It’s Frustrating That The Campus Free Speech Conversation Remains So Stunted

A generally interesting Slate article misses the point in illustrative ways

Unlocked 7/21/2022. If you like content like this and want to be able to read it before everyone else, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

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A lot of people are trumpeting a new Slate article by Lucas Mann, an author and creative writing professor at University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, headlined “I’m a Longtime Professor. The Real Campus ‘Free Speech Crisis’ Is Not What You Think.”

Mann argues early in his piece that there has been a lot of talk about campus free speech in major media outlets: endless coverage of major social justice blowups, of radical student activists and besieged professors. Since he himself is a professor, he explains, “Each time this happens, I wait for someone to ask me about it. And I always tell my interlocutors the same thing: I don’t recognize my school at all in the conversations about what conversation is apparently like at universities in America. I never have.”

What follows is a nice essay about what it’s like to be the sort of professor who is… well, common. Mann rightly points out that the elite institutions that generate the lion’s share of mainstream media coverage are just the tip of America’s academic iceberg: 

Think of how many of those 5,300 schools you’ve actually heard of. Now think how many you’ve seen mentioned in conversations about what does, or should, happen in a college classroom. U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 colleges—where, inevitably, most of these stories are set—have around 250,000 undergraduates enrolled per year. There are roughly 16 million undergraduates around the country at any given time. Those other 5,275 schools with millions and millions of students are where the vast majority of college learning in America happens. Whatever side you take on various arguments about speech at elite universities, you’re participating in a conversation that willfully ignores this truth.

Surely Mann’s general point here is correct. If you’re, say, a major newspaper reporter on the higher education beat, and you don’t devote a significant amount of your time to understanding what is going on at community colleges, or even just lesser known four-year colleges where none of your colleagues have kids, I’d argue you’re not doing your job well. “Higher education” is indeed often treated as a synonym for “The 50 ‘best,’ hardest-to-get-into schools in the US,” and that’s a mistake, because those schools represent only the tiniest tip of a very large, very important iceberg.

But I think Mann and the many people celebrating his essay as an important blow in the never-ending internecine progressive war over “cancel culture” or whatever you want to call it are missing the point.

I Was Very Wrong About All Of This

In 2015 or so, I didn’t think the stuff happening on college campuses was that big a deal. I bet if you’d asked me what my overall attitude was, I would have said that there certainly seemed to be some excesses on some campuses, and they were regrettable, but it didn’t really point to any larger trend, because all these kids would become normal when they entered the real world. When I was at New York magazine, I also got suckered by a bogus stat about campus kids’ views on free speech becoming more illiberal, which I think made me more skeptical of such narratives. That’s not to say I never wrote about these issues — here’s a brief piece I wrote about an insane 2016 “investigation” of pro-Donald-Trump chalking at Emory University — but I think I understood the trend toward illiberal weirdness as restricted to college campuses.

One of the cool things about having a made-up title like “senior editor,” like I did at the time, is you can trick impressive people into meeting with you. In 2016 or thereabouts, I had lunch with Jon Haidt, who I had been a fan of for years (definitely read his latest essay), and I remember discussing the possibility of making a friendly bet about our disagreement on this issue. Haidt thought that when college kids entered major institutions, they’d bring their strange and radical beliefs with them, changing certain parts of the adult world. I thought the kids would be absorbed into normie culture and, when paychecks and professional reputations depended on it, quietly abandon beliefs about, say, words that make them uncomfortable being “violent.”

If memory serves, our bet-talk was quite brief and preliminary, and we didn’t get far enough to discuss terms or anything. Lucky me, because man, would I have lost that bet! Haidt was completely right. Not that there was some nationwide “woke” revolution or anything, but that when it comes to the sort of institutions that employ graduates of top-tier schools, I don’t see how anyone in their right mind can deny that a massive change has taken place in a very short period of time.

Yet deny it they do! I view you all as a friendly audience, so I’m not going to waste much time defending the argument that yes, something is going on. If you’re at all skeptical despite being a subscriber to this newsletter, I guess I’d just recommend this compendium of “cancellations,” many of which took place in the sort of institutions I’m talking about. It’s hard to argue that these cases 1) don’t reflect a trend, and 2) could have happened in, say, 2010. (That’s not to say I agree with the details of every example as they are presented by this Twitter account, but there are a lot there.)

I could get into many examples myself, but I’ll keep it brief with a few from journalism that left a mark on me: dozens of New York Times staffers tweeting that a column by the Republican Senator Tom Cotton expressing an at-the-time widely held view (that the National Guard should be deployed to tamp down on rioting and looting) “puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” leading to the implosion of the top of the Times masthead; a Vox staffer claiming that Matt Yglesias signing a milquetoast free speech letter “makes [her] feel less safe” at Vox, and hundreds, if not thousands, of her fellow journalists publicly agreeing with this sentiment; and the heinous pile-on of Reply All’s PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, who had their reputations torched and their careers upended because… well, to this day, no one can explain exactly what they did that could have possibly warranted such treatment, but they stood accused of opposition to People of Color (despite Pinnamaneni being one), and who has the time to thoroughly investigate such a serious charge? (Technically, the “accusation” involved their initial opposition to a unionization drive at their podcasting company, Gimlet, but this didn’t really make sense because of course there might be legitimate reasons to oppose or have specific qualms about a given unionization attempt.) If you’re still unconvinced, Katha Pollitt has more examples here.

Same deal with these events: I find it hard to believe any of them could have occurred in 2010. Back then, the crazy ideas now commonplace in major liberal institutions were mere shoots in the ground. If you worked in the liberal world and argued a mainstream conservative op-ed, or a free speech letter, made staffers unsafe, you would have been quietly mocked by your colleagues. There’s definitely still some mockery, these days — none of these blowups and/or firings occur without controversy — but you can’t deny the underlying ideas are firmly established and treated as credible within liberal institutions.

It seems quite obvious to me that there’s a moral panic afoot in these institutions, and that it’s fueled by some very radical understandings of speech, harm, and identity. And I do think those radical understandings come from — or at least are incubated and supercharged by — elite college campuses. 

Two Separate Issues

People are acting like there is one pie called How We Talk About Higher Ed, and that the more we talk about the alleged moral panic the less of the pie is left for “legitimate” higher-ed issues. Or at least that is Mann’s argument:

There’s just so much to cover in thinking about the challenges facing higher education in America. It’s an industry at an inflection point: The future feels entirely, terrifyingly uncertain. Which is why devoting so much space to coverage of the freedom that certain wildly ambitious people on wildly prestigious (and rich) campuses do or don’t feel is so misguided. It continues this fantasy that academia’s concerns are elite, a semantic playground for those who have the time and luxury to play. There are so few true ivory towers. Alongside them, millions of people are trying to teach and learn, under duress, and largely invisible.

I don’t think this is really how things work. At the Times, for example, the excellent longtime reporter Michael Powell recently took on a beat that is basically “free speech debates in left-of-center institutions,” producing articles like this infuriating piece about an innocent janitor who was victimized by craven administrators at Smith College, and this one about a controversy involving the Democratic Socialists of America and the black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed (whose words are too dangerous for him to be platformed, according to some DSAers). The Times wouldn’t have created this beat if editors there didn’t rightly discern that there’s interest in this subject, but Powell’s output in no way makes it more difficult for the Times to cover community colleges, student debt, or any other meat-and-potatoes higher ed issues affecting a broader range of people.

Or take me, for example. I’m not that interested in writing about education. That’s not to say it isn’t extremely important, but I just don’t know that much about it, and for random reasons my journalistic interests have taken me elsewhere. When I’ve written about education, it’s typically been because some other interest — the “grit” research, for example — takes me there.

Another intersection point: I’m interested in the norms that prevail in elite institutions on issues of identity, speech, and disagreement, because these norms go a long way toward determining what academic research is funded and disseminated, how young thinkers are socialized, what news stories get written versus ignored or suppressed, and so on. I’ve written a lot about these issues for these reasons, but also because they have directly impacted my own life and career trajectory, and because I’m fascinated by academic controversies (as opposed to higher ed policy, which is a separate subject). And since academia plays such an outsize role in just about every aspect of liberal life — in the form of newly arrived young staffers at a newsroom, NGO, or political campaign, and in terms of who these institutions turn to for expert guidance on a wide variety of important subjects — interest in this question of norms is inseparable from interest in a subset of the academic world.

Just a subset! I have never and would never claim that the slice of academic issues I’m interested in should dominate the national discussion of higher ed. The median college student’s most pressing challenges likely have nothing to do with “cancel culture” or with claims that words are violence or anything like that. But my writing about this angle of the higher-ed world doesn’t reduce anyone else’s ability to cover higher ed differently.

The Underappreciated Class Divide

These issues are especially important for working-class and poor people entering elite institutions. I mean, maybe this is a minor issue given that it’s increasingly impossible for them even to do so, but assuming that we want to make it easier for people from socioeconomically humble backgrounds to gain entry to — and exert influence within — elite institutions, shouldn’t the fact that there’s a very specific, unusual set of norms within those institutions strike us as important and worth exploring?

That’s why this bit from Mann annoyed me:

Earlier this semester, in one class we ended up having an unplanned conversation about how often students use the word pretentious as a catchall term for “snooty,” and how they mostly turn it inward: worrying that their ideas are too pretentious, abandoning an essay because they were going for something different that might reek of the word. It was a conversation, ultimately, about permission, about this need to feel like the things they’re working on, hopefully throwing themselves into, are worth the time, are doing something beyond self-indulgence. Pressure—a good pressure, I think—was again put on me to essentially defend my class. And again, I have no idea if I convinced anyone, but they were generous and good-humored in the conversation, and I really enjoyed the essays they turned in that week. [emphasis in the original]

To think that these students might be there in bad faith, or are just looking to pile on someone who doesn’t get the same things they do, borders on disrespect, especially when they are often so unsure of their own ability to get it, even as they’re thriving. That takes real intellectual and emotional work, and many are undertaking this challenge while working full time, or caregiving full time, or both; on a number of occasions over the years, students have parked their kids in the back with some headphones because they couldn’t find child care. During pandemic learning, students were Zooming into our discussions from ROTC training barracks, or their car while dropping their mother off for treatment, or a patient’s bedside during a long hospice shift.

Okay, but I would never in a million years claim that the bad stuff occurring on some campuses is coming from working-class students! In fact, it’s exactly the opposite — there is a deep, well, snooty class component to a lot of this stuff. It is overwhelmingly wealthier people who are in favor of the more radical, less liberal understandings of harm, language, and free speech. When college administrators gang up on professors (or janitors!) who are deemed problematic, they are enforcing upper-middle-class norms.

This class divide manifests in so many ways, from relatively minor ones (“Latinx”) to the I-would-argue-major issue of what happens when lower socioeconomic status folks attempt to become a part of organizations dominated by college graduates. Mann’s mention of ROTC students, for example, reminded me of something Freddie deBoer wrote about a male college student who had been in the military prior to enrolling in school. He showed serious promise in a small class, but because he kept violating various minor “rules” of etiquette that are overwhelmingly created, understood, and enforced by wealthier folks, he became a pariah, accused of all sorts of wrongthink, and, if memory serves, he withdrew emotionally from class participation. (I’m going from memory here because I can’t find the text of the anecdote in question — I did reach out to deBoer but didn’t hear back.) 

(Update, 7/21/2022: After I unlocked this piece, someone emailed me to say they had found the article in question. I mostly remembered it right and will stick the passage in question in a footnote¹.)

Or, to expand the discussion beyond college campuses, take this, from an interview in Dissent between the legendary leftist writer Barbara Ehrenreich and the labor reporter Alex Press:

[Ehrenreich:] I’ll give you another anecdote—though this is not about DSA. In 2009, there was an event—part of an international series of socialist gatherings—in Detroit. There was a workshop at this conference, and I had invited a group of working-class people from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who I had become close to. About six or seven of them drove from Fort Wayne to Detroit, and they were mostly laid-off foundry workers: stereotypical white men—though, actually, not all of them were white. I was closest with one of them, Tom Lewandowski, who created a workers’ organization and was the head of the Central Labor Council in the Fort Wayne area. [At the event], they talked about what they were facing in the recession. And then some woman in the room who was an adjunct professor suddenly says, “I’m tired of listening to white men talk.”

I was so aghast. Of course, it was a big setback for my friends from Fort Wayne, who were humiliated. I advised Tom not to get into settings where he would be subjected to that ever again. There has to be a way to say to such people, look, we know you probably aren’t doing great as an adjunct, but have some respect for other people’s work and their experience, and recognize that they are different from you in some way. I’ve just had too many encounters like that, which are kind of heartbreaking.

(I could have sworn Natalie Shure tweeted this excerpt recently and I retweeted it. I’m not finding the tweet, but hat tip to her, I think.)

This is the result of culture clash between non-college and college-educated types. Among the latter, it is now considered normal and fine to shut someone down solely on the basis of their race and gender, as long as their race and/or gender are “privileged.” This is not how most people think and talk, and it comes across as jarring and insulting to people who aren’t used to it, like these laid-off workers, who for very understandable reasons didn’t recognize themselves in the professor’s caricature of domineering, spoiled white men. This is another example of why the ideas that are able to spread elsewhere from college campuses matter to anyone who might encounter them “in the wild.” They are worth debating and talking about, and interest in them is not some sort of idle or reactionary distraction.

On a final note, I feel like the concerns I share with a bunch of other liberal and leftist writers tend to be strawmanned by skeptics of these concerns. “What I find most foreign in accounts of ‘free speech’ on campuses is the depiction of militancy among students, a monolith of kids who, in these representations,” writes Mann, “apparently show up at age 18 secure in their views and voice and the power of that voice in an academic setting.”

The idea that there is a “monolith” of students who are stridently militant and anti-free-speech is, indeed, silly. Maybe some people are making that argument, but I’m not really seeing it. The issue is much more what college administrators do when a small minority of students try to inflict illiberalism and misery on the broader campus community, which tends to be much more moderate. I don’t even blame the students! I had a lot of dumb beliefs at 19 (luckily they went away and today all my beliefs are accurate and true and just). But you can’t deny that college administrators have, in some cases, absolutely turtled when faced with crazy students. Nor can you deny that this behavior has spread to certain newsrooms, and that certain people have been fired as a result of managing editor types refusing to say no to younger staffers who really do claim to view disagreement as violence. I think this is all worth talking about. 

Of course, if you pretend that the argument you’re responding to is “All students are incorrigible radicals,” then you barely have to engage at all. Which I think is the point!

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Questions? Comments? Blanket accusations about millions of students? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

Image: RENO, NEVADA, UNITED STATES - 2022/02/14: Protesters follow Emily Bird, chanting over a megaphone through campus grounds. Students gathered on Valentines day in a protest to ask their university to reinstate the mask mandate after it was removed on February 10 by Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak. (Photo by Ty O'Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

1. deBoer writes:

I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19-year-old white woman—smart, well-meaning, passionate—literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word “disabled.” Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back. I watched that happen.

I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 20-year-old black man, a track athlete who tried to fit organizing meetings around classes and his ridiculous practice schedule (for which he received a scholarship worth a quarter of tuition), be told not to return to those meetings because he said he thought there were such a thing as innate gender differences. He wasn’t a homophobe, or transphobic, or a misogynist. It turns out that 20-year-olds from rural South Carolina aren’t born with an innate understanding of the intersectionality playbook. But those were the terms deployed against him, those and worse. So that was it; he was gone.

I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 33-year-old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, be lectured about patriarchy by an affluent 22-year-old white liberal arts college student, because he had said that other vets have to “man up” and speak out about the war. Because apparently we have to pretend that we don’t know how metaphorical language works or else we’re bad people. I watched his eyes glaze over as this woman with $300 shoes berated him. I saw that. Myself.