The Anti-Liberal Left

It used to be that the words “liberal” and “leftist” seemed interchangeable.  Not anymore.  Not for quite some time.  Especially when it comes to higher education.

Fact is, the left has made such a mess of America’s universities that people who favor freedom of expression and ideas should now naturally be at home in the Republican party, not because their ideas will necessarily be embraced there, but because at least the GOP won’t favor voting them off the island.

Will we ever see a comeback by real liberals – those who favor using the mechanisms and power of the state to try and protect the little guy and keep established powers in check?  Who favor free expression over oppression?  Who are open to new and different ideas?

We continue to witness the closing of the American mind via the de facto elimination of free speech on campuses far and wide, and the shunning of politically incorrect speakers, especially for commencement.  This, in the places where free speech should not just survive, but thrive more than anywhere else.

Indeed, ‘tis again the season to disinvite.  Commencement speakers like Condi Rice at Rutgers, as well as at Brandeis & Smith have so far been ditched.  At Haverford College (where current 4 year tuition, fees, room and board are a cool $247,000) – a group rejected invited speaker Robert Birgeneau, because of the way police treated Occupy protesters at Berkeley when he was Chancellor there.  The small crumb of good news is that the replacement speaker dressed down the speech police, calling the student protestors’ approach both “immature” and “arrogant” and the subsequent withdrawal of Birgeneau, a “defeat” for the Quaker college and its ideals.”

Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) likes to call it “disinvitation season”.  Indeed, open-minded campus liberals have turned into closed-minded leftists in just one generation – from being the victims of speech codes and opening up the campus, to barring the door behind them when they achieved positions of power.

The college free speech movement began at Berkeley in 1964, when the dean declared that “existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, [etc.,] would be “strictly enforced.”  Is it hard to believe that a taxpayer-supported college would have administrators so hostile to free speech that they would limit the exercise of that fundamental first amendment right to tiny, remote areas of campus or prohibit it altogether?  No. That is not what they did in the 50’s and 60’s – that is what they are doing today!

The outrageous concept of postage stamp-sized “free speech zones” have been metastasizing in higher education.  One of the consequences is – believe it or not – banning the distribution of copies of the US Constitution (on Constitution Day, no less), and more than one school supported by taxpayers has done exactly that.

So it has taken almost exactly the same amount of time for those people young enough to be students in the early 1960’s to become university presidents and deans and treat students exactly how they were treated – with contempt for the concept of expressing ideas without permission.  Lord Acton’s maxim that power tends to corrupt, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, never seemed more appropriate, and cautions us to always be on guard for tyrants petty and grand.

Of course, it is in some ways unsurprising that so many university faculty and students cannot stomach a speaker with whom they disagree – they are not encouraged or prepared to deal with disagreeable ideas by the very institutions whose job it is to equip them for just such challenges.  For lo these many years, too many schools have allowed the heckler’s veto to go unchallenged.  Instead of protecting all speech, and making students challenge the expression of ideas with which they disagree by encouraging them to express their own thoughts, the schools have allowed speakers to be shouted down…and shut down.  Students thus learn not to marshal arguments in order to present the most persuasive case to an audience, but rather the true bully’s shortcut – to just shut up those who disagree.

Harvard Dean James Ryan may have put it best when addressing calls to uninvite a convocation speaker, saying

“Universal assent cannot be the expectation or the standard used to assess potential speakers, as no speaker would pass a test that requires our entire community to agree with every stance that speaker has taken over his or her career.”  The test itself, moreover, would run counter to another value that I believe is deeply held at Harvard:  tolerance and respect of difference, including tolerance and respect of those with whom we might disagree.  We are and always will be a place for ideas and debate, not a place that insists on conformity — intellectual, political, ideological, or otherwise.”

We can only hope that more replacement speakers choose to follow Mr. Bowen’s lead and shame these people into amending their ways.  Those who would turn the speeches and the schools themselves into places where uncomfortable or minority views are shunned must be shown the light, or shown the door.