By George Will
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Commencement season brings a respite from the sinister
childishness rampant on campuses. Attacks on freedom of speech come from the
professoriate, that herd of independent minds, and from the ever-thickening
layer of university administrators who keep busy constricting freedom in order
to fine-tune campus atmospherics.
The attacks are childish because they infantilize
students who flinch from the intellectual free-for-all of adult society. When
Brown University’s tranquility of conformity was threatened by a woman speaker
skeptical about the “rape culture” on campuses, students planned a “safe space”
for those who would be traumatized by exposure to skepticism. Judith Shulevitz,
writing in the New York Times, reported that the space had “cookies, coloring
books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of
frolicking puppies.”
The attack on free expression is sinister because it
asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless.
Free speech is more comprehensively and aggressively embattled now than ever
before in American history, largely because of two 19th-century ideas. One is
that history — actually, History, a proper noun — has a mind of its own. The other
is that most people do not really have minds of their own.
Progressives frequently disparage this or that person or
idea as “on the wrong side of history.” They regard history as an autonomous
force with its own laws of unfolding development: Progress is wherever history
goes. This belief entails disparagement of human agency — or at least that of
most people, who do not understand history’s implacable logic and hence do not
get on history’s “right side.” Such people are crippled by “false consciousness.”
Fortunately, a saving clerisy, a vanguard composed of the understanding few,
know where history is going and how to help it get there.
One way to help is by molding the minds of young people.
The molders believe that the sociology of knowledge demonstrates that most
people do not make up their minds, “society” does this. But progressive minds
can be furnished for them by controlling the promptings from the social
environment. This can be done by making campuses into hermetically sealed
laboratories.
In The Promise of American Life (1909), progressivism’s
canonical text, Herbert Croly said, “The average American individual is morally
and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his
responsibilities as a democrat.” National life should be “a school,” with the
government as the stern but caring principal: “The exigencies of such schooling
frequently demand severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?”
“Unregenerate citizens” can be saved “many costly perversions, in case the
official school-masters are wise, and the pupils neither truant nor
insubordinate.” For a survey of today’s campus coercions, read Kirsten Powers’s
The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.
In Kindly Inquisitors (1993), Jonathan Rauch showed how
attacks on the free market in speech undermine three pillars of American
liberty. They subvert democracy, the culture of persuasion by which we decide
who shall wield legitimate power. (Progressives advocate government regulation
of the quantity, content and timing of political campaign speech.) The attacks
undermine capitalism — markets registering the freely expressed choices by
which we allocate wealth. And the attacks undermine science, which is how we
decide what is true. (Note progressives’ insistence that the science about this
or that is “settled.”)
For decades, much academic ingenuity has been devoted to
jurisprudential theorizing to evade the First Amendment’s majestic simplicity
about “no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” We are urged to “balance”
this freedom against competing, and putatively superior, considerations such as
individual serenity, institutional tranquility, or social improvement.
On campuses, the right of free speech has been supplanted
by an entitlement to what Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education calls a right to freedom from speech deemed uncongenial.
This entitlement is buttressed by “trigger warnings” against spoken
“micro-aggressions” that lacerate the delicate sensibilities of individuals who
are encouraged to be exquisitely, paralyzingly sensitive.
In a booklet for the “Encounter Broadside” series,
Lukianoff says “sensitivity-based censorship” on campus reflects a broader and
global phenomena. It is the demand for coercive measures to do for our mental
lives what pharmacology has done for our bodies — the banishment or mitigation
of many discomforts. In the social milieu fostered by today’s entitlement
state, expectations quickly generate entitlements. Students are taught to
expect intellectual comfort, including the reinforcement of their beliefs, or
at least those that conform to progressive orthodoxies imbibed and enforced on
campuses. Until September, however, the culture of freedom will be safe from its
cultured despisers.
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