BY HANK REICHMAN
To hear more than a few right-wing politicians and pompous pundits tell it, the greatest problem in American higher education today is that free speech on campus is on life support, especially when it comes to the speech of prominent conservatives and especially at places like the University of.California at Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement, which Ann Coulter has called a “thuggish institution.” [By the way, the FSM was not about the rights of outside political speakers, as some seem to suggest, but about the right of students to recruit their classmates to participate in acts of civil disobedience against racial discrimination.] At Berkeley the College Republicans, supported by the Trump-Sessions Justice Department, have gone so far as to file a lawsuit charging that campus officials are violating their First Amendment rights. Yet last Fall conservative speaker Ben Shapiro appeared on campus without incident, albeit supported by an expensive security operation. And now last Thursday the very same College Republicans, in cooperation with the Ayn Rand Institute, successfully held a forum entitled “Are We Killing Free Speech?” with little fanfare and no incident.
As the Daily Californian reported today, “The event hosted speakers Heather Mac Donald and Steve Simpson. Simpson is a constitutional lawyer and director of legal studies at the Ayn Rand Institute and Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Talk show host and ‘classically liberal’ comedian Dave Rubin was the moderator for the event.” About 100 people RSVP’ed. There was a question period, although “there were almost no questions that challenged the viewpoints of the speakers.” Mac Donald, it may be recalled, was the target of protests last year at Claremont-McKenna College. At Berkeley, however, the only registered opposition to last week’s event came from the now-suspended Twitter account @AntifaOfficial, an account revealed to be a hoax. The Berkeley Republicans are set to hold a second event tomorrow, entitled “No Safe Spaces,” which will feature conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and is co-sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation. It too has garnered little attention, much less opposition.
That phony Twitter account, by the way, was also cited in a much-read New York Times op-ed by Bari Weiss (now “corrected” to eliminate the fake citation), which yet again trotted out the tired complaint that left-wing students pose the biggest threat to free speech and academic freedom on campus, a viewpoint whose flaws I have repeatedly addressed (see, for examples, here and here) and which was addressed today by David Perry and Matthew Yglesias.
Meanwhile, however, while the pundits continue to harp on the exaggerated and often simply fraudulent threats aimed at a small coterie of right-wingers, campuses face much more significant and pressing problems. Indeed, Perry lists 98 of them. High on his list are hunger (#4) and homelessness (#7). And, guess what, these are issues at “elitist” Berkeley too, even if the likes of Weiss, David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, et al. don’t find them very interesting.
Take, for instance, the situation of Ismael Chamu, a Berkeley student whose life in a trailer in Hayward, twenty miles south of Berkeley, with no heat or sewer hookup was profiled in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Here’s a portion of that account:
Ismael constantly scrambles to find shelter and enough food for himself and his siblings while working a campus job, leading a student club and trying to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
In the last 18 months, he has slept on couches and floors, in trailers and attics. Since November, he and his 20-year-old brother Edward have rented the 20-foot-by-8-foot mobile home, parked in a Hayward driveway. His sisters joined them in January after their parents fell on hard times in the Central Valley and were forced to live in their car.
But Hayward has outlawed living in residential trailers. The family is due to be evicted Tuesday. And so the scramble will begin again.
According to the LA Times, “A recent University of California study estimated that 13,000 of the system’s 260,000 students have struggled with unstable housing. That guess comes from two 2016 surveys, in which 5% of the nearly 70,000 students who responded said they had couch-surfed, lived on the street or found temporary shelter in vehicles, motels or campgrounds at some point since they had enrolled.” In the California State University system, with some 500,000 students it is estimated that about 41,000 students have unstable housing; in the Los Angeles Community College District it’s about 44,000.
My colleagues and friends at Berkeley can provide additional stories of hardship and struggle among their students. But I guess they won’t make headlines like Milo Yiannopoulos did. It doesn’t seem like Berkeley is “killing free speech” after all; the College Republicans are alive, well, and organizing events, as is their right, even as students like Ismael struggle simply to live. I wonder when the New York Times op-ed page will host a student like Ismael Chamu and devote even half the column-space they give to the over-hyped “assault” on free speech to the more real and pressing problems that colleges and universities confront.
I’m very skeptical of the idea that free speech is in perfect shape and we have nothing to worry about, at Berkeley and elsewhere. In fact, Berkeley’s policies and recent history are pretty worrisome for free speech. The fact that one event was held on campus without being shut down is not exactly holding the campus to a high standard. And the fact that right-winger exaggerate a problem (and ignore the right-wingers who threaten free speech) doesn’t mean the problem is nonexistent.
I’m also skeptical of Salon’s list of 99 items that are supposedly more important than campus free speech (most of them aren’t). If caring more about free speech than homeless students is a terrible thing, then this blog and the AAUP are surely guilty of it, too. The AAUP has issued endless statements and reports on intellectual freedom for 100 years, and probably has never said a word about homeless students. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on free speech without being obliged in every discussion of it to also mention every other social evil affecting colleges.
Really, John? It would be nice if you responded to what I actually wrote. I never wrote that free speech is in “perfect shape” at Berkeley or anywhere else; that would be absurd — or perhaps just the straw man that excuses your reply. I did answer the question, “Is Berkeley KILLING free speech,” with “apparently not.” You suggest that one event held on campus without being shut down hardly absolves Berkeley of such a charge. Agreed, except that dozens of events are held at Berkeley every single day without being shut down. I know; I attend many of them. In fact, can anyone name a single event — from whatever perspective, right, left, center, weird — that was “shut down” at Berkeley in the last five years other than the notorious Milo speech, terminated in the wake of a riot by a group of mainly off-campus demonstrators? That’s it. So, don’t you think that one event is itself hardly a criterion for condemning Berkeley’s free speech record?
David Perry’s list is a rhetorical device designed to make a point; I’m not going to stand by every one of his rankings. But no one — not me, not David Perry, not Matt Yglesias — has said that caring more about free speech than homelessness is terrible. That would be nuts. What we have said is that the “conservatives are being silenced” argument has been greatly exaggerated and overblown in the media, which has — with some exceptions, of course — paid far more attention to that problem than to others that are rightfully of greater concern to most people in the campus community. It’s not a matter of “ranking” principles, but of assessing the extent and urgency of various problems.
As for the AAUP and homelessness/hunger among our students, let me simply point out that this was my blog post, not an official posting of the AAUP, and hardly the first time I’ve blogged about that topic. For examples see:
https://academeblog.org/2016/02/18/hunger-on-campus/
https://academeblog.org/2016/07/12/our-hungry-homeless-students/
https://academeblog.org/2017/06/30/one-in-five-los-angeles-community-college-students-is-homeless/
https://academeblog.org/2017/11/30/a-worthy-cause-bravo-to-sarah-goldrick-rab/
So, believe it or not, I can and do write about a variety of higher ed topics; I’ve never seen any use to ranking them by importance. Hence I agree that “There’s nothing wrong with focusing on free speech without being obliged in every discussion of it to also mention every other social evil affecting colleges.” But I also think there’s nothing wrong with pointing out occasionally the hypocrisy of pundits and entire op-ed pages that carp on a single exaggerated issue and pointedly ignore other manifest evils, especially those who repeatedly decry today’s students as thuggish “snowflakes” (yes, it’s a contradiction; it’s theirs) while ignoring the plight of the growing number of students who are hungry, homeless, and increasingly in debt. In short, I think Ismael Chamu merits as much attention as the Berkeley College Republicans (or of Milo Yiannopoulos). So that’s what I tried to give him.