A Williams College professor decries his “comfort college”

Those are just soothing words to placate the anger and offense seething in the student body, for while free speech and D&I are often compatible, the hard decisions come when they are not—precisely when meaningful speech is offensive to some students. And someone who’s offended is clearly not “included”.  Discussions worth having guaranteed to offend people include those about abortion, affirmative action, Israel and Palestine, Republican politics, segregated dormitories (in the offing at Williams), equity versus gender feminism, the status of transgender people, statues and buildings named after people who weren’t perfect, cultural appropriation, and so on. No, D&I and liberal free speech are not always compatible, and become incompatible just when the discussion gets interesting. After all, a difference of opinion, particularly if identity politics are involved, is going to lead to some people being offended—hence “excluded.”

None of those topics constitute “hate speech”, but all are guaranteed to produce rancor and, at Williams, student revolt. FIRE has given Williams’s speech code a yellow rating, in part because it’s sufficiently ambiguous to invite “administrative abuse and arbitrary application.” Remember, too, that for 17 years Williams has been the #1 rated undergraduate liberal arts college in America. It has enormous financial resources, which will be endangered if the administration doesn’t play its cards properly.

Gerrard, as someone in favor of free speech, has faced his share of opprobrium. The first essay details some of the obstacles he faced, and also floats the notion of a “comfort college”.

A small group of faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts, where I teach philosophy, had circulated a petition to have our institution sign a national pledge of allegiance to principles of free expression that originated at the University of Chicago. Over 50 colleges and universities, including Princeton and the Citadel, had already adopted the mainstream liberal principles, protecting both speakers and protesters.

I was cautiously optimistic. Like many liberal arts colleges, Williams had gone through a free-speech crisis — and survived. In 2016, our then-president canceled a talk from a conservative writer (the first presidential cancellation since 1865, when Ralph Waldo Emerson was barred from speaking on campus); he also ordered that a mural of the school’s founderbe temporarily boarded over because of objections to its depiction of Native Americans.

. . . So it was with all this in mind that I went into a faculty meeting to present the free-expression “pledge” with the idea that we would have a productive discussion. Then reality hit.

As I stepped up to the lectern in one of the college’s elegant Federal-style halls, students marched into the room, bearing a letter naming me an “Enemy of the People.”

In the spirit of liberal openness, I read their letter aloud. This is what it said: “‘Free Speech,’ as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism.” The letter reserved special scorn for liberalism: “Liberal ideology asserts that morality is logical — that dehumanizing ideas can be fixed with logic and therefore need to be debated.” But, it added, “dehumanization cannot be discussed away.”

The letter finished, I started to reply. But a group of younger faculty in the front row demanded that I be quiet and let the students speak. And the students did. They had almost nothing to say about free speech; instead, they testified to the indignities they suffered at Williams. The dean of the college, who was in attendance, praised the students for their passion.

And so began Williams College’s annus horribilis, a year marked by protests, marches, threats and demands — everything but rational argument. A significant number of faculty not only supported this, but also instigated it. And the administration? Its response was to appoint a committee consisting of faculty, staff and students. Since “free speech” was now a dirty phrase, it was called “the Ad Hoc Committee on Inquiry and Inclusion.”

The year pretty much went downhill from there.

I wrote about a lot of the trouble in the posts I’ve linked to above. My prediction: after the new free-speech proposal that pretends to comport D&I with Chicago-style free speech is approved, things will go even further downhill. Those who want curbs on free speech will be enraged, and will test any policy that will punish students for censoring, deplatforming, or interrupting speakers. But I’d be glad to be wrong.

And here’s the “comfort college”—one of many neologisms which, in this case, seems only marginally different from what people like Haidt and Lukianoff have written about previously.

Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. They are currently considered controversies because the colleges are in transition, and many do not realize that the old standards no longer hold. Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity — just as faith was to the Christian college, self-confidence was to the gentlemen’s college, and alumni devotion and achievement were to the consumer’s college.

Some have suggested naming this new college “the therapeutic university” or “the woke college.” I prefer “the comfort college,” because it combines the emotional component of the first with the political elements of the second. Our students are comfortable in their opinions but uncomfortable with their lives, finding their world and the Williams campus a threatening place. Once Williams’ transition to comfort college is complete, the students will expect to find their college truly comfortable in all respects.

. . .What characterizes the comfort college? The slogan of the comfort college is “diversity and inclusion.” And just to be clear: The presence of previously underrepresented groups is vital, necessary and welcome. What’s more, insensitivity toward people’s identities should be self-censored, and social pressure to do so is a helpful tool.

But another agenda, an agenda that runs counter to true diversity and inclusion, has (often silently) accompanied these positive changes. At some point along the way, this laudable attention to the language of inclusion turned from a psychologically realistic sensitivity into a harsh and confrontational tribal marker. Much of comfort-college language — “neurodiverse” versus “mentally ill,” “minoritized” versus “minority” — simply identifies one as a member of the woke tribe, and using the wrong term will bring about social death.

Finally:

Essayist William Deresiewicz gets it right when he says:

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. … They possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. … Which brings us to another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means those beliefs that undermine the orthodox consensus, so it must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation — if necessary, by censorship.

Well, this much we already know, but think of this essay as a cri de coeur from a professor who is bravely risking the disapprobation of the administration and student body as he watches his principles get trampled in the mud.

The second essay I found less useful, perhaps because it’s long on philosophy and short on remedies and descriptions of what Gerrard has faced. But it’s still worth reading (judicious inquiry. . . . etc.):

If one adopts social justice as the primary goal of a college, there emerges a paradox that resembles what philosophers call the hedonistic paradox. It goes something like this: Many hold happiness as the goal or purpose of life. However, the surest way to make sure you never attain happiness is to always hold it as the goal and to ask yourself constantly, Is this making me happy?

As John Stuart Mill notes in his autobiography: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.” If you want to be happy, then immerse yourself in ballet or baseball or breaking the chains — if happiness is to come, it will follow from that. It turns out that sometimes the best way to pursue something is not to do it directly. For a college interested in training its students to fight for social justice, the paradox holds.

By raising the pursuit of justice over the pursuit of knowledge, the comfort college discards the very tools needed to achieve true justice.

. . .The comfort college’s acolytes make the figurative fallacy literal. It is the arguer’s genes that determine truth and validity, not facts or reason. That is why, in the comfort college, testimony has come to substitute for rational argument. When students (and more and more faculty) demand a new policy, their arguments often begin as (and rarely go beyond) accounts of victimization; the account is justification enough.

This ritual institutionalizes the denial of rational justification. It corrupts the healthy multicultural idea, built on Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitanism, that different perspectives matter, and that what one sees often depends on where one stands — and that we are all better off from listening to those who stand in different places, who see the part of the truth that is blocked from our particular vision. The liberal ideal of the pursuit of knowledge is that by cooperating we all can see and understand better. But identity politicians reject the Enlightenment’s hope of mutual understanding and reason’s path to get us there. In the fragmented comfort college, the only tool is power — the power to enforce the dogma.

That, the heart of the essay, could have been conveyed in less than half the space. But I carp too much: even to get an essay like this published in Bloomberg is an accomplishment. However, the essay is too heavy on Plato, Mill, and Thrasymachus, and light on instantiation of his thesis. It’s stuff like this that really educates me:

When a Williams College department is given permission to create a new teaching position, the dean of the faculty assigns the search committee to read, among other works, “‘We Are All for Diversity, But …’: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can Change.” The authors say:

Another unnamed logic of Whiteness is the presumed neutrality of White European enlightenment epistemology. The modern university — in its knowledge generation, research, and social and material sciences and with its “experts” and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom) — has played a key role in the spreading of colonial empire. In this way, the university has validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous, and non-European knowledges.