the reason that police protection is needed in the first place.
Those professors also maintain that to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in “hate speech,” and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty, I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of communication rights.
But the students currently stewing will eventually graduate, and some will seize levers of power more far-reaching than those they currently wield over toadying campus bureaucrats and spineless faculty. Unless the campus zest for censorship is combated now, what we have always regarded as a precious inheritance could be eroded beyond recognition, and a soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.