As I reported recently, Middlebury College in Vermont, scene of an Outrage Brigade protest against Charles Murray in 2017 (the student riots injured one of his hosts on the Middlebury Faculty), just had another free-speech kerfuffle. This time it was over Ryszard Legutko, a right-wing Polish professor scheduled to talk at Middlebury about his recent book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Tendencies in Free Societies. Shortly before Legutko was to arrive at Middlebury, he was informed by the administration that the university had canceled his talk. The reason, said an email issued by the Provost and Dean of Students, was this:
“In the interest of ensuring the safety of students, faculty, staff and community members, the lecture by Ryszard Legutko scheduled for later today will not take place. The decision was not taken lightly. It was based on an assessment of our ability to respond effectively to potential security and safety risks for both the lecture and the event students had planned in response.”
A few days later, an audio recording (long version here) of aggrieved students accosting three administrators became public. It was horrifying to hear how outraged the students were simply because a right-wing speaker had been invited, and how vehemently they demanded apologies from the administrators. What’s even scarier is to hear the administrators abase and debase themselves, apologizing profusely as they affirm the students’ outrage and promise that Middlebury would “do better.” It’s a prime specimen of college authorities groveling to aggrieved students.
As the Quillette article below reveals (the author is the brave Middlebury undergraduate Dominic Aiello), those administrators were Sujata Moorti, incoming dean of the faculty, Baishakhi Taylor, Dean of Students, and Renee Wells, director of education for equity and inclusion. Aiello adds his own take on the shameful behavior by both students and faculty:
As my recording of the event shows, it was a call-and-response performance starring outraged protestors and three highly sympathetic administration members—two of them being both deans and gender studies professors. The whole thing resembled a modern day Struggle Session, with kids literally weeping over the “violence” that supposedly had been brought to campus through the vessel of Legutko. The response of the administrators was an endless expression of sympathy and guilt, as well as pledges to make things right. The students actually demanded that the administrators take notes. And like an obedient underling, one of the professors whipped out her phone to record every demand (all of which were subsequently published in manifesto form).
The three faculty members spoke openly about their desire to block speakers with certain viewpoints from coming to campus, and discussed plans for an extensive background-check scheme that would allow Middlebury officials to systematically analyze speakers beforehand. I recorded all of this because I’m passionate about free speech—and I felt it was my duty to show other students that members of their own administration were explicitly advocating for a system that would allow them to restrict speech on campus in accordance with their own privately held biases.
After about an hour, three more college officials entered the room, and students again jumped up to the whiteboard to list their demands. At this point, I felt I had seen enough and decided to go home, where I listened to the 40 minutes of audio I’d recorded. I was stunned by the realization that the school was no longer run according to any coherent set of ideas set down by the administration, but rather by the knee-jerk diktats of a small group of radicalized students operating in open alliance with like-minded staffers.
Read the rest below (click on screenshot); it’s even worse than that. The letter I wrote the other day to the President, Provost, and Dean of Middlebury has of course gone unanswered.
And now (this is getting to be the normal drill), the Student Senate, the students’ governing association, has produced a list of 13 demands (well, “proposals”, though the blackmail threat outlined below takes them into the realm of demands) in the Middlebury Campus, the student newspaper:
Note that who is supposed to get “healed” here is not the community, but the offended students.
There are the usual calls for structural changes in the college, but the one below struck me especially hard. While it does not explicitly ban “offensive” speakers, it requires that all speakers be vetted by filling out a “due diligence form” to determine whether a speaker’s views “align with Middlebury’s community standards”. It also requires that academic departments publicize invited speakers a month an advance so they can be vetted by the student body. (My emphases in these demands). I quote:
- Any organization or academic department that invites a speaker to campus will be required to fill out a due diligence form created by the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in coordination with the SGA Institutional Diversity Committee. These questions should be created to determine whether a speaker’s beliefs align with Middlebury’s community standards, removing the burden of researching speakers from the student body.
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- Additionally, administrators will ask Faculty Council to require all academic departments to have Student Advisory Boards which will have access to a list of speakers invited by the department at least a month in advance. The Student Advisory Boards’ purpose will be to ask the student body for potential community input when necessary.
This is absurd. What are, exactly, Middlebury’s “community standards”? Presumably they align with those of the Authoritarian Left: no questioning of things like affirmative action, abortion, blank-slate-ism, Leftism, and so on. You know the kind of speakers this is designed to get rid of: those like Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Sommers, Heather Mac Donald, Legutko, and all Republicans. In other words, they are pressuring the University to invite only speakers who conform to approved campus ideology. This is just short of a ban, and certainly has a chilling effect on inviting controversial speakers.
One more demand. I myself would try to learn and use preferred pronouns of students (although in a class of 100+, it’s really hard to remember names, much less pronouns), but the following “demand,” especially the ideologically-themed required and recurrent “bias training”—and the McCarthy-esque publication of names of those who refuse that training—smacks of pure Stalinism.
Recurrent bias training will be provided to all hired staff, faculty, administrators, as well as all students, with implementation beginning in the 2019-2020 school year. The names of any faculty, staff, or administration members who do not participate in bias training should be publicly available to students so that they can make informed decisions on courses and interactions.
- In this bias training, participants must learn about the importance of preferred gender pronouns. All faculty must ask students’ names and pronouns on the first day of each new semester, and preferred names and pronouns must be respected.
What makes these demands rather than requests is the blackmail described below: the student government will resign en masse if these requests are not implemented and a town hall meeting with the President not convened by today. Therefore, they are demands.
These proposals were created in consultation with the student body and we expect each to be fulfilled as stated. We would like to give the administration time to consider adequate ways to address our proposals. As such, we ask the President to address students at a town hall on Tuesday, April 30. If tangible plans to implement these proposals are not released, a majority of SGA Senators will resign such that the SGA Senate will no longer be able to make quorum, effectively dissolving the body. More importantly, students will witness again the continued inaction of the current administration.
We await the administration’s response.
SGA Senate
My view about this is: LET THE STUDENTS RESIGN! Perhaps their seats will be filled by those less demanding and more conciliatory. (There are 18 senators in total.)
Here’s the article in the student newspaper about the threat (click on screenshot); note that the article characterizes the “proposals” as “demands.”
SGA Senators Threaten Mass Resignation If Administration Doesn’t Meet Demands
Were I a parent, I wouldn’t send any of my kids to Middlebury, a place where studying apparently takes back seat to social engineering. I now anoint Middlebury and Williams as joint holders of the title “Evergreen State of the East.”
Finally, in a section of his weekly New York Magazine column, “Free Speech at Middlebury, Part Two,” Andrew Sullivan, who is gay, defends Legutko’s right to speak at Middlebury despite the speaker’s apparent homophobia. Sullivan also faults the administration more than the students, as apparently many students didn’t want Legutko’s talk to be canceled, but they did want to protest his appearance. (Note that the students in the audio recording above, however, did want Legutko to be disinvited and for such a thing to never happen again.) Counter-protest, of course, is the students’ absolute right, and perhaps the cancelation of the talk on “safety grounds” may have been an excuse cooked up by the administration to avoid the whole controversy. However, it takes only a handful of violence-prone students to destroy a talk.
Sullivan also draws unflattering parallels between Middlebury and the Polish Communist government:
After Legutko’s invite, the administration convened an emergency meeting with students. And in another encouraging sign, a rebel student secretly recorded it. Check out his video here and here. You can hear PC students arguing that gay students are too fragile to engage arguments against homosexuality, so distraught by even the idea of it that they could not study anything at all. Seriously. All those pioneering activists for gay equality, who risked their lives and careers for their cause and brought their arguments directly to the face of their opponents, should shudder at the insult.
Legutko, of course, is no stranger to having his speech threatened. In Poland, the Communists did it, with the power of the state. Communist students would berate professors in class with the same arguments against a liberal education that today’s “social justice” activists make. Legutko remembers them: “Why teach Aristotle who despised women and defended slavery? Why teach Plato whom Lenin derided as the author of ‘super-stupid metaphysics of ideas’? Why teach Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was propagating anti-scientific superstition? Why teach Descartes who in his notion of cogito completely ignored the class struggle?”
In America, with the First Amendment, he is far freer. But it’s quite clear that college administrators, following critical race, gender, and queer theory, did all they could to silence him, just as the Polish Communists did. In the same samizdat tape, one professor, responding to the outrage at even inviting Legutko to speak, told the students: “You should be outraged and we should acknowledge that and apologize for it.”
I disagree with Andrew on one point here: he sees the Middlebury students’ claim that they were not demanding the censorship of Legutko as a positive sign: a pushback against the Authoritarianism that’s effacing free speech on American campuses. I am not so hopeful or so sanguine. Given the students’ behavior with respect to Murray, there may well have been the threat of violence, one perceived by the administration when they canceled Legutko’s talk. That, of course, is spineless and shameful: their job is to allow the talk to proceed and provide sufficient security so that Legutko could talk without being shut down. The administration was also, I think, acting out of fear of its own reputation: another Murray-like demonstration would further besmirch Middlebury’s appearance. So I can’t agree with Sullivan when he says this, though I’d like to:
I’ve long believed that at some point students would rebel against their new ideological overlords, like students always have. The desire to learn by engaging uncomfortable arguments rationally has been a deep one in the human psyche, since Socrates was executed for it. It is the root of liberal democracy. It is what universities are for. More and more are deciding to back the Chicago Principles, which guarantee that no speech can be suppressed on campus, within First Amendment limits. Sixty-two other institutions of higher learning have now adopted this principle, and the list is growing. If you’re a student denied a free education by the social-justice fanatics, ask your college administrators if they would agree to sign on.
As I used to say: know hope.
I know what hope is, but I don’t entertain it with respect to the college Zeitgeist, at least with respect to freedom of expression.
h/t: Simon
