Hypocrisy and cowardice have turned US students against debate and let an extremist minority take over protests — but all is not lost, writes Greg Lukianoff, the Canceling of the American Mind author for the Times. He continues:
College campuses in the United States continue to boil with protests, encampments and violence in response to the war in Gaza.
Last week the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), erupted as pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with no immediate police intervention, injuring at least a dozen. After a Jewish student was attacked and admitted to hospital, pro-Israel counter-protesters shot fireworks at the pro-Palestinian camp and tore down barricades. Pro-Palestinian activists responded with pepper spray. Eventually, police would arrest hundreds.
After weeks of encampment and tense interactions between protesters and police at Columbia University, New York, pro-Palestinian students stormed and occupied a building, with protest leaders insisting they “will not be moved unless by force”. This led to 109 arrests, many of them not of students but of outside activists.
The climate is chaotic and varies from campus to campus and day to day. In some cases the response has been heavy handed. At the University of Texas in Austin last week, police showed a serious lack of judgment as they attempted to disperse a crowd of protesters.
However, some of what’s going on is not free speech, such as setting up encampments and occupying university buildings, which constitutes civil disobedience. Many universities have failed to get a handle on the problem. Serving sweets and burritos to students when they take over an administrative building — as occurred at Harvard in November — sends the message to everyone that some opinions are implicitly supported by the administration, whereas encampments of students espousing causes they felt less sympathetic towards would not be tolerated.
As Keith Whittington, professor of politics at Princeton, wrote recently: “Would they show the same grace toward students wearing Maga [Make America great again] hats engaged in the same behaviour?”
October 7 may have triggered much of this chaos, but the underlying issues have been building for some time.
The data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and the number of event disruptions and attempts to cancel speakers has only worsened since then. Moreover, the vast majority of these issues increasingly come from the left. This is no surprise, given the daunting political and ideological hurdles preventing dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon that, in our book, The Canceling of the American Mind, my co-author, Rikki Schlott, and I call “the conformity gauntlet”.
This shift towards ideological homogeneity, along with administrative hypocrisy and moral cowardice, has caused this anti-free-speech attitude on campuses to bubble for a long time. Since October 7, it’s come to a rolling and sometimes violent boil.
Before the mayhem of the past few weeks, my colleagues and I at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have witnessed nearly 70 attempts to punish scholars for expressing controversial views about the conflict. In the past seven months, more than 100 students and groups — such as Students for Justice in Palestine in Massachusetts, Florida and Texas — have faced sanction attempts for expressing views related to the conflict. And while we have consistently defended pro-Palestinian voices for our entire existence, our organisation has also noted that pro-Palestinian protesters are responsible for every attempted and successful disruption of campus events and of invited speakers related to the Middle East conflict since October 7.
In the name of tranquillity, administrators have cultivated groupthink through ideological filters on hiring, promotion and even teaching. Universities need to take a long, hard look at the “anti-debate” certainty culture they’ve created, in which issues are dealt with by students locking arms, shouting others down and sometimes even resorting to violence rather than talking to one another.
Worth reading in full.
