Do We All Live On Campus Now?

There’s a lot happening in the United States right now. A global pandemic ravages our population, mass demonstrations against police brutality and misconduct have raging for weeks, despite attempts by police and city governments to crush them, a presidential election is happening, India and China appear to be on the brink of war, murder hornets may soon descend on us all. So obviously, prestige media is having another Discourse™ about political correctness. Specifically, this seems to be one of those perennial “controversies” where extremely well-paid tenured conservative columnists throw tantrums about the fact that they’ve been criticized by some of their colleagues. In this cases, it’s mainly Bari Weiss at the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine. Both of these individuals have a saying that they like to repeat: “We all live on campus now”, which means that just as America’s college campuses are ruled by Political Correct mobs of students who ruthlessly crush their opposition, so now is the rest of American society.

Now, it will probably come as no surprise that I think this is a tad bit silly, but in many ways, this current dust-up does remind me of campus “free speech” controversies, specifically in the fact that the conservatives demanding support and recognition and acceptance from the institution in question have absolute contempt for it and their supposed fellows.

Sullivan and Weiss really, really hate most of the people who work for them and with them. This is clear. Both write constant bromides about how their subordinates and colleagues are Cultural Marxist Social Justice Wokes bent on destroying civilization. At the New York Times, there’s been an ongoing brouhaha over the appropriateness of publishing an Op-Ed written by Senator Tom Cotton advocating sending in the troops to crush protests. During an editorial meeting to discuss this, Weiss tweeted a long thread describing virtually all of her colleagues under the age of forty of being “wokes” who didn’t believe in liberal values or freedom, something that her coworkers do not seem to have appreciated. Sullivan meanwhile, has been writing rants for the last few years about “cultural Marxists” and “critical race theorists” who are tearing apart civilization by, uhhh, talking about sexism and racism? I think. But most recently he’s been throwing a tantrum about the fact that his columns are edited, just like in Soviet Russia.

In the micro-sense, both of these “controversies” are about entitled people reacting with petulance and terror to criticism and push-back. (The fact that Bari Weiss in particular has a history of using her power to try and punish her critics is, of course, too ironic for words). But in a broader sense, they’re about the fact that these people fundamentally don’t like the institutions they’re demanding to be a part of. Much like how Senator Cotton was able to get The New York Times to publish his fascistic Op-Ed despite it going against every value that the paper claims to represent, conservative commentators and writers demand that liberals “live up” to their values by promoting and tolerating dissenting views, while doing everything they can to undermine said values.

This is relevant, I think, because it touches on the other side of the “Great Campus Political Correctness Debate”. Namely, there is a lot of pressure placed on liberal students and majority-liberal colleges to create a welcoming and inclusive environment for conservative students (a “safe space”, we call describe this). And while I would characterize the vast majority of “Political Correctness Out Of Control” stories as bad faith scare tactics, I’ll acknowledge there’s a real tension there that has to be balanced. Colleges and universities, if they are to function as educational institutions, need to be allow people to hold a wide variety of viewpoints, even objectionable ones. But very little attention is paid to the fact that many of these conservative student activists have made it clear that they view themselves as enemies of their fellow students and their “communities”. In essence, many of these stories turn on a demand that an institution welcome people who despise it as a matter of principle and are working to destroy it.

Back a million years ago during the national furor over Milo Yiannopoulos being invited to speak at Berkley and the violent protests that followed, there was a lot of outrage over people attacking College Republicans for inviting Milo. There was very little talk about the fact that one of Milo’s charming tactics at these events was to call out random transgender students and encourage his fans to attack them. (And let’s not mention the Nazi ties). To be blunt, there is no reason for trans students or their allies or friends to treat this man as anything but an enemy. And there is no reason to pretend that the students who invited him in the hopes he would pull stunts such as that are anything but enemies. And I use that term very consciously. Because it is very clear that they see themselves as such. You don’t invite Milo Yiannopoulos to your campus because you want to hear what he says to say or because you want to have a conversation about “free speech” or whatever. You do so because you hate a lot of your fellow students and you want to make them upset and hurt them. Does this justify the violence of the protests? No. That was stupid, and mostly the work of some non-students by most accounts. But trying to understand the story without that context is a futile endeavor.

There is a habit of trying to generalize these controversies, to make them about big, grand principles like “Free Speech” or “Classical Liberalism”. But while broad lessons can be extrapolated from individual incidents, that does not negate the details of the original event. The fact that students protest campus speakers or try to cancel their appearances can be read as a sign of their intolerance or inability to tolerate opposing views. But the fact that College Republicans invite white supremacists who publicly humiliate random students can also be read as a sign of conservative student’s basic antipathy to their institutions and communities.

This pattern is fairly common—I saw it myself at Brandeis when a right-wing student attacked a fellow student (and private citizen) in a national publication and did his best to get her expelled. There was a truly wild incident at Stanford in 2018, when leaked emails revealed that world-renowned professor Niall Ferguson had been trying to collect “opposition research” on liberal students, tasking conservative activists with seeking information they could use to “discredit” his enemies. A professor calling for his ideological allies among the student body to play informant on their peers sounds like a quintessential example of Political Correctness Out of Control™—but because it was a conservative celebrity professor and some right-wing activists it doesn’t seem to have made much impact on the cultural memory. Then there’s Turning Points USA, which raises millions of dollars from right-wing donors in order to try and enact hostile takeovers of student governments and campus institutions.

Turning Point USA is a non-profit organization focused on promoting right-wing ideology on college campuses through tactics that include supporting clubs, arranging speaking tours, publishing a “watchlist” intended to intimidate liberal professors, and now staging a nationwide campaign to elect their supporters as presidents of university student governments. They’re touting a plan to take over the presidencies in every Division One university in the country, as well as a select group of other schools in the swing states of Florida and Ohio. The group’s goal is to defund progressive student groups in order to reshape the campus culture in a conservative mold. What’s worse, absent any organized response, it might just work.

“The Right-Wing Plot to Take Over Student Governments”, David M. Perry

This sort of coordinated, outside-backed campaign is indicative of how a lot of conservative student activists (and it’s worth noting here how many literally hundreds of thousands of conservative students go to universities and colleges and don’t try and stage a coup or harass their fellow students) view their institutions. After the Daniel Mael incident (you can look it up, I refuse to explain it), Brandeis held a big celebration of our school’s community and sense of togetherness to try and heal the wounds. This infuriated me. The clear takeaway from the whole ordeal was that we did not have a community. Or at least, certain students did not see themselves as part of it. Which, to a certain extent, is fine? I’m not exactly brimming over with institutional loyalty to my alma mater. I don’t think communal spirit should be a requirement for entry into a school. But values matter. People’s moral and political beliefs are important, and they shape these debates.

The issue here is not that self-consciously liberal institutions should or need to purge their conservative members. Universities should be open to conservative students and conservative student activism. Newspapers should not bar right-wingers from employment. But they do need to understand that these people are not operating in anything like good faith. That, to a great extent, they are there to advocate for ideas and philosophies that would destroy everything you value if they succeed. In so many of these cases, you have people demanding a stake in and influence over organizations and communities that they actively despise. In his excellent overview of the problems with publishing Cotton’s Op-Ed, David Roberts at Vox discuses the problems inherent in assuming conservatives are actually interested in accepting the “those shared values, rules, and norms” that underlay the parameters of “marketplace of ideas”-style debate. They are not.

While Cotton very deftly exploited the liberal tolerance that Sulzberger and Bennet are so proud of to get his piece published, he does not share that tolerance. The movement he represents — he is often identified as the “future of Trumpism” — is ethnocentric and authoritarian. It is about maintaining the power and status of rural and suburban white people, even as they dwindle demographically, by allying with large corporate interests and using the levers of government to entrench minority rule. Such a movement is incommensurate with the shared premises that small-l liberals take for granted. Minority rule is incompatible with full democratic participation. A revanchist movement meant to restore power to a privileged herrenvolk cannot abide shared standards of accuracy or conduct. Will to power takes precedent over any principle.

“The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America’s values”, David Roberts

Tom Cotton did not publish his column in The New York Times because he wanted to participate in an intellectual debate about the merits of his proposal; he wanted to troll liberals and he’s been gleefully mocking the fallout ever since. For all the performative outrage from conservatives about the oppressive nature of liberal universities, conservative Christian colleges maintain vastly more stringent speech codes and explicit control over student’s intellectual and cultural life. Andrew Sullivan has spent the last two decades defending and promoting shoddy race science that purports to show African-American intellectual inferiority, and also seems to believe that the fact that he has testosterone somehow disproves feminism (I don’t really get it to either). He is a very much a Not a Friend to any newsroom or organization that wants to live up to basic principles of racial and sexual equality. When Kevin Williamson was fired from The Atlantic for the picayune crime of “having called for the execution of a not-insignificant number of his colleagues”, it was treated as a Scandal and an Outrage and part of the Slippery Slope to Fascism. It is noteworthy, however, that the conservative papers that Williamson still writes for, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal, do not even make a pretense of ideological diversity. The modern American conservative movement is mostly interested in using liberals’ commitment to pluralistic values as a way of undermining them, demanding that they grant them a level of access and influence that they have no interest in reciprocating. Institutions committed to small-l liberal values of tolerance, pluralism, openness can be threatened by overzealous leftist attempts to police speech or regulate behavior, but a far greater danger is the organized national political movement dedicating to stamping out those ideas. The fact that it’s adherents claim to be fighting for the universal value of Free Speech does not make that true.

In that way, it’s true that “we all live on campus now”, in that the conservative movement is mostly dedicated to destroying and dismantling liberal democracy and cultural pluralism while screaming that they’re being oppressed every time someone criticizes them.