by Grania

When Jerry sent me an article from The College Fix to read, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the story but I was – enough to do a search to see if this wasn’t a parody site in the style of The Onion and that the story had been reported elsewhere.

The story isn’t in fact unusual, it is in fact exactly what is becoming relatively commonplace news from campuses. Zach Wood, a student at liberal arts Williams College, who organises talks for a student group called Uncomfortable Learning, where members challenge themselves to hear different points of view—including ones that they disagree with—has now become the target of bullying, abuse and accusations of “promoting ‘violent ideologies'”. The reason for this is one we’ve all heard before: he invited a speaker whose opinions other students dislike.

Even worse is that Williams College President Adam Falk himself decided to cancel the invitation that had been extended, claiming these were “extreme circumstances“.

The thing is, even Zach Wood disagrees with the views of the speaker, paleoconservative John Derbyshire. As reported in The College Fix, he says

[T]he point was to have him here so we could question him and support free speech and intellectual freedom….there were even students of color on campus who said we think this is an opportunity to challenge [Derbyshire’s] views, question what he thinks, assess how he would present his arguments.

This was a great opportunity for students to do the very things that universities and colleges are there for: providing an opportunity to challenge your ideas. Now, thanks to President Falk, that won’t happen. It’s one thing to hold a particular point of view. It’s quite another thing to decide that only your point of view may be heard.

The Washington Post has an interesting quote from Falk defending his choice to de-platform Derbyshire.

To create an environment in which students learn and are challenged by challenging ideas, he said, ‘requires something more nuanced than the free-speech absolutism needed to run a country or a town. There are some things that are destructive of our community, destructive of our ability to have those kinds of complicated, nuanced conversations.’

What Falk doesn’t say is why he thinks that the views of Derbyshire who was invited by a black student for the express purpose of challenging his ideologies would damage his college’s community; but that gutting the plans and purposes of a student group would not.

If I were Falk, I would also be considerably more concerned that his students are targeting a fellow student—not for his views, which they presumably agree with—but for daring to publicly meet with someone holding different ones. That, more than anything else, could really could be destructive to his community. And how safe can any student feel if the lesson they are learning is that only certain ideas may be discussed publicly, and all dissent is to be repressed?

That is not how you build a healthy society. It’s how you build a society that fragments into groups that practice exclusion, foster a lack of understanding of other perspectives, and worst of all, eliminate the ability to reach across social and ideological divides and reach some common understanding.

[JAC: I can’t help add this to Grania’s piece, because I see it so often: college disinvite, ban, or refuse to entertain speakers, all the while insisting that they’re in favor of free speech. And their empty paeans to free discourse is always followed by “but”. . .  when they explain why in this case free speech isn’t useful. They are “free speech butters” in the same way that atheists who coddle faith are “atheist butters.” And what they mean is “We are in course in favor of free speech so long as it’s the kind of speech we like.”