Tales From The Safe Space

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 39 – UC San Diego, The Koala And The Battle To Censor Student Media

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Danger Unsafe Space Sign - The Koala - UCSD

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Student identity politics cultists and their craven university administration enablers are now gunning for student journalism and the free press

When University of California – San Diego student publication The Koala published this satirical article, they probably had some idea of the reaction that it would inevitably provoke:

Too long have trigger warnings plagued the airwaves. Too long has the no-blacks rule been removed from our campus. Too long have students not been free to offend their hypersensitive peers. “Spam Musubi only $1” and “Holy shit they opened up Starbucks” have replaced the long-gone chants of “Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger.” Next week, that will all change.

Administrators at UC San Diego are creating an all new, state-of-the-art Dangerous Space for UCSD students who just don’t feel like their needs have been met on campus. In the past few weeks, the lack of dangerous space at UCSD has become increasingly apparent; students have been lashing out with puppy parades, non-violent protests, and other equally safe gimmicks. Safe spaces at UCSD are commonplace, and threaten individuals who do not like feeling safe. The logical next step has been taken by the university in creating a place to fairly support all UCSD students, continuing the university’s theme of inclusion and equality.

Located in the center of Library Walk, the new Dangerous Space is the ideal place for students to do whatever the hell they want. Senior Frank Yu gave The Koala the following statement: “The needs of dangerous-space students have been overlooked for generations, but UCSD is finally recognizing what means the most to 19-year-old Asian nerds: fucking a dead body with a picture of my waifu taped on the face.”

F. Yu isn’t alone. Not only will this new dangerous space allow people of all ethnicities and sizes – even unnaturally large sizes – it will allow for knifes, guns, opinions that might be different than yours, drug paraphernalia, sharp writing instruments, and explicit pornography.

The new Dangerous Space is guaranteed to get students excited for a good time, and will probably end like all good things do, with body mutilation and feelings of remorse.

Not world class humour, you might think, but certainly something that falls well within the boundaries of constitutionally protected speech in America.

(And from this blog’s perspective, an always-welcome attack by students on the illiberal cancer metastasising through the English-speaking Western academia.)

But on this occasion, the publication was not merely the recipient of angry protests and tearful accusations from “triggered” snowflake students. Instead, the entire weight of the university leadership, egged on by vengeful student protesters, came crashing down on the small student newspaper.

From Inside Higher Ed:

On Nov. 18, the university’s administrators responded to student complaints, condemning the Koala in a statement. “We, the UC San Diego administration, strongly denounce the Koala publication and the offensive and hurtful language it chooses to publish,” several administrators, including the university’s president, stated. The Koala responded to the denouncement by publishing a series of profanity-laden and slur-filled fictional emails meant to be written by administrators.

So far, so unsurprising. Just another craven university administration cowering in fear and issuing Stalin-like denunciations of alleged thoughtcrime at the behest of entitled student protesters.

But it gets worse:

In an attempt to starve out a controversial student publication without violating the First Amendment, the student government at the University of California at San Diego voted last week to cease any funding of student media.

The move — which First Amendment experts said does not pass constitutional muster, despite the student government’s maneuvering to avoid targeting a specific group — came after UCSD administrators condemned the most controversial of the university’s publications amid student protests about racism on campus.

In other words, the officious student council was not satisfied with having bullied the spineless UCSD university administration into denouncing humorous free speech, they wanted to starve The Koala of funding, effectively shutting it down.

In Britain, this would have been a slam-dunk. Game over. But in America, the pesky First Amendment makes such blatant retaliation illegal, and so instead the student government had the bright idea of ceasing funding to all student media organisations – essentially killing off an entire campus industry and ruining everyone’s fun in order to punish one organisation accused of causing “offence”.

The political machinations here are so crude that there is simply no disguising them, try as the student council might:

Student leaders appear to have been worried that if they just ended funding for the Koala, and did so based on its content and language, they would be violating the First Amendment. So later that day, the Associated Students Council voted to defund all student media by removing a section from its constitution about financial support of student media organizations.

The Associated Students provides about $15,000 per year, drawn from student fees, to several student media organizations, including student-run research journals and magazines. The twice-weekly student newspaper, the Guardian, is independent and was not affected.

“When this was brought to council floor, I made it a point to address that this issue was not to be tied to any particular organization,” Dominick Suvonnasupa, the student government’s president, said in an email. “The question was whether to fund media at all, and at the end of the meeting, council decided not to. AS decided to discontinue print media funding as it was determined that there were other areas of campus that could better benefit from the limited resources of the Associated Students. All campus media organizations have received suggestions of alternative funding sources.”

Uh-huh. Sure. And of course the Associated Students Council would have come to exactly the same conclusion, independently, had The Koala not published their heretical article back in November of 2015 (funding was withdrawn from all student publications a week later). Right.

Incidentally, these are exactly the same tawdry tactics which were once used by die-hard segregationists during the last gasp of Jim Crow, where some racist whites chose to privatise their school districts and close their public amenities rather than submit to federally mandated integration. Only now it is moralising student activists and their cowardly enablers within academic leadership who would rather burn all student media to the ground than allow one publication to continue posting material which they find “offensive”. But don’t expect today’s virtue-signalling student activists to note the irony.

Just as many British leftists are desperate for Britain to vote to remain in the European Union in the coming referendum because deep down they don’t think that the people are capable of making the “right choices” if proper democracy was restored with Brexit, so these Social Justice and Identity Politics cultists on both sides of the Atlantic seem to think that fellow students are somehow unable to handle free speech, and that it must therefore be withdrawn or highly circumscribed in order to prevent “harm” from occurring.

Fortunately, the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is now riding to the rescue. From The Daily Caller:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against the University at California at San Diego (UCSD) for defunding a student publication that offended UCSD students.

[..] The ACLU alledges this action runs afoul of the First Amendment.

“The student government violated the First Amendment in two ways,” a statement from the ACLU read. “First, it targeted the student press by stripping it of revenue that remains available to support other student speech. Second, it retaliated against the editorial viewpoint of The Koala, an action that is not immunized by inflicting collateral damage on all student media.”

Although the organization expressed sympathy with those offended, it asserted The Koala piece was “classic protected speech.”

“Trauma is real,” said David Loy, legal director of the ACLU in San Diego and Imperial Counties, “but censorship is not the cure, because it inevitably blows back on those it purports to protect.”

It is good to see the ACLU come down on the right side of this issue and take up the case of this small student-run publication. One does not have to approve of The Koala, or this article in particular, to decry the way that the UC San Diego student government, drunk on power, sought first to shut down the paper and then effectively silence all campus media as a collective punishment for the heretical editorial viewpoint of one outlet.

The ACLU’s case seems quite watertight, and it is likely that the lawsuit will succeed, but student protesters will not take a defeat lying down. If they cannot accomplish their primary objective (shutting down the offensive publication) or secondary objective (suppressing student journalism altogether) they will come back with a third strategy, and a fourth.

These people are relentless. Caving in to their shrill and authoritarian demands encourages them to come back for more, while rebutting them only encourages the snowflakes to shout louder. All of which might be admirable, if only their cause was a just one. But despite the name, there is nothing “just” about the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics.

On the contrary, it is a poisonous, tawdry ideology which preaches personal fragility, collective guilt, voluntary re-segregation and a rampant culture of victimhood. And as such it must be actively opposed on all fronts.

God speed the ACLU lawsuit, and may The Koala survive to publish many more editions filled with edgy, unapologetically provocative student humour.

 

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Top Image: The Koala

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Jonathan Haidt On The Social Justice Self-Destruction Of Our Universities

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Jonathan Haidt discusses the madness which has taken hold of our colleges and universities

Social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt has an excellent interview on The Rubin Report, talking about the takeover of universities in the English-speaking Western world by the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics.

The full 30 minute video is well worth a watch, but these selected observations in particular stand out.

On the cult-like nature of the new PC movement:

We love to identify something as a sacred object, like a rock or a tree. Traditional religions would make a person or a river, something as sacred. And then we circle around it, we worship it, we make sacrifices to it. And that’s the way religions have always worked.

Well, now that formal religions are fading out, we have these new moralistic religions. So – “fighting racism”. You know, very good cause. But when fighting racism becomes the centre of a religious cult, you get all these extreme policies. And this is what universities have been for several decades – they have been basically been cults devoted to fighting racism. Again, a good aim. But it has been warping research.

And as it applies to racism, so it applies to today’s transgender bathrooms furore in North Carolina and across the United States:

Everybody at university is totally in favour of gay rights, gay marriage, that’s been true for decades. And it’s the most amazing thing that American society just in that twenty years we go from like “no way, never!” to “wow, okay, I guess that’s the law of the land” and most people accept it. So twenty years, that’s amazing.

Okay, but now what’s weird is three years ago nobody knew a transgender person, nobody thought about it – it wasn’t on anybody’s radar. So to make it in three years from that to “You must do this!” – this, I think, is a bridge too far. And this, I think, Obama is going to be remembered for this, I think it’s gonna cause a lot of reaction, because the country was not ready for this and it’s not appropriate for the federal government – I can see why the supreme court would way in on marriage rights because marriage has to be coordinated among the states, I get that – bathrooms? The federal government, bathrooms? Did nobody read The Federalist Papers? Has nobody read the Constitution? This is nuts.

And once this battle has been won by the Social Justice Warriors, new demands will be made:

As certain elements of the social justice Left have been victorious on certain fronts, this is the newest battleground. And so this becomes an object of sort of sacredness and extreme devotion. So the way to understand all these moral movements is as a kind of a crusade that binds people together.

[..] A good moral and political movement needs a good clear enemy. So you must, you must believe that the other side is really strong and is adamant against you, and racism is everywhere, sexism is everywhere, transphobia is everywhere, homophobia is everywhere. So you need a good solid enemy. And even though universities are the most anti-racist, anti-sexist places in the country, but it’s an article of faith that they are institutionally racist, institutionally sexist.

So it’s an incoherent movement if you look at it from the outside, but psychologically it’s very standard sort of Manichean, Us versus Them religion.

And on victimhood culture, and the hierarchy of the oppressed:

What’s happening is kind of a moral movement on campus, where the sort of social justice Left – and you find this on every campus, you find a group, they’ll meet, they’ll often take gender studies courses and intersectionality stuff, all that stuff – so you’ll have a group which is very much in an Us versus Them mindset. And everybody on every side thinks they’re the victim, that’s what’s so interesting here.

[..] So there’s seven. So there’s the big three, which is where almost all the controversy, almost all the stuff on campus is about, so it’s African Americans, women and LGBTs. That’s what almost everything is on campus. Then there’s what you might call the little three – not that they’re small, just less prominent – and that is Latino, handicapped of any kind, and Native Americans. Those are the six that have been around for decades. Just in the last year it’s Muslims. So the Left – and this is very alarming to me, I’m Jewish, and suddenly to say, you know, Jews are oppressors, Jews are evil, so there’s a lot of sympathy on the Left.

Also fascinating is the breakdown by subject – the illiberal, regressive Left has utterly captured some sections of the university while others are holding out far better:

The illiberal Left is a small portion, and then the liberal left – because liberals traditionally believed in freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thought – so the illiberal Left has everybody else scared. It’s the students overwhelmingly. Because the students – everyone is afraid of the students. Students are afraid of the students, professors are afraid of the students. So the illiberal Left make these demands, they march into the president’s office, they demand this and that, they accuse everybody of racism and sexism, and because everybody is on the Left and everybody is afraid of the students, nobody stands up.

So when the Christakis at Yale [see here for more on the Yale Halloween Costume Drama of 2015]  so within three days there was a giant petition, five hundred Yale professors backing the students. Well, I had one of my research assistants find out what departments they’re all in, it was gender studies, film studies, English, it was that stuff. So the humanities, they’re totally onboard with this. The humanities are full of illiberal leftists.

Four weeks later, a small petition, forty names, mostly STEM – mostly scientists. So the natural scientists are still liberals, they believe in openness, they believe in debate. So that’s what you have to keep in mind. The problem comes out of the humanities, the social sciences are in the middle, and the question is where does the illiberal Left have such dominance that the professors are afraid to speak?

And finally, on the nascent fightback:

The methods that the students have demanded – more social justice training, more bias reporting systems, anonymous reporting systems, diversity training – these are going to make things so much worse.

And what I’m really encouraged by is this: outside the university, everyone thinks they’re crazy. And so the first university presidents who just caved in – so Peter Salovey at Yale, Christina Paxson at Brown, the first university presidents who were faced with a mob of angry students just said “woah, you’re right! We’re so racist! Brown is racist, Brown is racist, oh my god! Here’s fifty million dollars!”, Peter Salovey said. A hundred million dollars for diversity! So the first presidents did that.

What happens? The alumni are like, “what are you doing?! What are you doing to our – no. We’re not giving to you any more”. And Missouri, things are way down in Missouri, they’re in big trouble. The first presidents all caved in. But then they started hearing from alumni, they were laughing stocks, everyone was making fun of them, and so now we’re seeing some presidents willing to stand up because they know that if they cave in they are going to be made fun of forever and they care about their legacy.

The same situation has been observed in Britain, with leaders of Oriel College at Oxford University scrambling to backtrack on lavish concessions granted to angry “Rhodes Must Fall” students after being contacted by furious alumni and finding major pledged donations suddenly in calamitous jeopardy.

Haidt’s conclusion:

So I think we have turned a corner. Presidents aren’t just going to lie down and give in any more, that’s one. Alumni are mad as hell, they’re saying “we’re not giving if you do this because we believe in free speech and we don’t want to turn it into a left wing propaganda factory”. And I think we’re gonna see more students rising up, we’re not that yet. I mean, there are conservative groups on each campus but even they are often afraid to speak up. But I think next year we are going to see a lot more students standing up, alumni standing up, so I think the tide is turning.

I hope and pray that this is the case. But as Britain lags a couple of years behind the United States in the progression of the disease, it could well be that remission is similarly further away.

And:

So I think things are going to change when the younger – when the high school kids now, kids who are in high school now, when they join in laughing at these silly campus snowflakes, at students who are afraid to see a photograph or hear a word – so I think mockery and humour is actually the way that honour revolutions happen. So keep up the mockery and humour, I say, good work.

That certainly chimes with the message of this blog – see here and here.

Haidt himself admits to having been pushed from being first left-wing to centrist, and then again to a sometimes libertarian stance by these developments. And one suspects that Haidt is far from alone in this – that many people with absolutely no racist or homophobic tendencies are nonetheless being alienated by a social justice movement which preaches collective guilt and brings shrill charges of heresy against anybody who does not instantly conform 100% to the latest Newspeak.

This relates to the remarkable lack of magnanimity shown by the victors of the culture wars towards those whose only crime was not to be in the vanguard of change, loudly cheering from the front – something picked up on by Andrew Sullivan, among others.

But then Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Sullivan are just middle-aged white males, so what would they know about anything?

 

Jonathan Haidt - Social Justice

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Bottom Image: The American Conservative

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Segregation Comes To Glastonbury, In The Name Of Social Justice

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

Womyns Music Festival 2

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As if going to Glastonbury were not already insufferable enough, now those who do will implicitly be condoning segregation – in the year 2016.

Vice reports:

When you’re a woman, going to a festival brings a new set of problems, whether it’s batting off the advances of some limp chirpser in the healing field, or, worse, feeling unsafe in a space that has a serious and unaddressed problem of sexual assault. While some festivals have been attempting to tackle the issue with safety awareness campaigns, sometimes all you want to do is drink and dance in a space where those problems are less likely to occur.

This year at Glastonbury, for the first time, there will be a venue for women only, which will be tucked away in the Shangri-La zone of the festival. The venue itself is ran by an organisation called The Sisterhood, who describe themselves as an “intersectional, queer, trans and disability-inclusive space open to all people who identify as women”. All staff working in the venue will also be those who identify as women, whether they are the acts who are performing, bar staff or security guards.

“The producers of The Sisterhood believe that women only spaces are necessary in a world that is still run by and designed to benefit mainly men,” the festival organisers explained. “Oppression against women continues in various manifestations around the world today, in different cultural contexts.”

“In the UK, the gender pay gap in the workplace, cuts to domestic violence services and sex worker rights are current talking points that highlight this issue. Sisterhood seeks to provide a secret space for women to connect, network, share their stories, have fun and learn the best way to support each other in our global struggle to end oppression against women and all marginalised people, whilst showcasing the best and boldest female talent in the UK and beyond.”

If you think this defence of sexual segregation at Britain’s most popular music festival sounds more like a spiteful two-fingers up at men in general rather a defensive act in response to a specific threat, you would be quite right – The Sisterhood spent more time ranting about the “oppression” of women around the world than fretting about any specific perils faced by women at Glastonbury.

Digital Music News also questions the rationale:

The group dubbed this ‘the 1st ever women only venue’ on Twitter, though the rationale for the space seems less celebratory and pro-women, and frankly, more anti-male.

Still, ISIS would be thrilled with this segregationist nod to their hardline Islamist ideology. Or they would, if only music festivals weren’t themselves haram.

 

Womyns Music Festival

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Fighting Censorious, Safe Space Authoritarianism With Comedy

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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If the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is the disease, comedy and the human instinct to ridicule the absurd are penicillin

Stand-up comedian Steve Hughes has an excellent rejoinder to the current illiberal mantra, held by all devotees of the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can kill me stone dead“.

In this excellent excerpt from an old routine, Steve Hughes skewers this baseless assertion and rejects the constant attempts to equate hearing disagreeable words with incurring physical harm.

As Hughes rightly says, when one is offended, absolutely nothing happens. The sky does not fall, pestilence and famine do not rain down on the Earth, one is not physically injured. On being offended, one can either respond and make a stand, or choose to let it go – both are valid options and people are free to choose between them, depending on the individual circumstances.

What is not valid are the attempts to circumscribe free speech – particularly the current fad of calling for “free speech, not hate speech” without realising the inherent contradiction – because the fear of giving or receiving offence is now so great that it overrides our commitment to the principles of a free, democratic society.

But though we must be vigilant in pushing back against these attacks on free speech, with university leaders and professors in particular needing to finally step up and take a stand for academic freedom, it is also worth recalling something which blog pointed out last year:

We must never forget that our best weapon in the fight against these petty, censorious students, these Orwellian tyrants in gestation, is the simple act of ridicule.

The more we take seriously and earnestly debate with these student babies, coming up with detailed arguments as to why it is in everyone’s interests that they tolerate the presence of someone with different ideas on their campus – or why they are wrong to terrify their professors with accusations of supposed microaggressions to the extent that they become unable to properly teach – the more their hysteria can begin to seem like a valid world view.

But of course it is not. Just as nobody takes seriously that diminished rump of eccentrics who maintain that the world is flat, so we should be careful not to take the bait every time some wobbly-lipped student demands the purging of a challenging book from the academic syllabus or the revocation of an honorary doctorate from a partisan figure.

That doesn’t mean that we sit back and do nothing, allowing these baby-faced tyrants to have their way. But it does mean all of us choosing more carefully how and when we pick our battles, and being willing to sit out a few rounds to let Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the good people at The Onion pick up the slack once in awhile.

Sometimes, earnestly engaging with those who seek to curtail freedom of speech and behaviour in the name of protecting the perpetually vulnerable from taking offence can be counterproductive, because deploying the well-trodden earnest arguments in favour of free speech only provides the Identity Politics cultists with another opportunity to state their toxic credo all over again.

Far better, in these circumstances, to keep one’s powder dry and let the comedians do the leg work instead.

 

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 38 – DePaul University Administrators Complicit In Disrupting Free Speech

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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It is not enough to issue mealy-mouthed apologies to speakers and societies after their events have already been ruined by militant student protesters. Free speech must be robustly defended by university administrators at the very moment it is being threatened – something which few liberal university leaders have the courage or character to do

Read this shocking account of how Vichy administrators at DePaul university, entirely cowed and captured by the militant Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, allowed violent and threatening protesters to shut down a private speaking event organised by DePaul College Republicans.

Michael Sitver writes:

I never realized that forcibly shutting down a private speaking event was considered free speech. I was also surprised to learn that assaulting a police officer is now a form of protest. It certainly never occurred to me that making violent threats towards a speaker was a constitutionally protected right. In fact, I was pretty confident all three of these acts were illegal…highly illegal.

Yet, yesterday I saw radical protesters do all three of these things, without consequence. DePaul University administrators looked on dispassionately, as if this was an every-day occurrence. Watching this all unfold, I had to wonder for a moment whether DePaul administrators were defending some bizarre form of free speech I had never heard of.

They weren’t. They knew they were tolerating a dangerous suppression of speech, but in the face of adversity they chose to do the easy thing, rather than the just thing. As usual.

Years of inaction by university administrators has left radical student activists feeling they are immune from the law. Free from consequences, or dissenting opinions, endowed with a feeling of moral high-ground, students have taken increasingly drastic steps to suppress other opinions, and conservative opinions in particular.

I watched from the front row yesterday as a whistle-blowing “protester” stormed the stage of an event featuring conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, with about a dozen more radicals following behind him. The event was privately organized by students, requiring months of planning and painstaking fundraising, but that never even factored into their heads. Administrators have handed them a bubble, a “safe space” where they don’t need to consider the impact of their actions on other students.

After the foul-mouthed and intimidating protest continued (one of the protesters simulated punching Milo Yiannopoulos in the face), the event was ultimately cancelled. The screeching, hysterical mob had their victory, aided and abetted by the silent university administrators who reportedly skulked in the corner and refused to take any action – save forbidding on-site security and the Chicago Police from removing the protesters and allowing the event to proceed.

Stories like this are now a dime-a-dozen. Almost every day brings some new egregious case of free speech suppression by supposedly “oppressed” protesters, grown increasingly emboldened with the knowledge that their universities would never dare to bring disciplinary proceedings against them for fear of unleashing the full force of mob justice.

But though these outrages are now common, we should not lose sight of what is lost when the forces of censorship and thought control succeed in one of their grotesque actions. In this case, the DePaul Republican society had fundraised extensively and gone to a significant effort to organise a high-profile event and attract a well-known if controversial speaker (Milo Yiannopoulos including the stop as part of his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of the United States). Many hours and many thousands of dollars doubtless went into organising the event. And hundreds of students made efforts to attend, in some cases travelling from far afield.

The very least that these students should have been able to expect from their university is that the leadership foster an environment of free speech in which the event could take place, and that administrators come down decisively on their side when their lawful event was disrupted. And yet DePaul University signally failed to fulfil this most elementary of duties, ostensibly because the victims were conservative and the perpetrators shielded by the blame-proof cloak of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sitver continues:

While an invited speaker was harassed and harangued by protesters, DePaul administrators cowered indecisively in a corner. Faced with a serious challenge to first-amendment rights on their campus, they were visibly frightened of confronting the protesters, who tied themselves to the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

Administrators had fought against hosting the conservative event for over three months. As they watched the event unravel, they seemed almost relieved to see the radical protesters fulfil their wishes. The rights implications were utterly lost on them. All they wanted was a nice, quiet, homogeneously-thinking campus.

Only days before the event, administrators had demanded that DePaul College Republicans, the club that hosted the event, pay hundreds of extra dollars in security costs. This was a clear breach of contract, but the organizers paid the fee under threat of cancellation. Yet, after ordering a dozen security officers, the administrators prevented them from restoring order, forcing them to stand down.

I talked to a few of the dozen Chicago police officers eventually called into the building, and they were irate. They were well-trained, and well-equipped to handle scenarios such as this. They wanted to do their job, and remove the protesters, but administrators demanded they stand passively and watch. Once again, violence prevailed over free speech on a liberal college campus, and the administration was 100% complicit.

And the great sickness at the heart of the academic establishment which allowed these protesters to act with such impunity is revealed in the official response of DePaul University president Dennis Holtschneider, who made absolutely clear that his sympathies lay with the belligerent protesters and not the innocent student society which had its long-planned event ruined in a brazen attack on free speech.

Immediately after the event, Holtschneider wrote:

Mr. Yiannopoulos and I share very few opinions.  He argues that there is no wage gap for women, a difficult position to maintain in light of government data.  As a gay man, he has claimed that sexual preference is entirely a choice, something few if any LGTBQ individuals would claim as their own experience.  He claims that white men have fewer privileges than women or people of color, whom he believes are unfairly privileged in modern society — a statement that is immediately suspect when white men continue to occupy the vast majority of top positions in nearly every major industry.

Generally, I do not respond to speakers of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ ilk, as I believe they are more entertainers and self-serving provocateurs than the public intellectuals they purport to be.  Their shtick is to shock and incite a strong emotional response they can then use to discredit the moral high ground claimed by their opponents. This is unworthy of university discourse, but not unfamiliar across American higher education.  There will always be speakers who exploit the differences within our human community to their own benefit, blissfully unconcerned with the damage they leave behind.

In other words, Holtschneider cannot even bring himself to unequivocally condemn the acts of the protesters – rather, he begins with this lengthy and cowardly disclaimer, making it crystal clear to any would-be student tormentors that he disagrees with pretty much everything that Yiannopoulos says and believes. Such a statement, it hardly needs pointing out, should be utterly redundant in a university setting. Whether the university president agrees or disagrees with the views expressed by a lawfully invited speaker is utterly irrelevant when it comes to condemning the subsequent disruption of the event. Yet Holtschneider is so terrified of his restive student population that he has to get his disclaimer in quick and early.

The statement continues:

Now that our speaker has moved on to UC Santa Barbara and UCLA, we at DePaul have some reflecting and sorting out to do.  Student Affairs will be inviting the organizers of both the event and the protest — as well as any others who wish — to meet with them for this purpose.  I’ve asked them to reflect on how future events should be staffed so that they proceed without interruption; how protests are to be more effectively assisted and enabled; and how the underlying differences around race, gender and orientation that were made evident in yesterday’s events can be explored in depth in the coming academic year.

This is about the tamest statement of disciplinary intent one could imagine. University administrators will not be summoning and ordering those who participated in this suppression of free speech to attend and account for their actions – rather, they will merely be “invited” to share their thoughts, and come armed with reflections on how things might be done differently next time.

At this point it is worth reminding ourselves that it is the university administrators who are supposed to be the authority figures, not the anti free speech student protesters. And when students have egregiously violated the university’s own code of conduct – as Sargon of Akkad shows conclusively that they did – campus authorities have considerable scope in imposing sanctions on the guilty parties. Yet the DePaul hierarchy seems so terrified of incurring the wrath of their own students that the most they are willing to do is meekly request a sit-down with the young woman who jabbed her fist mere inches from the face of an invited guest speaker.

At the end of his statement, Holtschneider does manage to scrape together the basic decency to apologise to the DePaul College Republicans for the disruption and abandonment of their event. But free speech is not something which can be protected in retrospect, or the harm inflicted by its suppression made good by a subsequent apology. Either a speaker is able to air his thoughts in the public square, free from intimidation and undue disruption, or he is not.

Issuing an apology once an event has already been disrupted and abandoned does nothing to redress the injury to free speech which has taken place. If anything, failing to tackle disruptive protests as they occur and relying on subsequent mealy-mouthed apologies exacerbates the problem, emboldening militant students to repeat the same childishly aggressive behaviours again and elsewhere, knowing that they will be free to achieve their aims while any mild repercussions will lag long behind.

Thus far, in the battle for academic freedom and free speech rights on campus, university authorities have been found dangerously wanting. At best they are paralysed by an overwhelming fear of their most militant students and the potential disruption (and potentially career-ending bad PR) they can bring, and at worst they are outright collaborators in the activists’ efforts to suppress freedom of speech and establish a culture of intellectual and ideological homogeneity on campus.

This is untenable. Academic institutions cannot properly function when the most immature and authoritarian students are flattered and pandered to by terrified university leaders. And neither can conservative students alone be expected to keep the flame of academic freedom and free speech alive while fully grown academics cower in the corner and shamefully shirk their own duties.

University administrations should be championing the cause of academic freedom and providing vital air cover to students on the front line of the debate. But sadly, at present many university leaders would rather stab such students in the back rather than openly support their right to freedom of speech and expression.

And for this cowardice they should feel heartily ashamed.

 

DePaul University - Milo Yiannopoulos - Protest - Free Speech

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