Yelling Stop in Postliberal America
An article asks if campus free speech is really dead. It should have asked that about American civil society.
As a genre, the Great American Progressive Think Piece does not draw from a deep well of tropes. One that you see more than occasionally is the reporter who investigates the area of the United States between the coastal northeast and the coastal southwest to find out what’s “really” going on. A recent example is a Washington Post story on the Appalachian headquarters of an organization that has long spoken out against mulitculturalism and mass immigration. As John Kline described it,
The Post dispatched properly woke reporter Ellie Silverman to Berkeley Springs to get the lay of the bigoted land. Her story employs a fairly common technique in “mainstream” reporting, in which she concocts a made-up, no-news premise that appeals only to her readers’ ideological prejudices and shoe-horns in the findings of her “investigation” in a way that achieves her premeditated conclusions.
Another frequent trope belatedly ponders an issue about which progressives have taken damage for the extremity of their position, only to conclude that the progressives have legitimate grievances and the real extremists are the conservatives. I had the opportunity to respond to one of these myself in 2018, when Noah Berlatsky smeared Bret Weinstein in the Pacific Standard after the situation at the Evergreen State College so deteriorated that the professor had to flee for his safety. As a dedicated liberal himself, Weinstein sought out the progressive media to tell his story, but they rebuffed him. He went to the conservative media instead, for which certain progressives have never forgiven him.1
It was only a matter of time before someone tried to combine these two conceits. Behold “Is Campus Free Speech Really Dead?”2 by Nina Burleigh, running at The New Republic under the category “Busted Myths.” The subhed is “Media coverage of campus speech controversies focuses almost solely on elite, coastal schools. But what about the rest of the country? A report from an array of higher education institutions nationwide.” Here’s what she found:
More than half a century after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement set a new standard for campus protest, student speech is as robust as it ever was. Students are speaking. Some quite confidently and through bullhorns. And right-wing provocateurs roam the college speaking circuit. Confrontations between such speakers and lefty students are what make news, but when such talks go off without incident, which they do more often than not, it isn’t news. Inside classrooms, history and political science students are still learning and not just shouting one another down, arguing about critical race theory or whether enslaved people were really happy. But something else is changing: Conservatives who have long complained that their views are unwelcome on campuses are asking for protected space—intellectually at least. Republican lawmakers who used to scoff at trigger warnings and safe spaces for tender liberal snowflakes are now codifying speech restrictions to protect whites and males from feeling guilty about the histories of oppression.
The lack of self-awareness in the report is intense. At one point the author laments that initiatives by the DeSantis administration such as the Stop WOKE Act had obliged one professor to remove “prohibitions against neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and hate speech from her syllabus.” This paragraph follows:
In discussion over the bills, conservative lawmakers smirked with own-the-libs glee. During debate on the intellectual diversity bill, when one Democrat pointed out that the words “uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, offensive” could mean different things to different people, bill sponsor Representative Spencer Roach responded: “I think that’s kind of the beauty of the thing.”
Someone thinking more objectively about this might notice that “hate speech,” too, could mean different things to different people. Even a category like “white supremacist speech” only remains unambiguously negative if it pertains to what it says on the label, and not, for instance, math. Since we live in an age in which the recipient of a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is making the case that math classrooms continually manifest “white supremacy culture,” the ways in which a student might end up on the wrong side of that prohibition are unlimited.
As a longtime non-progressive reader of progressive reporting, it’s easy to see at the outset where the article is headed: to a conclusion that progressive activists may go a little overboard sometimes but their concerns are well-founded, while their conservative critics have nefarious intentions and are in fact guilty of everything of which they’re accusing their progressive opponents. That assumption pays off.
The piece is not the worst I’ve seen. (I’ve read Noah Berlatsky after all.) It mostly lets speakers have their say. Burleigh bothers to find them from all sides of the issue, not perfectly, but neither with utter neglect. It is nevertheless couched in progressive digs. Young Americans for Freedom is “a node in a dark money–funded, right-wing college provocateur machine with a history of harassing professors.” The bills in Florida were passed for - for, as if no one else is affected by the schools’ refrigerated intellectual climate - “conservative whites and especially white males who might feel ‘uncomfortable’ around discussions of past and present gender- or race-based oppression.” And so on.3
As I noted in another context, this is only hypocrisy if you genuinely believe that there should be one standard for everyone. But in postliberal America, the whole point is to situate yourself on the easy side of the double standard. That’s how you know that you have made it.
And boy, but has progressive postliberalism made it in American academia. Campuses are verifiably and exaggeratedly skewed in its direction. Studies with N’s in the three to five digits find that a 50% liberal student body is being taught by a 60% liberal faculty managed by a 70% liberal administration.4 Or looked at another way, a 24% conservative student body is being taught by a 12% conservative faculty managed by a 6% conservative administration. Russell Jacoby, who in 1987 scolded conservatives for fretting about the destruction of Western civilization by radical academics back when campuses were not nearly as tilted as they are now, last month admitted that he was wrong. Those white males who supposedly can’t handle “discussions of past and present gender- or race-based oppression,” presumably even the discussions that aren’t blaming them for it personally, are driving the trend not to attend college at all.
Two quotes come to mind. One is William F. Buckley’s 1955 description of the mission of National Review: “It stands athwart history, yelling stop!” The other is Arendt: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” Burleigh, as a progressive implicitly recognizing the comfortable progressive entrenchment in academia, is yelling Stop.
Yell she must, because certain conservatives have read the terrain and altered tactics. There is a meta-text running through Burleigh’s choices of three campuses to observe, the University of Florida, Oberlin, and the University of New Mexico. In Florida, Ron DeSantis placed former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse into the president’s seat at the university. He passed a bill curtailing the humiliation of Florida students through pedagogy which claims that “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” Another item forbids that “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.”5 Naturally this is found to be a shameless affront to academic freedom, as if subjecting your students to Kendian struggle sessions somehow encourages it.
Oberlin, which Burleigh now claims is mellowing, had the snot kicked out of it in a courtroom by a jury “picked, it must be said, from the largely working-class and Trumpy community that surrounds the elite blue island of the college.” She takes for granted that the school calmed down on its own, and not because a judge found it liable for a sum that could fund, at current tuition, a student’s enrollment for 600 years. Its offense, if you don’t know the story, was to egg on demonstrations against a local bakery that dealt appropriately with a thief. After years of delay, the college finally coughed up the judgment to the wronged widow running the bakery only when she took to
to ask, Will I Ever See the $36 Million Oberlin College Owes Me?UNM recently saw a speech by Tomi Lahren devolve into a melee that made Fox News. Protesters knocked a hole through the wall of the venue. “Of course, raucous student protests are exactly what [Turning Point USA] is after,” remarked Burleigh. (The students certainly served it to them, with garnish.) A later talk by an equally controversial speaker went on as planned because
Protesters faced off against a line of bulletproof vests and face shields. [UNM student and protester] Julie Bettencourt said officers bruised their face when they6 tried to “create a safety buffer” between police and protesters.
The common thread is the use of state power to fight the culture wars. There remains a desire for small government among conservatives, but they are losing ground to figures like DeSantis who have understood that progressives have come to adore big government and are using it to crush dissent at the universities, in the K-12 system, throughout the public health infrastructure, and beyond. The progressive embrace of state force is copyable, and certain conservatives are copying it. Burleigh concludes,
So the lefties at Oberlin may be mellowing a bit, just as the righties in Florida seem to be Oberlinizing colleges for the right.
But they’re not Oberlinizing, they’re Orbanizing. Rod Dreher:
This is a pretty good story from Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is kind of Viktor-Orbanny. Of course Beauchamp means it to tarnish DeSantis. For me, as an Orban fan, it makes me excited about a DeSantis presidential candidacy. For those American conservatives who have bought the media line critical of Viktor Orban, you should read the Beauchamp piece and understand that if you like what Ron DeSantis is doing, you ought to take a look at how Viktor Orban runs Hungary.
As a libertarian, and thus an opponent of state power, I find this immensely disappointing. Libertarians have a solution to these problems: eliminate government schools, which is what we call public schools, and abolish the federal student loan system. Schools thereby could stop being organs of the state, for either progressive or conservative ends, and perhaps revert to their true purpose of imparting knowledge.
Progressives find that proposition objectionable, as do most conservatives. But without such alternatives, it’s hard to see how America halts its descent into a principle-free, might-makes-right war between progressives and conservatives for control over the dangerously outsize mechanisms of government force, and not just at the schools. For different reasons than Buckley’s and Burleigh’s, I am yelling Stop.
Pacific Standard is defunct, and Berlatsky is now the communications director at an organization that wants to make the world a better place for pedophiles.
Quillette, where I’ve contributed, is said to be “a magazine that is a kind of refuge for libertarians of the non–alt-right, non-Claremont sort.” This implies the existence of alt-right libertarians, which I concede may exist, though in smaller numbers than do left-libertarians. But Claremont libertarians? I can’t even visualize them.
AEI is using “liberal” to describe something I prefer to call “progressive” so as not to confuse what I mean by “postliberal.”
Burleigh doesn’t mention it, but DeSantis is also transforming New College of Florida into the “Hillsdale of the South.”
Due to Bettencourt’s nonbinary pronouns it’s impossible to ascertain whether singular-they or the police were trying to create the “safety buffer.”
I feel like eventually you're going to need to adopt a more workable solution than "de-fund" the State which in this case is the public educational system, but I gather might well include quite a few other "coercive" and controlling institutions. This idealistic and aloof stance reminds me of my own youthful punk-rock affiliation to the utopian cry for Anarchy; much beloved by bands and rebels everywhere for the big A with a circle around it. Easy to spray paint on a wall, scrawl on your school books, or stencil on your combat boots as I did. Back then, young "rebel" artist that I was, I took the time to silkscreen a sweatshirt with the following lines of political poetry (imagine if you will the two capitalized "A"s as Anarchy symbols)
"No Justice, No LAw
No Crime, No FlAw"
Quite Liberatarian in its way too, wouldn't you say? And it is perfect because it uses the same inverse logic that fueled the "de-fund the police" rallying cry: it's the police themselves that fuel crime. By extension this could be applied to the military and anything else one deems oppressive to the individual. And sure, literally everything under the umbrella of "municipal" is restrictive and requires someone, probably everyone, to give up something.
Then again, you don't have kids that need education and have already reaped the benefits of "the system" so maybe it's easy to see it as all too much trouble anyway. City council meetings are by design tedious, slow and grating simply because they have take into account all the real-world problems inherent in Life with other human beings. We evolved to organize into groups of 100-300 or so, and at those numbers very little structure need be applied. Except that stopped being how things worked out a few thousand years ago. Whether the punk anarchist on the left of the Right of Center libertarian wants to admit it or not: reality just doesn't work that way.
The police de-funders all seemed to forget that "systemic" or not, there are enough people out there who do genuinely want to cause harm to others, to steal, and to sell substances that routinely kill their customers, and that it's kind of a good thing to keep 911 around when you run into such individuals. I myself also enjoy having untainted water, sewers that bring our waste to be treated, electricity I can count on, natural gas that heats our house, roads that are both paved and get plowed, restaurants that I can trust not to serve spoiled food at, nearby hospitals for birthing as well as removing a failing organ, schools that do an OK job of preparing kids for adulthood. None of it is great, but neither are most human beings come to think of it. But it is what we are.
Lastly, just to give some on the ground perspective: The ONLY schools around here that you're going to find teaching some form of hard-left progressivism are the private ones. The public schools, even in MA, the bluest of blue states, teach what might be characterized as slightly Left of Center curricula, but certainly not anything like a concerted progressive agenda. This skew however is nothing new and has swung back and forth over the years. We grew up with decidedly Right of Center teaching perspective, whereby the Civil War wasn't about slavery but "states rights" and economic independence (except it turns out that EVERY Southern state explicitly stated that slavery was in fact the primary factor for succession). At the end of the day, those who detach from society are only those that can do so and still remain comfortable. This also is nothing new of course. Meanwhile, the rest of us feel there is work to be done.