BY JOHN F. COVALESKIE
In “Speech, Academic Freedom, and Privilege,” in the current issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom, I argue that “colleges and universities should actively place themselves on the side of victims of systems of oppression.”
Over the last couple of generations, a movement has developed to make college campuses more welcoming to students who came from traditionally oppressed and marginalized groups: women, people of color, marginalized religious and ethnic groups, and members of LGBTQ+ communities. As this movement has gained strength, visibility, and voice, pushback has developed to maintain the historic privileges of white male students and professors on campus. The defense of white male privilege is most often presented as defense of free speech and academic freedom. Regardless of the effect of others in the public square, the argument goes, I have the right to speech that marginalizes or subordinates others. This nicely finesses the question of whether it is right to do so.
In principle, free speech and academic freedom create an arena of ideas in which policy should be made and opinions formed by open debate within a marketplace of ideas, where the best arguments will carry the day. This is not entirely false.
However, this is not entirely true, either. Voices of marginalized communities have been and still are often silenced, and their claims are dismissed out of hand just because those in power can ignore them. And even when opposing points of view are accommodated or even encouraged, the fact that someone is invited on campus to speak against LGBTQ+ people (or women, or people of color, or religious minorities, or any marginalized and underrepresented group) is damaging to the students listening, on whichever side of this debate they fall. Students who are members of the LGBQT+ communities are told that their campus community considers limiting their civil rights to be reasonable and respectable. Straight students who support such limitations are told they have the right to decide what rights and how much presence in civic spaces other people will be allowed.
Speakers defending display of the Confederate battle flag require students of color to pretend that it is a perfectly reasonable claim to say that the flag is neither a symbol of white supremacy nor an implicit (at least) threat to students of color. And white supremacists are given the same message: their position is perfectly reasonable and deserving of university resources and a respectful hearing.
What theoretical discussions about abstract principles ignore is that in such debates neither power nor stakes are equal. While both “sides” may get equal time and hearing, only one side speaks from a position of power, and only one side faces effacement from or subordination in civil life. When the university takes a position of official neutrality and acceptance, it does an injustice to those marginalized.
It is a mistake to assume, as does the argument presented by Lukianoff and Haidt, that students oppose certain speakers coming to campus because they are too “fragile” to hear themselves denigrated in one way or another. It may well be that they refuse to continue to pretend that these assaults are acceptable civil or academic discourse just because they are advanced under the banner of free speech or academic freedom: they refuse to be complicit in their own marginalization.
There is no “civil” way to argue that members of the LGBTQ+ communities have no right to full civic membership, just as there is no “civil” way to tell women they are second-class citizens. No matter how gentle the tone of my voice, there is no civil way to preach the virtues of white supremacy to students of color. Nor is there any reason why these students should stand quietly and graciously as their university community gives attention to such views, often paying those who espouse them.
We should learn to listen to the voices of those who have been hurt by racist, sexist, homo-negative speech, and we should learn that our job is to do no harm. If we refuse to accommodate our students’ needs for trigger warnings in syllabi and safe spaces on campus, among the most obvious ways we can support them, we are not exercising academic freedom. We are abusing it. If we give resources to the voices of exclusion on our campuses, we are betraying our students who come to us to learn and be mentored.
Guest blogger John F. Covaleskie is a professor emeritus of educational studies at the University of Oklahoma and Northern Michigan University.
Read the complete volume of the 2019 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.
I am fully supportive of the idea that “colleges and universities should actively place themselves on the side of victims of systems of oppression.”
However, given recent events on campuses across the U.S., it can hardly be denied that those efforts have sometimes gone to extremes and resulted in injustices against, yes, white professors and students (often not right-wing troglodytes). Inside Higher Education reports at least one such incident almost every day: examples of outright censorship of (often misunderstood) “offensive” art, literature, cinema, etc, — not to mention words, phrases, and ideas (often mistakenly) taken to be “MICRO-aggressions.”
Clearly, if one uses the “n-word” against an individual or group of people that is way over the line and campus codes should prohibit that. But discussing that slur in a law class or in reference to HUCKLEBERRY FINN or a Dave Chappelle monologue is quite a different matter.
Look what happened to me: although I am white (and worked tirelessly for four decades in black communities and for minority causes) I am still supposedly in a protected class under Affirmative Action guidelines in the CUNY system due to my Italian American heritage and my age. Nonetheless, I lost my position as Adjunct Full Professor at CCNY over the use of one word: “hood” (urban neighborhood). Read all the gory details here:
https://www.academia.edu/23593134/A_Leftist_Critique_of_Political_Correctness_Gone_Amok_–_Revised_and_Updated
My story is not a mere anecdote, as this author would like us to believe. Freedom of speech on campus is important — and should be ESPECIALLY important — to minorities, who were denied such protections through most of their history in the U.S. Likewise, even if “white privilege” exists as a general rule, does that justify INJUSTICE against individual whites as some kind of reparation for the injustices meted out to blacks?
This article is unfortunate. For at least two reasons. One, it perpetrates “victim” identity rather than an identity based on merit, work and individual integrity. It is an identity based on weakness rather than strength; on blame and projection rather than self-confidence and advocacy; and on division rather than unity. Two, and relatedly, the writer appears to promote the advancement of the rights of one group, by effectively suppressing those of another. This kind of logical fallacy and effective mass psychosis, undermines the integrity of pedagogy, and the rational authority of the academy. Put more plainly this is an example of precisely why parents and donors are increasingly reconsidering the university construct and culture. It is suffering and in need of treatment. As for this article, it is likely not redemable or clarified as its ideology does not rest on rational cognition but on emotion. You cannot back someone out of such a position with logic when it was formed by feeling. Regards.
Matt Anderson, if you found this article disturbing for its logical fallacy and its undermining of the authority of the academy, I wonder what you think of another article in this same issue of JAF, by John Streamas, which states that “The time is now to bully back.”
How do we determine what “doing no harm” is? Couldn’t Trump supporters argue that posters outside classrooms harm them, even thought hey are an attempt to support those who feel harmed by Trump? As someone who taught women’s studies, I often heard that my course materials was “harming” those who opposed abortion rights, who were men, etc. Should I have stopped teaching what I taught because those people felt “harmed”? Surely we need some sort of *non-political* measure of what would constitute harm, and what would constitute my academic freedom. Otherwise, we are saying it’s ok to let your politics determine whom you get to harm and whom you don’t, whose academic freedom you’ll support and whose you’ll squash.
Martha: Regarding “Should I have stopped teaching what I taught because those people felt “harmed”?
That rhetorical question is an EXCELLENT counter-argument to all those on the liberal side of things who insist that students’ “feelings” or preconceived beliefs should considered in designing lesson plans and selecting required readings or activities! Brava!
Instead of “coddling” pseudo-“SJWs” (not whites, as emphasized in the article), let’s EXPOSE them to ideas, writings, and art that CHALLENGES their preconceived (and often wrongheaded) views.
The “P.C.” police have already led many profs to self-censor their lessons and language. Cf. this link, which features MY run-in with self-censorship as well as several other faculty members:
https://www.academia.edu/31680392/Self-Censorship_of_College_Faculty
Safe spaces for faculty!
Thanks for taking time to comment on my blog. I can use all the feedback I can get, as I am in the process of working through what seem to me to be very complicated questions. For example, I take Martha’s question as a real question, not rhetorical: “Should I have stopped teaching what I taught because those people felt “harmed”? In a society structured around patriarchy, moving to more justice is going to discomfort those male students who assume that patriarchy is the proper order of things. To teach a feminist view of the world will discomfort some, and they will feel entitled to let us know. But to NOT teach a feminist point of view will discomfort our female students. So, we have to choose: whose side are we on (whom will we discomfort)? A smiler situation follows from efforts to dismantle white supremacy. Or heteronormativity. To be neutral is to stand on the side of the status quo.
As far as the question of “MICRO aggressions,” it does seem to me that one of the hallmarks of privilege is that white men think that it is normal that they get to decide what people of color and women can justifiably complain about and what they should be expected to put up with quietly: “He jests at scars who never felt a wound.”
It is PRECISELY the over-emphasis on race (by all sides) in today’s academy that determines the detrimental climate. Although the situation IS “complicated” as John C. states, it is ridiculous to assume that “one of the hallmarks of privilege is that white men think that it is normal that they get to decide what people of color and women can justifiably complain about.”
There are other arbiters of what ANYONE can complain about than an individual’s personal experience. For instance, a prominent History professor stated that ALL Art History professors should remove nude paintings from their offices and class lessons. Likewise, James Baldwin and Malcolm X’s writings should be banned if ONE black person is offended by their use of the n-word or depictions of bad acts by African Americans. What about THE BOYS IN THE BAND, which might offend a few gays AND a few homophobes?
Yes, the n-word is almost always offensive when directed at an individual or a group, but its use can (and should) be justified in the context of a law class on “fighting words” or an analysis of HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Context is everything.
BTW, regarding “MICRO-aggressions,” doesn’t MICRO mean “small”? How come faculty members lose their jobs over such (often unintended) words, ideas, or texts?
A drop of water is small. Enough of them will wear away a rock.
Professor Covaleskie: Thanks for your article and follow-up. I agree with you completely. Here it is your next-to-last paragraph, on false claims to “civility,” that cinches your argument for me. Those who are attacking you are guilty of either 1) ignoring history or 2) personalizing issues. Both tactics are typical of privileged people made uncomfortable by the historically informed grievances of the oppressed. The flip side of the old injunction to “comfort the afflicted” is to “afflict the comfortable,” and clearly you have done both pretty well.