College free-speech controversies, I fear, will rage on because opposing sides talk past each other.
On one side are those who insist that speech is simply free — no ifs, ands, or buts. These are often the same people who insist that markets are free, disregarding, in both arenas, that society isn’t made up only of individuals but also of structures and histories that give advantage to the elite while oppressing poor people and ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities.
Those most disadvantaged by so-called free speech insist that we consider its costs, and they see certain ideas as acts of symbolic violence. They consider blocking it a form of self-defense. When hate crimes are on the rise, when anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment is in the wind, to tolerate bigotry is to invite brutalization, the reasoning goes.
In fact, everyone — right, left, and center — can see the costs of speech when it is directed at them and their sense of safety in the world.
After all, if the right really believes we should all be hearty enough to consider views we find abhorrent, why did it cast off one of its media darlings? Free speech was the right’s mantra with regard to its golden boy Milo Yiannopoulos, whose tweets were so racist and misogynist that he was kicked off Twitter. When he came to Berkeley on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour, students protested, black-bloc agitators rioted, and the right-wing Twittersphere went ballistic over those “precious snowflake” students too fragile to bear his provocations.
Everyone — right, left, and center — can see the costs of speech when it is directed at them and their sense of safety in the world.
But free speech, as it turns out, applies only when it doesn’t touch on matters one holds especially dear. The right became its own precious snowflake when Yiannopoulos talked about teenaged boys as sexual subjects who could consent to sex with adult men. When his words undermined the idea that teenagers are children and that children are innocent, the “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me” camp screamed “Shut him down,” and shut him down it did: Yiannopoulos was forced to part ways with Breitbart News, disinvited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster.
Targets of rhetoric like Yiannopoulos’s reasonably insist that we acknowledge symbolic violence not only in raucous provocations but in seemingly polite racist, sexist, or homophobic opining as well. Recently the very polite Charles Murray was invited by a student group to speak at Middlebury College, where I teach. His 1994 book with Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, posited a racial basis of intelligence as measured through IQ tests. The authors used spurious correlations, as well as a highly problematic measure of intelligence, to trot out old, eugenicist arguments that have oft been debunked.
When Murray came to Middlebury in 2007 to discuss his research, according to some alumni of color, it felt pretty awful to sit in a room and have your intelligence and, by extension, your right to be at Middlebury, publicly debated. Many said they wished they had been more forceful in protesting Murray’s presence then.
So this time, more than 450 alumni and over 70 faculty members (including me) spoke up. We asked the political-science department to withdraw its cosponsorship of the event, or to at least make it a panel-type discussion so that Murray’s views might be contested. We also asked President Laurie Patton not to introduce him.
We weren’t trying to block Murray from speaking. We were seeking some recognition that words can and do hurt, that they can be a form of symbolic violence, the sort pretty obvious to faculty, students, and staff of color, who are already told, in a million small ways, that they don’t belong at Middlebury. They can be made fun of in Halloween costumes or “thug"-themed parties where white bros wear baggy jeans and carry malt liquor, casually using the N-word and laughing if anyone is offended. The white bros “belong” at Middlebury, you see. Many of them have relatives, parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents who went to Middlebury or places like it. No one ever debates their intelligence, no matter how little of it they display.
The Murray event’s organizers encouraged us to debate his ideas and to counter his eugenicist arguments with evidence and pointed questions. To be fair, many at Middlebury, including the president and the political-science faculty, were worried about censorship and committed to the idea that we must be able to hear ideas we find disagreeable. For people who feel threatened in the current political climate, however, polite debate about disagreeable ideas is a luxury they can no longer afford. We live in dangerous times, when immigrants fear expulsion and hate crimes are on the rise. Personal vulnerability drowns out the fear of censorship.
By the time Murray arrived on campus, the mood was explosive. Protesters shut down his talk, and Allison Stanger, a political-science professor moderating Murray’s appearance, was injured, although the circumstances around that are still murky.
Since then commentators in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and elsewhere have attacked Middlebury for being against free speech. We receive emails and tweets calling us “brownshirts” who seek to “muzzle” speakers. As I write this, my program, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, is being trolled on Twitter by Murray’s American Enterprise Institute colleague Christina Hoff Sommers. The right-wing website The Daily Wire suggests ludicrously that our curriculum is the reason “many leftist students felt compelled not only to disrupt Murray’s speech, but also to rationalize the use of violence to combat ideas that they did not agree with.” This is the sort of free speech the right loves: It targets feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and queer scholars in ways that are intimidating and designed to shut us up. It calls our courses “categorically insane.”
The notion that our curriculum incited violence isn’t just wrong, it’s slanderous. But categorical insanity, differently read, is closer to the truth, for our curriculum does teach students to be critical thinkers, to question dominant ideologies and “common sense.” The commonsensical notion that speech is free, for instance, and that we all enter fields of speech as equals is certainly a category of inquiry within our program. That must seem incomprehensible, or “insane,” to those who do not want to question why things are the way they are. We expect our students to experience “category crisis” when looking from new vantage points at prevailing ways of seeing.
It is this sort of “categorical insanity,” in fact, that might just extricate us all from the speech quagmire. That kind of analysis shows that our ways of seeing the world are shaped by our circumstances: race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so on. When people on the right say they feel their traditions and livelihoods are threatened, I don’t question the strength of their feelings. When those on the left no longer want to bear the pain of having their human worth debated, I recognize their outrage. When those in the middle acknowledge that ostensibly free speech has costs, but that censorship is too high a price to ever pay, I trust their sincerity as well, and I agree with them.
Surely Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor, understands the nature and value of such category analysis. A free-speech advocate, as I am, she can no doubt find a critique of my department more articulate and empathetic than her tweeted “Oy vey.”
The right became its own precious snowflake when Yiannopoulos talked about teenaged boys as sexual subjects who could consent to sex with adult men.
I am a card-carrying member of the free-speech absolutist ACLU. I also believe that when institutions support even polite racism and misogyny, they aggravate deep, ancient wounds, symbolically excluding those who have been historically excluded for many generations. I am truly concerned, too, about censorship, since when it is backed by the state it is usually targeted against the likes of me, not Charles Murray.
This queer inability, this refusal to be labeled, requires that I live with unresolvable contradictions. So must we all. Neither Middlebury nor any other college can resolve them. Trite appeals to civility won’t resolve them either, nor will columnists’ scolds nor acts of violence.
But if we can’t untie these infinite knots, maybe we can at least remember how to live together. Academe, and thoughtful people outside it, can begin to acknowledge not just intellectual but also circumstantial ways of perceiving speech.
Whether you’re on the right or the left or in the topsy-turvy anxious middle, take a breath. Recognize the vastness of the gaps between us. Recognize too the humanity and the life experiences of those you fear and scorn. Knowing that we understand speech, its costs and its freedoms, in radically different ways isn’t a tidy fix, but it is at least a first step toward actually hearing one another.
Laurie Essig is director, and an associate professor, of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College.
