BY HANK REICHMAN
Listening to right-wing Republican whiners, you’d think that America’s college and university campuses have been overrun by thuggish “snowflake” leftists busily drowning out conservative voices in the name of some sort of ideologically purist “political correctness” dismissive of free speech. After U.C. Berkeley failed to find a safe venue for her to speak last year Ann Coulter called that university a “thuggish institution” that had snuffed out the “cherished American right of free speech.” In the National Review, Stanley Kurtz claimed that “campus free speech is more besieged nowadays than it’s been in decades.” New York Times columnist David Brooks once even suggested that “fragile thugs who call themselves students” are partly responsible for an existential “crisis of Western Civ[ilization].” In January a top Justice Department official said colleges ought to do more to deal with those who heckle speakers or shut down campus events and Republicans in multiple state legislatures have proposed or passed ill-conceived “free speech” laws that, as PEN America has argued, in critical respects defend free speech by attacking it. Following a speech by attorney general JeffSessions assailing colleges that allegedly attempt to curb free speech through restrictive rules, his department filed at least three statements of interest in cases involving free-speech lawsuits and colleges.
But guess who disagrees? None other than President Donald J. Trump!! Of course, after violent protests last year at Berkeley against the appearance of provocateur-bigot Milo Yiannopoulos, Trump went so far as to suggest revoking federal funds from the University of California. But yesterday, in a panel discussion with Charlie Kirk, executive director of the right-wing group Turning Point USA, sponsor of the notorious Professor Watchlist, Trump claimed that the “vast majority” of people on campuses “want free speech.” The so-called antifa and other opponents of free speech, Trump declared, “get a lot of publicity, but you go to the real campuses, and you go all over the country, you go out to the Middle West, you go out even to the coast in many cases, we have a tremendous support. I would say we have majority support. I think it’s highly overblown. Highly overblown.”
Here’s the relevant exchange between Trump and Kirk:
Well, to be fair, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Or, to quote Aldous Huxley, “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” And for Oscar Wilde “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Still, one has to wonder. Indeed, I’m thinking of another word, one in Yiddish — chutzpah, sometimes defined as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”
Trump notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to minimize the danger to free expression posed by attacks on controversial speakers. In a post last year on Yiannopoulos I wrote: “repulsive as his ideas and actions are, Yiannopoulos has the right to speak publicly, including on college campuses. Under the First Amendment public colleges and universities are clearly legally bound not to bar him nor to create viewpoint-based obstacles (like inordinately high “security fees”) to his appearances. Under the broader principles of free expression, all institutions, public or private, and all members of the higher education community should refrain from efforts to block his appearances.”
Still, as I’ve also argued extensively on this blog (see here, here, here, and here) the danger is, indeed, as Trump puts it, “highly overblown.” Not because most students are closet conservatives, but because despite all their many flaws, colleges and universities are probably still the places in America where the diversity of views to be found is most extensive and least restricted, certainly when compared to the mass media, the corporate world, or religious institutions. And despite their reputation as both frightened “snowflakes” and bullying “thugs,” student protesters have been far more willing to engage in constructive dialogue than sensationalist media reports would suggest.
Sadly, that can hardly be said for Trump or his cynical interlocutor Kirk, whose main contribution to the cause of free speech is to ruthlessly promote the vile harassment of those with whom he disagrees — or simply dislikes because they’re, well, not like him. But, as I said, chutzpah.
