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Home > What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
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What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
By Jim Sleeper [1] / AlterNet [2]
September 4, 2016
Whenever American civil society has been under great stress, if not, indeed,
falling apart, self-appointed champions of the conventional wisdom and
traditional values have ginned up public paroxysms of alarm and rage at
selected internal enemies to blame for the crisis.
In the 1690s, it was the witches, hysterical women and girls whom Puritans
said had been taken by Satan. In the 1840s, it was Catholic immigrants, who
were said by a presidential candidate to be besotted with “rum, Romanism,
and rebellion.” In every decade before and since then, it has been feral
Negroes. In the 1920s, it was anarchists, Reds, and pushy Hebrews. In the
1950s, it was American Communist spies for Stalin, the Satan of that time.
In the 1960sm, it was hippies, riotous blacks, and traitorous opponents of
the Vietnam War. Since 2001, it has been American Muslims and, in 2003, it
was critics of the Iraq War.
Now a new cohort of crusaders has found a new internal enemy: coddled,
petulant college students and some of their professors, who, we’re being
told, are forcing university administrators to silence and punish others who
exercise freedoms of inquiry and expression in ways that offend and hurt the
complainers.
We’re also being told that these “cry-bullies” of “political
correctness” are winning such protections by perpetrating what one of their
supposed, much-ballyhooed, victims, former Harvard President Lawrence
Summers, calls a “creeping totalitarianism” on our nation’s campuses.
They’re destroying the freedoms of expression and open inquiry that a
liberal education should cultivate in students, not protect them against.
If this new paroxysm has a manifesto, it’s “The Coddling of the American
Mind [3],” with a scarifying subtitle: “In the name of emotional
well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from
words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for
education-and mental health.”
It was written by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education [4] (the FIRE), and Jonathan Haidt, a business
psychologist at New York University and, like Lukianoff, an itinerant
preacher of their jeremiad against over-protective parenting and pedagogy
that, although neither man likes to say it explicitly, is “liberal” in the
colloquial and pejorative sense of that term.
Literally millions of American college alumni have fallen for this account
of where the threat to liberal education is coming from. The Atlantic rode
the tidal wave of the 500k-plus shares that “The Coddling” yielded,
following up with a videotaped conversation [5] between Lukianoff and the
magazine’s then-editor James Bennet (now the New York Times’
editorial-page editor); with brief accounts by Lukianoff and Haidt of how
they’d come to write the essay; with an essay by Yale Child Psychologist
Erika Christakis, who had become one of the FIRE’s supposed martyrs,
silenced by rampaging hordes of the politically correct on the altar of free
speech.
The more closely I’ve looked at this new “enemy” of free speech on
campus, the more I’ve been drawn -- and invite you to come along with me -
to look at the self-professed defenders of individual rights in education
who’ve been warning us about this scourge. Lukianoff has been a tactically
brilliant point man for a larger, conservative campus campaign of which the
FIRE is decidedly a part by virtue of its funding, many of its personnel,
and, most importantly, its strategy and tactics.
I’ve begun this examination briefly today [6] (Sept. 3, 2015) in the New
York Times, but there’s only so much one can report in 900 words. So, here
goes.
Lukianoff has been indefatigable, almost manic, rushing from the
foundation’s lavishly appointed suites on Walnut Street in Philadelphia to
campuses and green rooms across the country. Piously he brandishes First
Amendment arguments to portray politically correct students and the
administrators who indulge them as serious threats to open inquiry and
expression.
But I, on the other hand, having witnessed the discrepancy between what the
FIRE chose to highlight at one of those campuses, Yale, fall and what was
actually going on there in a huge, college-wide reckoning with race and
other matters, found Lukianoff to be more a propagandist and provocateur
than a tribune of individual rights in education.
How Paroxysms Work
Let me say first that the more I’ve looked at crusades of this kind, the
more I’ve been struck by similarities between this one and the earlier
paroxysms I’ve mentioned:
● Always -- and no matter whether the orchestrators of public spasms
against internal traitors sound their alarms impulsively and demagogically
or coolly and strategically, they get tons of support from less-talented and
fortunate people who are frightened, too, by a sense that their society is
unravelling. Witch-hunters, lynch-mobs, McCarthyite anti-Communists, white
supremacist “militia” members, and cheerleaders and apologists in the
media emerge in great numbers, out of nowhere, as the paroxysms approach
their peaks.
● Always, these spasms of fear and loathing grip the public precisely when
the conventional wisdom is unraveling on its own account, not because of any
serious damage done to it by the groups being targeted. The scapegoating
works because it diverts an increasingly nervous public’s attention from
deeper, broader dangers that most people fear to face head-on - dangers
inherent the blunders and deceits of the conventional wisdom’s own
champions, who most of us have a stake in believing and following at least
some of the time.
So the crusaders and their followers find an almost seductive, even
thrilling relief and release in assailing the more-vulnerable targets being
presented to them. Some even find the prospect of naming, sighting, and
punishing the enemy so thrilling that they go right out and join the hunt
for prey that can be held up plausibly as proof of the disloyalty and
danger: Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as
Jewish Communist spies, Willie Horton and O.J. Simpson as feral blacks, and
so on. It works in the tawdry, predictable ways that leaders of these
rituals understand only too well.
● Once a public paroxysm has been exposed to sunlight and has begun to
subside, many people begin to regard its chief witch-hunters, commie
hunters, and prurient scourges of decadent youth as more hysterical,
sinister, and destructive of their own society than their scapegoated prey
ever were.
That new clarity can prompt regret and even penitence among the
scapegoaters. One Sunday in 1697, seven years the last execution of a witch
in Salem, Massachusetts, Judge Samuel Sewall, who'd presided over the
trials, stood silently, head bowed, in Boston's Old South Meeting House as
the pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from him confessing his "guilt
contracted... at Salem" and desired "to take the blame and shame of it,
asking... that God... would powerfully defend him against all temptations
for Sin for the future...."
Senator Joe McCarthy never asked forgiveness for brandishing his largely
fictitious lists of “Communists” in government and universities and for
ruining so many lives and striking terror into many others, but he fell
apart under scrutiny. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, hard-driving
architect of a war in Vietnam that began with the largely fabricated Gulf of
Tonkin incident and continued with fraudulent warnings of danger to the Free
World, confessed tearfully in “The Fog of War” that the war was undertaken
with deceit and delusion. Republican political operative Lee Atwater, whose
television ads hyping feral blacks helped cost Democratic presidential
candidate Michael Dukakis the 1988 election, begged forgiveness from
African-Americans on his deathbed.
My reading of Greg Lukianoff, the new paroxysm’s ring-master, is that he’
ll end up giving us a sad demonstration of the same. In the course of this
essay, I’ll suggest several reasons why, and why the paroxysm about
political correctness is doomed.
Principles vs. Provocations
In November, 2015, Lukianoff was invited to Yale by Roger Kimball, chair of
the board of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program there and a member of the
board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the substantial funders of
Lukianoff’s FIRE. Also inviting Lukianoff to Yale that day were Professor
Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erika Christakis, “free speech” crusaders
who’d already hosted Lukianoff at Harvard when they’d taught there in
2013, when the FIRE named Harvard one of the ten worst colleges for free
speech in America.
At Yale last November, Erika Christakis had just ignited a free-speech
controversy with a public letter to students in which she criticized the
university’s council of cultural-center advisors for cautioning against
wearing culturally offensive Halloween costumes, such as those involving
wearing blackface or feathered Native American headdresses. To Christakis,
this was bureaucratic overreach, but hundreds of students signed an open
letter condemning her for underestimating the sensitivities of those who
might be offended.
I’ve described this controversy at some length here [7] in AlterNet, but
it’s worth noting that all of these open letters affirmed everyone’s
rights to free expression. As Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American
studies, history and African-American studies at Yale,told [8]The New York
Times, the FIRE’s spin, and the subsequent storm of media coverage, was “a
complete misconstruction of what happened. The cultural affairs committee
made its statement about Halloween costumes, The Christakises critiqued
that; the students critiqued them. Then everyone in the world criticized the
students. From beginning to end, it was never a matter of [suppressing] free
speech.”
No one at Yale was censured or punished by any government agency or by any
administrator, faculty committee or, as far as I know, any individual
faculty member.
No one, at any time, demanded or even suggested that Erika Christakis stop
teaching her popular course on early childhood education. At one point in
the controversy, though, an angry, black-led student group, Next Yale,
posted a list of demands on President Salovey’s door at midnight, among
them a demand that the Christakises be dismissed as heads of one of Yale’s
residential colleges. That demand was echoed vituperatively by an immature
student who yelled it right into Nicholas Christakis’ face in an open
confrontation in the residential courtyard.
Salovey promptly reaffirmed his faith in the Christakises’ “deep
dedication to undergraduates,” and the demand that they be dismissed as
heads of their residential college died. But they took leaves of absence and
cancelled their spring courses as their friend Lukianoff and the FIRE
constructed and dramatized a false narrative, peddled by many in the media,
casting Erika Christakis as a martyr to political correctness on the altar
of free speech.
I’ve told the truth about that narrative here [7] at AlterNet and won’t do
it again in this essay. (In an address [9] to Yale’s freshmen this year,
President Peter Salovey, too, assailed what he called “false narratives”
about freedom of speech at Yale and other colleges, although he didn’t
mention any one by name.) Since then I’ve learned more about Lukianoff’s
involvement in generating such narratives, and now is the time to share and
assess it, the better to help today’s paroxysm wind down.
At the Buckley Program’s free-speech conference, Lukianoff delighted a
pre-registered audience by quipping that, to hear recent student
denunciations of Erika Christakis’ defense of the right to wear blackface
and Native American headdresses on Halloween, “you would have thought
someone wiped out an entire Indian village.”
According to a student who’d registered for the conference because he was
interested in freedoms of speech but had no conservative preconceptions, the
tone for the audience’s response had already been set by its mostly older,
conservative Yale alumni members - decent, angry, somewhat clueless men whom
the speakers engaged by preaching to the choir, their implicit message being
that “We all know what we all know has happened to this college.”
By making “what has happened” explicit, Lukianoff’s quip prompted a burst
of laughter that released a pent-up anger because his listeners were
relieved to hear someone say what they, hemmed in by habitual decency or
inhibition, had been afraid to say themselves.
But then a student who’d slipped into the audience without registering got
up and demanded to know what was so funny about genocide. He put up some
posters he’d been carrying around campus urging students to “stand with
women of color.”
As he was escorted out by security, the other student I’ve mentioned posted
Lukianoff’s remark about wiping out an Indian village on Facebook’s
“Overheard at Yale” page, where it was read by some Native American
students meeting elsewhere on campus. They and some others converged outside
the conference, shouting, “Genocide is not a joke” and brandishing signs.
Apparently eager to face them was one of the alumni in the Buckley audience,
Scott C. Johnston, Yale ’82, a self-described [10] “conservative, data
geek, blogger, adjunct professor, prediction-market maven.” With the air of
a man finding what he’d come looking for, he’d leaned over to another
alumnus as the lone student protester was leaving and said, “This isn’t
over.”
Now, as the other protesters converged outside, Johnston leaned over again
and said, "They're here." Who “they” were is explained on his blog, [11]
The Naked Dollar: “Out of curiosity,” he writes disingenuously (clearly,
it was more than curiosity), “I went out to look. There were perhaps twenty
students, in high dudgeon, trying to get in to disrupt the conference (did I
mention it was about free speech?). I engaged them, which was probably
silly. ‘Why are you here?’
"’We are Native Americans and you are talking about burning down Native
American villages.’ (They looked about as Native American as Elizabeth
Warren - were they appropriating a culture?)
"’You realize, right, that no one in there is advocating burning down
villages, Native American or otherwise? That it was merely an analogy to
describe something bad?’
“Apparently they did, but that didn't matter. We said the words, and that
‘trivialized’ genocide, and that was the offense. I said, ‘You do realize
that you don't have the right not to be offended, right?’
“How wrong I was about that, I later reflected. That may be
true,Constitutionally, but I was in a ‘safe space’ where the these
delicate orchids are protected from hearing unpleasant things. The right not
to be offended now always trumps the right to free speech.”
Johnston’s observations so far are reasonable, or at least arguable. But
soon they become the conservative “free speech” campaign’s oft-repeated
talking points. As Johnston’s ideology and rhetoric got the best of him, he
began to soar:
“Teachers are now widely afraid of their own liberal students, because the
slightest slip - the absence of a trigger warning, for instance - can result
in accusations of micro-aggressions, racism, sexism, cisgenderism [12],
whateverism, and that can result in getting tossed from tenure track. The
administrators who make these decisions are afraid of the students, too,
because fundamentally, the left has become a mob, and mobs are dangerous.
These are the bullies of our time.”
Johnston wasn’t soaring alone. His post went viral on conservative sites
under headlines like “Regressive Liberalism,” and when Lukianoff appeared
on Washington, DC’s Diane Rehm show, a listener posted this comment [13]:
“Professors should tell these sensitive darlings to go pound sand if they
don't like what they are hearing. What do they expect when they graduate and
enter the real world of work, and find out their boss and co-workers don't
give a darn about their "feelings"? Or if they are discussing politics or
sports around the coffee pot? And God forbid these babies ever read, or
engage people on, this comment board. Microagressions galore! Their heads
will explode!”
This is the language of white men who are nostalgic for youths they don’t
clearly remember - they might wince to recall some of the things they did
and said at 19. Some of them may be feeling marginal in their own country
and are determined to do something about it - or to have somebody else do
something about it. In “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited,” [14]
Peter F. Gordon recalls Thedor Adorno’s and colleagues’ construction of
“a distinctive attitudinal structure, called ‘authoritarianism,’ which
consisted of nine characteristics,” including a “tendency to be on the
lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate
conventional values.”
Whatever the merits of categorizing personalities that way (Gordon questions
them), Johnston displayed that tendency energetically, and Lukianoff soon
gratified it even more when he and Nicholas Christakis, with whom he was
staying while visiting Yale, walked out into the courtyard of Christakis’
residential college to meet a group of black and Latino students who were
returning from a wrenching confrontation with Yale College Dean Jonathan
Holloway.
It was then that one of the students, a 20-year old black woman, flushed
with the anguish and excitement of the campus upheavals, instantiated
anyone’s fantasy of a “cry-bully” by hurling imprecations into
Christakis’s face, accusing him of failing “to create a place of comfort
and home” and, in practically the same breath, shouting, “Who the fuck
hired you?”
Video-cam at the ready, Lukianoff caught the outburst, which was posted [15]
quickly by Tucker Carlson’s conservative “The Daily Caller” website under
a headline, "Meet the Privileged Yale Student Who Shrieked at Her Professor,
" with photos of her and her parents' suburban Connecticut home and a note
about its $700,000-plus assessed value. Needless to say, the video went
viral, bringing the student death threats that drove her to seek police
protection and go into hiding.
The conservative free-speech campaign has drawn many other prurient scourges
of the decadent young to prowl campuses seeking the thrill of sighting a
specimen of the enemy who has become so vivid, so haunting, in their
imaginations.
Chasing the specter, they can forget about the Iraq war, the 2008 financial
meltdown, the mass killings, the road rage, the gladitorialization of
sports, the degrading, ever-more intrusive marketing, and Donald Trump’s
stampede through conventional herd of sacred political cows, all of these
horrors discrediting the neo-liberal paradigm within which the hunters have
lived and moved and had their beings. Finally, they can find a target.
Given its First Amendment absolutism, FIRE’s engagement with Yale was even
more ironic, because no government official, university administrator,
faculty committee, or, as far as I know, individual faculty member ever
threatened or effectively chilled the Christakises’ or anyone else’s
opportunity to speak and teach freely.
The only “threats” that the FIRE could cite -- and did cite loudly and
vividly enough to provoke more of them -- came from the angry black students
who posted their demands on Salovey’s door confronted Nicholas Christakis
in the courtyard. But should it really be so hard for Lukianoff and Johnston
to imagine that a 19-year-old black woman, seeing an upsurge of racist
violence and racist disenfranchisement tactics off campus, might cry out for
the refuge, caring, and resources to reckon with injustice that her
college’s own marketing promised her?
Of course, she shouldn’t be coddled but challenged to reconcile her
overwrought perceptions with complex realities. But if any of her critics
could pause to imagine how he might feel as a white student in a 93%
non-white student body, on a campus most of whose custodial and dining hall
staff were white and where most street crimes near campus were committed by
whites, mightn’t he assess a few black students’ histrionic student
reactions with a little more nuance and, frankly, a little more heart?
Instead, the calculated, viral distribution of the video of a confused and
belligerent student made it hard to avoid the impression that sick system is
eating its young. Like Inspector Clousseau in the movieCasablanca, the
“free speech” campaign wants us to be “shocked, shocked” that some
students are as intemperate as the Republican presidential nominee and that
some colleges accommodate them. True, that isn’t your Daddy’s liberalism.
But what the provocateurs of paroxysm are promoting isn’t his conservatism,
either.
If Lukianoff’s video was meant to correct the politically correct, it had
the contradictory effect of chilling the freedoms of expression that the
FIRE and Scott Johnston claim to defend even in highly offensive speech.
(“You do realize that you don't have the right not to be offended,
right?”, Johnston had said to the Native American students. And Erika
Christakis, in her open letter on Halloween costumes, had asked, “Is there
no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a
little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American
universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a
certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it
seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”)
No, universities haven’t become places of censure and prohibition, at least
not before Lukianoff took out his video-cam and used his own rights to shut
down someone else’s, a good example of what the conservative “free
speech” campaign is doing. That video and the angry Native American
students were enough to make Johnston, like alumni of other colleges that
have had similar demonstrations, some led by black and Latino students,
decide to stop funding what they see as coddled undergraduates and
weak-kneed administrators.
“This is not your Daddy’s liberalism,” Johnston told The New York Times.
“I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that” video
of the black student shouting at the professor.
A college has more than a brand. It has a mission to teach the young the
arts and disciplines of open inquiry and democratic deliberation. That
mission is sometimes compromised by immature students who disrupt civil
discourse and violate other students’ rights, even while demonstrating
against racism or sexual assault. Some professors do peddle propaganda and
impose orthodoxies instead of stimulating free inquiry. Some deans do
“guide” social life with rules that infantilize and tribunals that
short-circuit due process. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Civil
Rights has bureaucratized such “guidance” in ways, beyond my scope here,
that only make it easier to deny due process in order to advance feminist
strictures. Political correctness can be dangerous if it dominates
students’ politically and intellectually formative experiences.
But I, too, was at Yale last fall, teaching a political science seminar on
“Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy,” and although I saw “that
video,” little else that I saw would have damaged Yale’s “brand” or
liberal education’s mission had it not been so badly, willfully
misrepresented. Hundreds of white students had their first intimate
conversations about race with classmates of color. A thousand, of all
colors, joined a vibrant campus “March of Resilience.” Another thousand
convened in the chapel, where I saw them hear classmates and professors
speak from their deepest humanity, without malevolence or duplicity. As the
author of Liberal Racism and a journalist who lived among and wrote about
angry black New Yorkers for years, I know gratuitous racial “theater” when
I see it. I didn’t see much of it at Yale.
“I was disturbed by the discrepancies between what was actually happening
on campus and how it was being portrayed in the media,” said one of my
students, a young white man of classically “establishment” bearing. “It
wasn’t exactly a protest. It was a moment of education. The entire campus
was confronting collective emotions and challenges in a way I’d never
experienced. It was beautiful. And it needed to be emotional-- so it was."
Yet what many Americans know about such “moments of education” is what
they’re being shown by a campaign that’s peddling antipathy and an
ideology that condemns earnest, even if immature, students and protective
administrators but that touts “free markets” as better guarantors of
individual rights. Are they?
Morals and Dollars
“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every
perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become
factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,”
thundered Roger Kimball, [16]board chairman of the Yale Buckley Program,
board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation (one of the FIRE’s important
funders), and author of “Re-taking the University - A Battle Plan” [17] at
a black-tie dinner the Buckley Program sponsored last year in New York’s
Hotel Pierre.
But videotaping protesting students and putting others into tuxedos in
elegant hotels can’t disguise the truth that the more market-driven a
college, the more anxious it is to restrict free speech. Most deans and
trustees serve not politically correct pieties but pressures to satisfy
student “customers” and to avoid negative publicity, liability, and losses
in “brand” or “market share.”
The campaign to deflect this reality began in 1951, when William F.
Buckley’s God and Man at Yale urged alumni to roll back professors’
godless socialism. In 1953, Buckley helped found the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, [18] which trains students to counter “liberal” betrayals
[19]of “our nation's founding principles - limited government, individual
liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy,... ideas
that are rarely taught in your classroom.”
Again, though, universities are among the few places where “founding
principles” are discussed often and rigorously enough to show that, in
practice, some principles subvert others. For example, Lukianoff speaks
often and everywhere of reinvigorating “the marketplace of ideas,” [20]but
ideas in a university (and a healthy democracy) emerge from a culture of
open inquiry and expression based in mutual respect, not market exchange
values.
“You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism
disrupts culture," said Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of the American
conservative icon Whittaker Chambers, now writing a biography of William F.
Buckley, Jr., in a lecture in 2007 at the conservative American Enterprise
Institute.
Tanenhaus’ observation about the tension between today’s capitalism and
democratic or republican culture is anathema to the ultra-conservative Lynde
and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, the Earhart,
John Templeton, Koch-Brothers’ DonorsTrust (a conduit for donors for grants
not made under their own names), and other foundations that sustain
conservative think tanks like the AEI and a myriad of campus-targeting
organizations -- including FIRE, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The
David Horowitz Freedom Center (whose “Academic Bill of Rights” that would
mandate more hiring of conservative faculty and would monitor professors’
syllabi for “balance”) and Campus Watch (which tracks and condemns liberal
professors’ comments on the Middle East). These organizations stoke public
anger against political correctness as a threat to academic freedom and to
the free market economy that they keep insisting enhances it.
Their “free speech” campaign is really a culture war and a class war
carried out on several fronts by a much larger network of organizations that
are also funded by the very same foundations. The word “right wing” is
thrown around so often that I was surprised to learn just how “right-wing”
the funders of the FIRE and the other groups really are.
Harry Bradley was one of the original charter members of the far right-wing
John Birch Society [21], along with another Birch Society board member, Fred
Koch [22], the father of Koch Industries [23]' billionaire brothers and
owners, Charles [24] and David Koch [25].
Richard Mellon Scaife, progenitor of the Scaife Family foundations, attended
Deerfield Academy as a boy and got thrown out of Yale after a year and
developed a passion for advancing a conservative agenda and an avid funder
of efforts to impeach Bill Clinton. He wrote a check to FIRE for $150,000 in
2013, having donated similar amounts in 2012 and 2011, according to tax
documents posted on the foundation's website. [26] (He died in 2014, but
the Sarah Scaife Foundation, with Roger Kimball on its board, continues his
work, as do the other Scaife family foundations.)
The Bradley Foundation is one of the most aggressively, unapologetically
racist grant-makers of any great substance in America. Not only did it help
Charles Murray (with a $100,000 grant) to finish writing The Bell Curve when
even conservative groups were distancing themselves from that project; in
2010 Bradley contributed $10,000 toward putting up “voter suppression
billboards in black neighborhoods of Milwaukee that depicted a black man
behind bars above the message, “Voting Fraud is a Felony.”
But, even putting politically correct sensitivities aside in deference to
First Amendment rights, there is something so thoughtless and clueless - or
else subliminally provocative -- in Lukianoff’s analogy to “wiping out an
Indian village” quip and in the distribution of “that video” of the
overwrought black student that one can’t help but wonder if he and his
funders just slip opportunistically into targeting angry non-whites because
that boosts their campaign’s appeal to people looking for scapegoats, or if
they’re conscious racists themselves. You certainly don’t see many or any
people of color holding any staff positions at the FIRE or in the other
organizations in its network.
The foundation has won more than a million dollars [27] from Bradley andhalf
a million dollars from DonorsTrust, It had $7 million in revenue and $6
million in assets in June of 2015. Yet, basing its tax exemption on its
commitments to addressing “censorship, freedom of speech, and press
issues,” it deflects liberal and leftist criticism of its agenda by
fighting draconian campus speech codes [28]and other constraints on freedoms
of expression. It has even defended Israel-bashers [29]against some
colleges’ efforts to silence their protests as anti-Semitic hate speech,
because, as FIRE reminds us, the First Amendment protects it, at [30]least
in public universities.
Lukianoff has also gone somewhat out of his way topost appeals [30] to
“Stand Up for Global Academic Freedom,” saying that it’s “under threat
across the world from Turkey to China to the USA.” With all due respect to
slippery slopes, it’s more than a bit slippery to lump American university
bureaucracies’ encroachments on academic freedom with draconian crackdowns
by governments abroad.
Ironically, FIRE has been silent lately about David Horowitz’s efforts to
get state legislatures to enact his “Academic Bill of Rights,” which would
use government power to monitor and shape academic freedom, in clear
violation of the First Amendment. Yet David French, Lukianoff’s predecessor
as the FIRE’s president, supported Horowitz’s project in public testimony.
It’s characteristic of Lukianoff’s modus that he tells everyone he’s a
liberal Democrat and that he worked at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Never mind that he left the ACLU to lead the FIRE, whose grants come from
the tightly linked conservative foundations I’ve mentioned. His boards of
directors and advisors include well-known conservatives such as George Will
and T. Kenneth Cribb, assistant for domestic affairs to President Ronald
Reagan and a former president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The
Yale Buckley Program’s Roger Kimball is on the board of the Sarah Scaife
Foundation, one of FIRE’s chief funders, according to tax documents posted
on the foundation's website. [26]
Even Lukianoff’s big book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the
End of American Debate, was published in 2014 by the conservative Encounter
Books and has published books by Kimball, William Kristol, which is funded
at least $6 million by the Bradley Foundation.
What kind of liberal Democrat builds his work around accepting such grants,
obligations, and associations? This kind: Lukianoff, invited by The
Atlantic to explain how he’d come to write “The Coddling of the American
Mind,” chose to explain that “In the winter of 2007-08, I slipped into a
deep depression. I had struggled with bouts of depression my entire life,
many of them quite severe, but this was in a category by itself. I could not
shake the feeling that any mistake I made in my professional life-anything
short of complete success-would mean ruin; nightmare scenarios played
continually in my head.
“In January 2008, after I moved from Philadelphia to New York City to be
surrounded by family and friends, I started seeing a therapist who practiced
cognitive behavioral therapy, and began to turn a corner. I eventually
learned to question irrationally negative thoughts about myself, the people
I encountered, the future. Since then, my battles with depression have
become winnable skirmishes.
“As I was learning to identify distortions in my own thinking, I began to
recognize them in the thinking of others.” Lukianoff then cites instances
of distorted thinking in campus sensitivity exercises.
In his conversation with The Atlantic editor James Bennet about the “tidal
wave” of public reaction to the “Coddling” essay, Lukianoff says that,
“A response to the Atlantic that nearly brought me to tears because it was
so beautiful” came from someone who’d lost a sister who’d jumped off a
building. The survivor later took a class where a similar thing was
described in a work of fiction. According to Lukianoff, she wrote him that
because the professor had offered no “trigger warning” about the
description of suicide, “It was the first time she had felt normal in
years” for being “treated like everybody else.”
This brought Lukianoff to tears? Missing from FIRE’s campaign is candor not
only about his motives and modus but about his claim that protests, however
puerile, about matters such as trigger warnings and Halloween costumes
constitute serious threats to open inquiry and expression.
Undoubtedly that’s true in some of the disputes FIRE has publicized and
some of the very few legal cases it has actually taken up. But we need a
distinction between, on the one hand, defending the First Amendment against
all encroachments and, on the other hand, defending it selectively, as the
FIRE does, for ideological, propagandistic, purposes that can only weaken a
citizenry’s ability to be vigilant in protecting the First Amendment
itself.
The creeping totalitarianism that the FIRE and its enthusiasts warn about is
coming not from the kids but from the system they’ve grown up in -
neoliberal, corporatist dispensation, with its manifold and metastasizing
encroachments on individual rights, on campus and off.
The Real Enemy of Free Speech
When the FIRE and the larger conservative “free speech” campaign assail
university administrators from curbing individual rights, they often wind up
exposing but then fudging an inexorable reality: The more market-driven a
college, the more anxious it is to restrict free speech, because most deans
and trustees serve not politically correct pieties but market pressures to
satisfy student “customers” and to avoid negative publicity, liability,
and losses in “brand” or “market share.”
The real enemy of open inquiry and expression is the over-financialized,
corrupt investment that the FIRE and its funders never question and, indeed,
are out to defend.
Today’s capitalism would appall Adam Smith, and it can no longer vindicate
the old saying that “Free markets make free men.” What conservatives keep
calling “free markets” don’t accomplish that any more. But their
champions can’t let go of their determination to reconcile their commitment
to ordered liberty with their knee-jerk obeisance to market riptides that
are dissolving republican virtues and sovereignty before their eyes.
For example, the FIRE applauds the Citizens United ruling’s extension of
First Amendment-protection of political speech to business and other
corporations’ shifting whorls of anonymous investors. “If flag-burning and
nude dancing, why can’t it protect robust speech?” asked Theodore Olsen,
former solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration and counsel
for the Citizens United plaintiffs.
His subtext: Let the lefties rant, as long as the fiduciaries of shifting
whorls of anonymous corporate shareholders can drown them out with big,
expensive megaphones while the lefties get laryngitis from straining to be
heard. Money and speech are being equated here, both in the sense that money
can buy hired speakers and blast them to millions and in the sense that
money-making is permitted to “speak” in public deliberations about how to
regulate money according to human, social standards that should transcend
money itself.
Yet the Citizens United ruling says nothing about the speech rights of
workers within the very corporations whose political “speech” the ruling
protects. Irony of ironies, a lot of campus political correctness is only a
dress rehearsal for conformity to what most business-corporate
human-resources departments demand of employees these days Yet while the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education assails private universities
for restricting students’ individual rights, it would never support the
creation of a Foundation for Individual Rights in Employment in private
businesses.
The campaign’s legalistic strategy to defend speech rights (and gun rights)
on campuses can only provoke its own “progressive” targets to join it in
accelerating the transformation of cultures of dialogue and collegial
contention into rhetorical battlefields, using propaganda and provocations -
a strategy that risks destroying the village in order to save it.
That leaves even the most fair-minded, savvy university administrators in a
quandary: “I have never felt I had an adequate handle on how to reconcile
the need to protect free speech and the desire to have a decent, caring
community on the campus,” former Harvard president Derek Bok told me last
week. “My worst fear was encountering both a body of hypersensitive
students and another group determined to provoke and anger the vulnerable in
any way they could. Fortunately, that situation never arose, at least in
that extreme form.”
Conservatives are making it arise right now. It’s almost as if they’ve
forgotten how to hear themselves think. If they really cared about
individual rights in education, they’d have to start by recognizing that
the right has been dining out on the follies of American “liberals” for so
long that it has forgotten how to cook for itself and has abandoned the
kitchen to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, who’ve hi-jacked the “free
speech” campaign with Trump’s own attacks on “political correctness” and
with the Senate’s lockjaw against holding open hearings.
Shining the klieg lights of national media on hyper-sensitive students’
over-reactions to the collapse of public discourse and the bureaucratic
coping strategies of their campus elders punishes not only the students
themselves but also the “no strings-attached” alumni generosity that, like
Scott Johnston’s past donations, shielded academic freedom from donors with
narrower interests and ideological agendas.
Yet FIRE tells those alumni, [31] “Your Alma Mater is Listening: What
message are you sending?” and tells them horror stories [19] about campus
controversies. It even adds: “In addition to-or in lieu of [32]- a gift to
your school, consider a one-time or continuing gift to FIRE [33]. Your
contribution will go a long way toward fighting for the free speech rights
and other civil liberties of all college students.” If that’s not a
subversion of liberal education, what is?
Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of
"Liberal Racism" (1997) and "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the
Politics of Race in New York" (1990).
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/what-campus-free-speech-crusade-wont-say-0
Links:
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-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=gbKlP7n74sY
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nual-5Fupdate-3D1-26utm-5Freferrer-3Dhttp-253A-252F-252Ftwittercounter.com-2
52FSJohnston60-253Fv-253D4was&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&
r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQM
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define.php-3Fterm-3DCisgenderism&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&a
mp;r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=-S0_kIhgLea-7sD0W3GDN
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09_meet-2Dthe-2Dprivileged-2Dyale-2Dstudent-2Dwho-2Dshrieked-2Dat-2Dher-2Dpr
ofessor_&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB
7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&a
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[16] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.buckleyprogram.
com_-23-21Roger-2DKimballs-2DIntroduction-2Dof-2DGeorge-2DWill_c18lp_i8q6uar
641&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4
RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=
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G8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=hBqQ9OkMkfwngvx
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6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=p_AmWeHyih
FaRgfwEcaF5hk0aciXQ4zlYqOSQcl-Qcc&e=
[19]
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[20]
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[21] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_Birch_Society
[22] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fred_Koch
[23] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Industries
[24] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Charles_Koch
[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Koch
[26] http://www.scaife.com/sarah.html
[27]
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x.php_Contributions-5Fof-5Fthe-5FBradley-5FFoundation&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg
2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=
RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=phS56R93KlTaS76mTeOT1roFca
wvx1J8436WGr8wOMg&e=
[28] http://www.standupforspeech.com/
[29] https://www.thefire.org/when-race-israel-and-free-speech-roil-campus/
[30]
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1742.html
[31]
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alma-2Dmater-2Dis-2Dlistening-2Dwhat-2Dmessage-2Dare-2Dyou-2Dsending_&d=
CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s
6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=ysY_iCTG-4
nW7wACazV6U4vk5-3y3U9TIpZ_0MwJfqY&e=
[32]
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speech/
[33] http://thefire.org/donate
[34] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on What the Campus
'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
[35] http://www.alternet.org/
[36] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
What the Campus 'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
By Jim Sleeper [1] / AlterNet [2]
September 4, 2016
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Whenever American civil society has been under great stress, if not, indeed,
falling apart, self-appointed champions of the conventional wisdom and
traditional values have ginned up public paroxysms of alarm and rage at
selected internal enemies to blame for the crisis.
In the 1690s, it was the witches, hysterical women and girls whom Puritans
said had been taken by Satan. In the 1840s, it was Catholic immigrants, who
were said by a presidential candidate to be besotted with “rum, Romanism,
and rebellion.” In every decade before and since then, it has been feral
Negroes. In the 1920s, it was anarchists, Reds, and pushy Hebrews. In the
1950s, it was American Communist spies for Stalin, the Satan of that time.
In the 1960sm, it was hippies, riotous blacks, and traitorous opponents of
the Vietnam War. Since 2001, it has been American Muslims and, in 2003, it
was critics of the Iraq War.
Now a new cohort of crusaders has found a new internal enemy: coddled,
petulant college students and some of their professors, who, we’re being
told, are forcing university administrators to silence and punish others who
exercise freedoms of inquiry and expression in ways that offend and hurt the
complainers.
We’re also being told that these “cry-bullies” of “political
correctness” are winning such protections by perpetrating what one of their
supposed, much-ballyhooed, victims, former Harvard President Lawrence
Summers, calls a “creeping totalitarianism” on our nation’s campuses.
They’re destroying the freedoms of expression and open inquiry that a
liberal education should cultivate in students, not protect them against.
If this new paroxysm has a manifesto, it’s “The Coddling of the American
Mind [3],” with a scarifying subtitle: “In the name of emotional
well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from
words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for
education-and mental health.”
It was written by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education [4] (the FIRE), and Jonathan Haidt, a business
psychologist at New York University and, like Lukianoff, an itinerant
preacher of their jeremiad against over-protective parenting and pedagogy
that, although neither man likes to say it explicitly, is “liberal” in the
colloquial and pejorative sense of that term.
Literally millions of American college alumni have fallen for this account
of where the threat to liberal education is coming from. The Atlantic rode
the tidal wave of the 500k-plus shares that “The Coddling” yielded,
following up with a videotaped conversation [5] between Lukianoff and the
magazine’s then-editor James Bennet (now the New York Times’
editorial-page editor); with brief accounts by Lukianoff and Haidt of how
they’d come to write the essay; with an essay by Yale Child Psychologist
Erika Christakis, who had become one of the FIRE’s supposed martyrs,
silenced by rampaging hordes of the politically correct on the altar of free
speech.
The more closely I’ve looked at this new “enemy” of free speech on
campus, the more I’ve been drawn -- and invite you to come along with me -
to look at the self-professed defenders of individual rights in education
who’ve been warning us about this scourge. Lukianoff has been a tactically
brilliant point man for a larger, conservative campus campaign of which the
FIRE is decidedly a part by virtue of its funding, many of its personnel,
and, most importantly, its strategy and tactics.
I’ve begun this examination briefly today [6] (Sept. 3, 2015) in the New
York Times, but there’s only so much one can report in 900 words. So, here
goes.
Lukianoff has been indefatigable, almost manic, rushing from the
foundation’s lavishly appointed suites on Walnut Street in Philadelphia to
campuses and green rooms across the country. Piously he brandishes First
Amendment arguments to portray politically correct students and the
administrators who indulge them as serious threats to open inquiry and
expression.
But I, on the other hand, having witnessed the discrepancy between what the
FIRE chose to highlight at one of those campuses, Yale, fall and what was
actually going on there in a huge, college-wide reckoning with race and
other matters, found Lukianoff to be more a propagandist and provocateur
than a tribune of individual rights in education.
How Paroxysms Work
Let me say first that the more I’ve looked at crusades of this kind, the
more I’ve been struck by similarities between this one and the earlier
paroxysms I’ve mentioned:
● Always -- and no matter whether the orchestrators of public spasms
against internal traitors sound their alarms impulsively and demagogically
or coolly and strategically, they get tons of support from less-talented and
fortunate people who are frightened, too, by a sense that their society is
unravelling. Witch-hunters, lynch-mobs, McCarthyite anti-Communists, white
supremacist “militia” members, and cheerleaders and apologists in the
media emerge in great numbers, out of nowhere, as the paroxysms approach
their peaks.
● Always, these spasms of fear and loathing grip the public precisely when
the conventional wisdom is unraveling on its own account, not because of any
serious damage done to it by the groups being targeted. The scapegoating
works because it diverts an increasingly nervous public’s attention from
deeper, broader dangers that most people fear to face head-on - dangers
inherent the blunders and deceits of the conventional wisdom’s own
champions, who most of us have a stake in believing and following at least
some of the time.
So the crusaders and their followers find an almost seductive, even
thrilling relief and release in assailing the more-vulnerable targets being
presented to them. Some even find the prospect of naming, sighting, and
punishing the enemy so thrilling that they go right out and join the hunt
for prey that can be held up plausibly as proof of the disloyalty and
danger: Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as
Jewish Communist spies, Willie Horton and O.J. Simpson as feral blacks, and
so on. It works in the tawdry, predictable ways that leaders of these
rituals understand only too well.
● Once a public paroxysm has been exposed to sunlight and has begun to
subside, many people begin to regard its chief witch-hunters, commie
hunters, and prurient scourges of decadent youth as more hysterical,
sinister, and destructive of their own society than their scapegoated prey
ever were.
That new clarity can prompt regret and even penitence among the
scapegoaters. One Sunday in 1697, seven years the last execution of a witch
in Salem, Massachusetts, Judge Samuel Sewall, who'd presided over the
trials, stood silently, head bowed, in Boston's Old South Meeting House as
the pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from him confessing his "guilt
contracted... at Salem" and desired "to take the blame and shame of it,
asking... that God... would powerfully defend him against all temptations
for Sin for the future...."
Senator Joe McCarthy never asked forgiveness for brandishing his largely
fictitious lists of “Communists” in government and universities and for
ruining so many lives and striking terror into many others, but he fell
apart under scrutiny. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, hard-driving
architect of a war in Vietnam that began with the largely fabricated Gulf of
Tonkin incident and continued with fraudulent warnings of danger to the Free
World, confessed tearfully in “The Fog of War” that the war was undertaken
with deceit and delusion. Republican political operative Lee Atwater, whose
television ads hyping feral blacks helped cost Democratic presidential
candidate Michael Dukakis the 1988 election, begged forgiveness from
African-Americans on his deathbed.
My reading of Greg Lukianoff, the new paroxysm’s ring-master, is that he’
ll end up giving us a sad demonstration of the same. In the course of this
essay, I’ll suggest several reasons why, and why the paroxysm about
political correctness is doomed.
Principles vs. Provocations
In November, 2015, Lukianoff was invited to Yale by Roger Kimball, chair of
the board of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program there and a member of the
board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, one of the substantial funders of
Lukianoff’s FIRE. Also inviting Lukianoff to Yale that day were Professor
Nicholas Christakis and his wife Erika Christakis, “free speech” crusaders
who’d already hosted Lukianoff at Harvard when they’d taught there in
2013, when the FIRE named Harvard one of the ten worst colleges for free
speech in America.
At Yale last November, Erika Christakis had just ignited a free-speech
controversy with a public letter to students in which she criticized the
university’s council of cultural-center advisors for cautioning against
wearing culturally offensive Halloween costumes, such as those involving
wearing blackface or feathered Native American headdresses. To Christakis,
this was bureaucratic overreach, but hundreds of students signed an open
letter condemning her for underestimating the sensitivities of those who
might be offended.
I’ve described this controversy at some length here [7] in AlterNet, but
it’s worth noting that all of these open letters affirmed everyone’s
rights to free expression. As Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American
studies, history and African-American studies at Yale,told [8]The New York
Times, the FIRE’s spin, and the subsequent storm of media coverage, was “a
complete misconstruction of what happened. The cultural affairs committee
made its statement about Halloween costumes, The Christakises critiqued
that; the students critiqued them. Then everyone in the world criticized the
students. From beginning to end, it was never a matter of [suppressing] free
speech.”
No one at Yale was censured or punished by any government agency or by any
administrator, faculty committee or, as far as I know, any individual
faculty member.
No one, at any time, demanded or even suggested that Erika Christakis stop
teaching her popular course on early childhood education. At one point in
the controversy, though, an angry, black-led student group, Next Yale,
posted a list of demands on President Salovey’s door at midnight, among
them a demand that the Christakises be dismissed as heads of one of Yale’s
residential colleges. That demand was echoed vituperatively by an immature
student who yelled it right into Nicholas Christakis’ face in an open
confrontation in the residential courtyard.
Salovey promptly reaffirmed his faith in the Christakises’ “deep
dedication to undergraduates,” and the demand that they be dismissed as
heads of their residential college died. But they took leaves of absence and
cancelled their spring courses as their friend Lukianoff and the FIRE
constructed and dramatized a false narrative, peddled by many in the media,
casting Erika Christakis as a martyr to political correctness on the altar
of free speech.
I’ve told the truth about that narrative here [7] at AlterNet and won’t do
it again in this essay. (In an address [9] to Yale’s freshmen this year,
President Peter Salovey, too, assailed what he called “false narratives”
about freedom of speech at Yale and other colleges, although he didn’t
mention any one by name.) Since then I’ve learned more about Lukianoff’s
involvement in generating such narratives, and now is the time to share and
assess it, the better to help today’s paroxysm wind down.
At the Buckley Program’s free-speech conference, Lukianoff delighted a
pre-registered audience by quipping that, to hear recent student
denunciations of Erika Christakis’ defense of the right to wear blackface
and Native American headdresses on Halloween, “you would have thought
someone wiped out an entire Indian village.”
According to a student who’d registered for the conference because he was
interested in freedoms of speech but had no conservative preconceptions, the
tone for the audience’s response had already been set by its mostly older,
conservative Yale alumni members - decent, angry, somewhat clueless men whom
the speakers engaged by preaching to the choir, their implicit message being
that “We all know what we all know has happened to this college.”
By making “what has happened” explicit, Lukianoff’s quip prompted a burst
of laughter that released a pent-up anger because his listeners were
relieved to hear someone say what they, hemmed in by habitual decency or
inhibition, had been afraid to say themselves.
But then a student who’d slipped into the audience without registering got
up and demanded to know what was so funny about genocide. He put up some
posters he’d been carrying around campus urging students to “stand with
women of color.”
As he was escorted out by security, the other student I’ve mentioned posted
Lukianoff’s remark about wiping out an Indian village on Facebook’s
“Overheard at Yale” page, where it was read by some Native American
students meeting elsewhere on campus. They and some others converged outside
the conference, shouting, “Genocide is not a joke” and brandishing signs.
Apparently eager to face them was one of the alumni in the Buckley audience,
Scott C. Johnston, Yale ’82, a self-described [10] “conservative, data
geek, blogger, adjunct professor, prediction-market maven.” With the air of
a man finding what he’d come looking for, he’d leaned over to another
alumnus as the lone student protester was leaving and said, “This isn’t
over.”
Now, as the other protesters converged outside, Johnston leaned over again
and said, "They're here." Who “they” were is explained on his blog, [11]
The Naked Dollar: “Out of curiosity,” he writes disingenuously (clearly,
it was more than curiosity), “I went out to look. There were perhaps twenty
students, in high dudgeon, trying to get in to disrupt the conference (did I
mention it was about free speech?). I engaged them, which was probably
silly. ‘Why are you here?’
"’We are Native Americans and you are talking about burning down Native
American villages.’ (They looked about as Native American as Elizabeth
Warren - were they appropriating a culture?)
"’You realize, right, that no one in there is advocating burning down
villages, Native American or otherwise? That it was merely an analogy to
describe something bad?’
“Apparently they did, but that didn't matter. We said the words, and that
‘trivialized’ genocide, and that was the offense. I said, ‘You do realize
that you don't have the right not to be offended, right?’
“How wrong I was about that, I later reflected. That may be
true,Constitutionally, but I was in a ‘safe space’ where the these
delicate orchids are protected from hearing unpleasant things. The right not
to be offended now always trumps the right to free speech.”
Johnston’s observations so far are reasonable, or at least arguable. But
soon they become the conservative “free speech” campaign’s oft-repeated
talking points. As Johnston’s ideology and rhetoric got the best of him, he
began to soar:
“Teachers are now widely afraid of their own liberal students, because the
slightest slip - the absence of a trigger warning, for instance - can result
in accusations of micro-aggressions, racism, sexism, cisgenderism [12],
whateverism, and that can result in getting tossed from tenure track. The
administrators who make these decisions are afraid of the students, too,
because fundamentally, the left has become a mob, and mobs are dangerous.
These are the bullies of our time.”
Johnston wasn’t soaring alone. His post went viral on conservative sites
under headlines like “Regressive Liberalism,” and when Lukianoff appeared
on Washington, DC’s Diane Rehm show, a listener posted this Error!
Hyperlink reference not valid. [13]:
“Professors should tell these sensitive darlings to go pound sand if they
don't like what they are hearing. What do they expect when they graduate and
enter the real world of work, and find out their boss and co-workers don't
give a darn about their "feelings"? Or if they are discussing politics or
sports around the coffee pot? And God forbid these babies ever read, or
engage people on, this comment board. Microagressions galore! Their heads
will explode!”
This is the language of white men who are nostalgic for youths they don’t
clearly remember - they might wince to recall some of the things they did
and said at 19. Some of them may be feeling marginal in their own country
and are determined to do something about it - or to have somebody else do
something about it. In “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited,” [14]
Peter F. Gordon recalls Thedor Adorno’s and colleagues’ construction of
“a distinctive attitudinal structure, called ‘authoritarianism,’ which
consisted of nine characteristics,” including a “tendency to be on the
lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate
conventional values.”
Whatever the merits of categorizing personalities that way (Gordon questions
them), Johnston displayed that tendency energetically, and Lukianoff soon
gratified it even more when he and Nicholas Christakis, with whom he was
staying while visiting Yale, walked out into the courtyard of Christakis’
residential college to meet a group of black and Latino students who were
returning from a wrenching confrontation with Yale College Dean Jonathan
Holloway.
It was then that one of the students, a 20-year old black woman, flushed
with the anguish and excitement of the campus upheavals, instantiated
anyone’s fantasy of a “cry-bully” by hurling imprecations into
Christakis’s face, accusing him of failing “to create a place of comfort
and home” and, in practically the same breath, shouting, “Who the fuck
hired you?”
Video-cam at the ready, Lukianoff caught the outburst, which was posted [15]
quickly by Tucker Carlson’s conservative “The Daily Caller” website under
a headline, "Meet the Privileged Yale Student Who Shrieked at Her Professor,
" with photos of her and her parents' suburban Connecticut home and a note
about its $700,000-plus assessed value. Needless to say, the video went
viral, bringing the student death threats that drove her to seek police
protection and go into hiding.
The conservative free-speech campaign has drawn many other prurient scourges
of the decadent young to prowl campuses seeking the thrill of sighting a
specimen of the enemy who has become so vivid, so haunting, in their
imaginations.
Chasing the specter, they can forget about the Iraq war, the 2008 financial
meltdown, the mass killings, the road rage, the gladitorialization of
sports, the degrading, ever-more intrusive marketing, and Donald Trump’s
stampede through conventional herd of sacred political cows, all of these
horrors discrediting the neo-liberal paradigm within which the hunters have
lived and moved and had their beings. Finally, they can find a target.
Given its First Amendment absolutism, FIRE’s engagement with Yale was even
more ironic, because no government official, university administrator,
faculty committee, or, as far as I know, individual faculty member ever
threatened or effectively chilled the Christakises’ or anyone else’s
opportunity to speak and teach freely.
The only “threats” that the FIRE could cite -- and did cite loudly and
vividly enough to provoke more of them -- came from the angry black students
who posted their demands on Salovey’s door confronted Nicholas Christakis
in the courtyard. But should it really be so hard for Lukianoff and Johnston
to imagine that a 19-year-old black woman, seeing an upsurge of racist
violence and racist disenfranchisement tactics off campus, might cry out for
the refuge, caring, and resources to reckon with injustice that her
college’s own marketing promised her?
Of course, she shouldn’t be coddled but challenged to reconcile her
overwrought perceptions with complex realities. But if any of her critics
could pause to imagine how he might feel as a white student in a 93%
non-white student body, on a campus most of whose custodial and dining hall
staff were white and where most street crimes near campus were committed by
whites, mightn’t he assess a few black students’ histrionic student
reactions with a little more nuance and, frankly, a little more heart?
Instead, the calculated, viral distribution of the video of a confused and
belligerent student made it hard to avoid the impression that sick system is
eating its young. Like Inspector Clousseau in the movieCasablanca, the
“free speech” campaign wants us to be “shocked, shocked” that some
students are as intemperate as the Republican presidential nominee and that
some colleges accommodate them. True, that isn’t your Daddy’s liberalism.
But what the provocateurs of paroxysm are promoting isn’t his conservatism,
either.
If Lukianoff’s video was meant to correct the politically correct, it had
the contradictory effect of chilling the freedoms of expression that the
FIRE and Scott Johnston claim to defend even in highly offensive speech.
(“You do realize that you don't have the right not to be offended,
right?”, Johnston had said to the Native American students. And Erika
Christakis, in her open letter on Halloween costumes, had asked, “Is there
no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a
little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American
universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a
certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it
seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”)
No, universities haven’t become places of censure and prohibition, at least
not before Lukianoff took out his video-cam and used his own rights to shut
down someone else’s, a good example of what the conservative “free
speech” campaign is doing. That video and the angry Native American
students were enough to make Johnston, like alumni of other colleges that
have had similar demonstrations, some led by black and Latino students,
decide to stop funding what they see as coddled undergraduates and
weak-kneed administrators.
“This is not your Daddy’s liberalism,” Johnston told The New York Times.
“I don’t think anything has damaged Yale’s brand quite like that” video
of the black student shouting at the professor.
A college has more than a brand. It has a mission to teach the young the
arts and disciplines of open inquiry and democratic deliberation. That
mission is sometimes compromised by immature students who disrupt civil
discourse and violate other students’ rights, even while demonstrating
against racism or sexual assault. Some professors do peddle propaganda and
impose orthodoxies instead of stimulating free inquiry. Some deans do
“guide” social life with rules that infantilize and tribunals that
short-circuit due process. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Civil
Rights has bureaucratized such “guidance” in ways, beyond my scope here,
that only make it easier to deny due process in order to advance feminist
strictures. Political correctness can be dangerous if it dominates
students’ politically and intellectually formative experiences.
But I, too, was at Yale last fall, teaching a political science seminar on
“Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy,” and although I saw “that
video,” little else that I saw would have damaged Yale’s “brand” or
liberal education’s mission had it not been so badly, willfully
misrepresented. Hundreds of white students had their first intimate
conversations about race with classmates of color. A thousand, of all
colors, joined a vibrant campus “March of Resilience.” Another thousand
convened in the chapel, where I saw them hear classmates and professors
speak from their deepest humanity, without malevolence or duplicity. As the
author of Liberal Racism and a journalist who lived among and wrote about
angry black New Yorkers for years, I know gratuitous racial “theater” when
I see it. I didn’t see much of it at Yale.
“I was disturbed by the discrepancies between what was actually happening
on campus and how it was being portrayed in the media,” said one of my
students, a young white man of classically “establishment” bearing. “It
wasn’t exactly a protest. It was a moment of education. The entire campus
was confronting collective emotions and challenges in a way I’d never
experienced. It was beautiful. And it needed to be emotional-- so it was."
Yet what many Americans know about such “moments of education” is what
they’re being shown by a campaign that’s peddling antipathy and an
ideology that condemns earnest, even if immature, students and protective
administrators but that touts “free markets” as better guarantors of
individual rights. Are they?
Morals and Dollars
“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every
perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become
factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,”
thundered Roger Kimball, [16]board chairman of the Yale Buckley Program,
board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation (one of the FIRE’s important
funders), and author of “Re-taking the University - A Battle Plan” [17] at
a black-tie dinner the Buckley Program sponsored last year in New York’s
Hotel Pierre.
But videotaping protesting students and putting others into tuxedos in
elegant hotels can’t disguise the truth that the more market-driven a
college, the more anxious it is to restrict free speech. Most deans and
trustees serve not politically correct pieties but pressures to satisfy
student “customers” and to avoid negative publicity, liability, and losses
in “brand” or “market share.”
The campaign to deflect this reality began in 1951, when William F.
Buckley’s God and Man at Yale urged alumni to roll back professors’
godless socialism. In 1953, Buckley helped found the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, [18] which trains students to counter “liberal” betrayals
[19]of “our nation's founding principles - limited government, individual
liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy,... ideas
that are rarely taught in your classroom.”
Again, though, universities are among the few places where “founding
principles” are discussed often and rigorously enough to show that, in
practice, some principles subvert others. For example, Lukianoff speaks
often and everywhere of reinvigorating “the marketplace of ideas,” [20]but
ideas in a university (and a healthy democracy) emerge from a culture of
open inquiry and expression based in mutual respect, not market exchange
values.
“You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism
disrupts culture," said Sam Tanenhaus, biographer of the American
conservative icon Whittaker Chambers, now writing a biography of William F.
Buckley, Jr., in a lecture in 2007 at the conservative American Enterprise
Institute.
Tanenhaus’ observation about the tension between today’s capitalism and
democratic or republican culture is anathema to the ultra-conservative Lynde
and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, the Earhart,
John Templeton, Koch-Brothers’ DonorsTrust (a conduit for donors for grants
not made under their own names), and other foundations that sustain
conservative think tanks like the AEI and a myriad of campus-targeting
organizations -- including FIRE, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The
David Horowitz Freedom Center (whose “Academic Bill of Rights” that would
mandate more hiring of conservative faculty and would monitor professors’
syllabi for “balance”) and Campus Watch (which tracks and condemns liberal
professors’ comments on the Middle East). These organizations stoke public
anger against political correctness as a threat to academic freedom and to
the free market economy that they keep insisting enhances it.
Their “free speech” campaign is really a culture war and a class war
carried out on several fronts by a much larger network of organizations that
are also funded by the very same foundations. The word “right wing” is
thrown around so often that I was surprised to learn just how “right-wing”
the funders of the FIRE and the other groups really are.
Harry Bradley was one of the original charter members of the far right-wing
John Birch Society [21], along with another Birch Society board member, Fred
Koch [22], the father of Koch Industries [23]' billionaire brothers and
owners, Charles [24] and David Koch [25].
Richard Mellon Scaife, progenitor of the Scaife Family foundations, attended
Deerfield Academy as a boy and got thrown out of Yale after a year and
developed a passion for advancing a conservative agenda and an avid funder
of efforts to impeach Bill Clinton. He wrote a check to FIRE for $150,000 in
2013, having donated similar amounts in 2012 and 2011, according to tax
documents posted on the foundation's website. [26] (He died in 2014, but the
Sarah Scaife Foundation, with Roger Kimball on its board, continues his
work, as do the other Scaife family foundations.)
The Bradley Foundation is one of the most aggressively, unapologetically
racist grant-makers of any great substance in America. Not only did it help
Charles Murray (with a $100,000 grant) to finish writing The Bell Curve when
even conservative groups were distancing themselves from that project; in
2010 Bradley contributed $10,000 toward putting up “voter suppression
billboards in black neighborhoods of Milwaukee that depicted a black man
behind bars above the message, “Voting Fraud is a Felony.”
But, even putting politically correct sensitivities aside in deference to
First Amendment rights, there is something so thoughtless and clueless - or
else subliminally provocative -- in Lukianoff’s analogy to “wiping out an
Indian village” quip and in the distribution of “that video” of the
overwrought black student that one can’t help but wonder if he and his
funders just slip opportunistically into targeting angry non-whites because
that boosts their campaign’s appeal to people looking for scapegoats, or if
they’re conscious racists themselves. You certainly don’t see many or any
people of color holding any staff positions at the FIRE or in the other
organizations in its network.
The foundation has won more than a million dollars [27] from Bradley andhalf
a million dollars from DonorsTrust, It had $7 million in revenue and $6
million in assets in June of 2015. Yet, basing its tax exemption on its
commitments to addressing “censorship, freedom of speech, and press
issues,” it deflects liberal and leftist criticism of its agenda by
fighting draconian campus speech codes [28]and other constraints on freedoms
of expression. It has even defended Israel-bashers [29]against some
colleges’ efforts to silence their protests as anti-Semitic hate speech,
because, as FIRE reminds us, the First Amendment protects it,
athttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/sign-up-to-stand-up-for-g_b_7
671742.html [30]least in public universities.
Lukianoff has also gone somewhat out of his way topost appeals [30] to
“Stand Up for Global Academic Freedom,” saying that it’s “under threat
across the world from Turkey to China to the USA.” With all due respect to
slippery slopes, it’s more than a bit slippery to lump American university
bureaucracies’ encroachments on academic freedom with draconian crackdowns
by governments abroad.
Ironically, FIRE has been silent lately about David Horowitz’s efforts to
get state legislatures to enact his “Academic Bill of Rights,” which would
use government power to monitor and shape academic freedom, in clear
violation of the First Amendment. Yet David French, Lukianoff’s predecessor
as the FIRE’s president, supported Horowitz’s project in public testimony.
It’s characteristic of Lukianoff’s modus that he tells everyone he’s a
liberal Democrat and that he worked at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Never mind that he left the ACLU to lead the FIRE, whose grants come from
the tightly linked conservative foundations I’ve mentioned. His boards of
directors and advisors include well-known conservatives such as George Will
and T. Kenneth Cribb, assistant for domestic affairs to President Ronald
Reagan and a former president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The
Yale Buckley Program’s Roger Kimball is on the board of the Sarah Scaife
Foundation, one of FIRE’s chief funders, according to tax documents posted
on the foundation's website. [26]
Even Lukianoff’s big book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the
End of American Debate, was published in 2014 by the conservative Encounter
Books and has published books by Kimball, William Kristol, which is funded
at least $6 million by the Bradley Foundation.
What kind of liberal Democrat builds his work around accepting such grants,
obligations, and associations? This kind: Lukianoff, invited by The Atlantic
to explain how he’d come to write “The Coddling of the American Mind,”
chose to explain that “In the winter of 2007-08, I slipped into a deep
depression. I had struggled with bouts of depression my entire life, many of
them quite severe, but this was in a category by itself. I could not shake
the feeling that any mistake I made in my professional life-anything short
of complete success-would mean ruin; nightmare scenarios played continually
in my head.
“In January 2008, after I moved from Philadelphia to New York City to be
surrounded by family and friends, I started seeing a therapist who practiced
cognitive behavioral therapy, and began to turn a corner. I eventually
learned to question irrationally negative thoughts about myself, the people
I encountered, the future. Since then, my battles with depression have
become winnable skirmishes.
“As I was learning to identify distortions in my own thinking, I began to
recognize them in the thinking of others.” Lukianoff then cites instances
of distorted thinking in campus sensitivity exercises.
In his conversation with The Atlantic editor James Bennet about the “tidal
wave” of public reaction to the “Coddling” essay, Lukianoff says that,
“A response to the Atlantic that nearly brought me to tears because it was
so beautiful” came from someone who’d lost a sister who’d jumped off a
building. The survivor later took a class where a similar thing was
described in a work of fiction. According to Lukianoff, she wrote him that
because the professor had offered no “trigger warning” about the
description of suicide, “It was the first time she had felt normal in
years” for being “treated like everybody else.”
This brought Lukianoff to tears? Missing from FIRE’s campaign is candor not
only about his motives and modus but about his claim that protests, however
puerile, about matters such as trigger warnings and Halloween costumes
constitute serious threats to open inquiry and expression.
Undoubtedly that’s true in some of the disputes FIRE has publicized and
some of the very few legal cases it has actually taken up. But we need a
distinction between, on the one hand, defending the First Amendment against
all encroachments and, on the other hand, defending it selectively, as the
FIRE does, for ideological, propagandistic, purposes that can only weaken a
citizenry’s ability to be vigilant in protecting the First Amendment
itself.
The creeping totalitarianism that the FIRE and its enthusiasts warn about is
coming not from the kids but from the system they’ve grown up in -
neoliberal, corporatist dispensation, with its manifold and metastasizing
encroachments on individual rights, on campus and off.
The Real Enemy of Free Speech
When the FIRE and the larger conservative “free speech” campaign assail
university administrators from curbing individual rights, they often wind up
exposing but then fudging an inexorable reality: The more market-driven a
college, the more anxious it is to restrict free speech, because most deans
and trustees serve not politically correct pieties but market pressures to
satisfy student “customers” and to avoid negative publicity, liability,
and losses in “brand” or “market share.”
The real enemy of open inquiry and expression is the over-financialized,
corrupt investment that the FIRE and its funders never question and, indeed,
are out to defend.
Today’s capitalism would appall Adam Smith, and it can no longer vindicate
the old saying that “Free markets make free men.” What conservatives keep
calling “free markets” don’t accomplish that any more. But their
champions can’t let go of their determination to reconcile their commitment
to ordered liberty with their knee-jerk obeisance to market riptides that
are dissolving republican virtues and sovereignty before their eyes.
For example, the FIRE applauds the Citizens United ruling’s extension of
First Amendment-protection of political speech to business and other
corporations’ shifting whorls of anonymous investors. “If flag-burning and
nude dancing, why can’t it protect robust speech?” asked Theodore Olsen,
former solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration and counsel
for the Citizens United plaintiffs.
His subtext: Let the lefties rant, as long as the fiduciaries of shifting
whorls of anonymous corporate shareholders can drown them out with big,
expensive megaphones while the lefties get laryngitis from straining to be
heard. Money and speech are being equated here, both in the sense that money
can buy hired speakers and blast them to millions and in the sense that
money-making is permitted to “speak” in public deliberations about how to
regulate money according to human, social standards that should transcend
money itself.
Yet the Citizens United ruling says nothing about the speech rights of
workers within the very corporations whose political “speech” the ruling
protects. Irony of ironies, a lot of campus political correctness is only a
dress rehearsal for conformity to what most business-corporate
human-resources departments demand of employees these days Yet while the
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education assails private universities
for restricting students’ individual rights, it would never support the
creation of a Foundation for Individual Rights in Employment in private
businesses.
The campaign’s legalistic strategy to defend speech rights (and gun rights)
on campuses can only provoke its own “progressive” targets to join it in
accelerating the transformation of cultures of dialogue and collegial
contention into rhetorical battlefields, using propaganda and provocations -
a strategy that risks destroying the village in order to save it.
That leaves even the most fair-minded, savvy university administrators in a
quandary: “I have never felt I had an adequate handle on how to reconcile
the need to protect free speech and the desire to have a decent, caring
community on the campus,” former Harvard president Derek Bok told me last
week. “My worst fear was encountering both a body of hypersensitive
students and another group determined to provoke and anger the vulnerable in
any way they could. Fortunately, that situation never arose, at least in
that extreme form.”
Conservatives are making it arise right now. It’s almost as if they’ve
forgotten how to hear themselves think. If they really cared about
individual rights in education, they’d have to start by recognizing that
the right has been dining out on the follies of American “liberals” for so
long that it has forgotten how to cook for itself and has abandoned the
kitchen to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, who’ve hi-jacked the “free
speech” campaign with Trump’s own attacks on “political correctness” and
with the Senate’s lockjaw against holding open hearings.
Shining the klieg lights of national media on hyper-sensitive students’
over-reactions to the collapse of public discourse and the bureaucratic
coping strategies of their campus elders punishes not only the students
themselves but also the “no strings-attached” alumni generosity that, like
Scott Johnston’s past donations, shielded academic freedom from donors with
narrower interests and ideological agendas.
Yet FIRE tells those alumni, [31] “Your Alma Mater is Listening: What
message are you sending?” and tells them horror stories [19] about campus
controversies. It even adds: “In addition to-or in lieu of [32]- a gift to
your school, consider a one-time or continuing gift to FIRE [33]. Your
contribution will go a long way toward fighting for the free speech rights
and other civil liberties of all college students.” If that’s not a
subversion of liberal education, what is?
Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of
"Liberal Racism" (1997) and "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the
Politics of Race in New York" (1990).
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [34]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/what-campus-free-speech-crusade-wont-say-0
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jim-sleeper
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-amer
ican-mind/399356/
[4]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.thefire.org_&d=C
wMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6
-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=gbKlP7n74sY
m45m1ozg3jTiqgFZy-lqQR17klNyJvv8&e=
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwMeZLh1C8E
[6]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/political-correctness-and-i
ts-real-enemies.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-
heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right
-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0
[7]
http://www.alternet.org/education/blame-campus-liberals-campaign-targets-yal
e
[8]
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/education/edlife/fire-first-amendment-on-c
ampus-free-speech.html?_r=0
[9]
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/08/27/in-freshman-address-salovey-rejects
-false-narratives/
[10]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__twittercounter.com_SJohn
ston60-3Fv-3D4-26utm-5Fexpid-3D102679131-2D102.NhrC1QwMQ3O8woV72oXJig.4-26ma
nual-5Fupdate-3D1-26utm-5Freferrer-3Dhttp-253A-252F-252Ftwittercounter.com-2
52FSJohnston60-253Fv-253D4was&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&
r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQM
UQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=DNjabD5wpnnEAre4SmbvJX1-P25NgNg9vshUjRdui-8&e=
[11]
http://thenakeddollar.blogspot.com/2015/11/yale-at-free-speech-crossroads.ht
ml
[12]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.urbandictionary.com_
define.php-3Fterm-3DCisgenderism&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&a
mp;r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=-S0_kIhgLea-7sD0W3GDN
iHV_ttnZtP1cFgthgo_UKg&s=KVkoX_aOAwF8KyihyoU3533B_HUurOzxo-Kht4KOI_I&
;e=
[13] http://There's a real enemy to free speech, but you're not hearing
about it.
[14]
http://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-
revisited-reading-adorno-in-the-age-of-trump/
[15]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__dailycaller.com_2015_11_
09_meet-2Dthe-2Dprivileged-2Dyale-2Dstudent-2Dwho-2Dshrieked-2Dat-2Dher-2Dpr
ofessor_&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB
7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&a
mp;s=7wDcE2diE3XOmN7No9b4bfr4r41xzAK3g17c5zZWSSE&e=
[16] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.buckleyprogram.
com_-23-21Roger-2DKimballs-2DIntroduction-2Dof-2DGeorge-2DWill_c18lp_i8q6uar
641&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4
RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=
KsvYC9xheVyNXpq3J6mWKLpNpE9PKUCCkhsZ9nx_c-o&e=
[17]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.newcriterion.com_art
icles.cfm_retaking-2Dthe-2Duniversity-2Da-2Dbattle-2Dplan-2D1319&d=CwMFa
Q&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-Fgp
G8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=hBqQ9OkMkfwngvx
0k0NbTCv4CRjcASVlRocvjBgcm5Y&e=
[18]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__-2520www.isi.org_&d=
CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s
6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=p_AmWeHyih
FaRgfwEcaF5hk0aciXQ4zlYqOSQcl-Qcc&e=
[19]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.thecollegefix.com_po
st_27330_&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmj
B7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&
amp;s=gaoWA70KyRkeMEtKC0Wj0V4XjimYTCzZyB71kfVO6CU&e=
[20]
https://www.law.uconn.edu/calendar/event/2016/04/25/freedom-speech-or-freedo
m-speech-defending-marketplace-ideas-american-0
[21] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/John_Birch_Society
[22] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fred_Koch
[23] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Industries
[24] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Charles_Koch
[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Koch
[26] http://www.scaife.com/sarah.html
[27]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.sourcewatch.org_inde
x.php_Contributions-5Fof-5Fthe-5FBradley-5FFoundation&d=CwMFaQ&c=-dg
2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s6-FgpG8zw&m=
RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=phS56R93KlTaS76mTeOT1roFca
wvx1J8436WGr8wOMg&e=
[28] http://www.standupforspeech.com/
[29] https://www.thefire.org/when-race-israel-and-free-speech-roil-campus/
[30]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/sign-up-to-stand-up-for-g_b_767
1742.html
[31]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.thefire.org_your-2D
alma-2Dmater-2Dis-2Dlistening-2Dwhat-2Dmessage-2Dare-2Dyou-2Dsending_&d=
CwMFaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=nTkoE3YtEebE9f2jmjB7Zlw4RWz8yGc-2s
6-FgpG8zw&m=RVAJB3NzDJVLsVquX7nSHNQMUQXu9WuI7KGbgjANTMU&s=ysY_iCTG-4
nW7wACazV6U4vk5-3y3U9TIpZ_0MwJfqY&e=
[32]
https://www.thefire.org/stop-supporting-universities-that-dont-support-free-
speech/
[33] http://thefire.org/donate
[34] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on What the Campus
'Free Speech' Crusade Won't Say
[35] http://www.alternet.org/
[36] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
