Dick Cheney by David Bohrer [Public domain]
On Thursday evening, October 10, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will interview former Vice President Dick Cheney at Beloit College’s Eaton Chapel. I once knew the place well, having graduated from the college getting close to fifty years ago. Alumni like me, as well as a number of current students and faculty, are concerned about this event—which is sponsored by Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a well-funded group with ties to the DeVos family and roots reaching back into the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom. We believe the purpose has very little to do with education, more with attacking institutions of higher education by attracting protest.
YAF has found Beloit fertile ground for testing the notion of imbalance on American campuses due to a boisterous student body and a rather feckless administration, one that is forced to see every issue in terms of dwindling enrollment. This past spring, YAF scheduled an event with Erik Prince (the brother of Betsy DeVos) that had to be cancelled when a variety of protests made the appearance unfeasible. The college announced:
Due to disruptive protests and safety concerns, the event hosted by the Young Americans for Freedom featuring speaker Erik Prince had to be cancelled to ensure the safety of all participants. As an institution of higher learning, open dialogue on all topics is one of our core principles. Tonight’s events fell unacceptably short of this core principle, and we condemn the behavior of those who disrupted the event. The college will begin an investigation immediately.
Prince never even tried to speak, though students certainly were ready to disrupt him. By cancelling the talk moments before it was to start, according to John Wilson, writing for the Academe blog, college “president, Scott Bierman, was able to ban his cake and eat it, too. He banned a controversial speaker and then was able to blame the protesters, and ‘condemn excessive disruptions unequivocally.’“ The affair left a bad taste in the mouths of the college community and solved nothing.
From what I understand, Bierman is a reasonably nice man and generally a good president for the college. What he is not is a forceful academic gatekeeper creating clear markers for what should and should not happen on campus. Nor is he acting as an effective leader for the campus community. Instead, he is dodging bullets and fixing blame.
Leaving no one happy.
Not even the Prince fiasco was the first YAF attempt to cause turmoil on the campus by bringing on a controversial figure. In 2018, Harvey Mansfield, who edited an excellent edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America but who has become better known in recent years for his defense of “manliness,” spoke only to be disrupted, an incident that sparked more discussion and controversy than anything Mansfield could have said.
The YAF cloaks its defense of bringing people like Mansfield, Prince and Cheney to campus under ‘intellectual balance,’ a pretense that would make an invitation to, say, Augusto Pinochet (were he still alive) equally defensible. Their putative point is that American colleges and universities lean so far left that an entire element of argument is ignored. Their real intention is to bring attention to their organization and further their right-wing cause.
The YAF argument could make a little sense in the case of Mansfield, were he not a professor himself (at Harvard), but to extend it to the mercenary soldier Prince or the long-retired politician Cheney is risible. Intellectual discussion requires intellectual interest and pursuit. Neither Prince nor Cheney has ever made claim to either.
I don’t know what is planned for Thursday in response to Cheney/Walker, nor do I really care. The student protesters may make fools of themselves or prove to be heroes (yes, I hope for the latter, but I have low expectations). I don’t care either if the YAF gets another affirmation of what its members already believe about academia in America (it won’t change anything, not at this point). I don’t even care that, whatever happens, intellectual discussion on American campuses will not have been moved forward one inch. That doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s intention in this whole sordid sequence, so why should I care?
What I do care about is the evident incompetence of groups like Beloit’s administration (to be fair, I think it’s not far removed from that of any other contemporary institution of higher education). I care that American colleges and universities are putting forward meaningless drivel like “As an institution of higher learning, open dialogue on all topics is one of our core principles.” For that is not true, never has been true, and putting it forth simply pulls one further into the morass instead of providing a plank to solid ground. I care about the abandonment of gatekeeping responsibility, at Beloit, at most other colleges and universities, and even at social-media entities such as Facebook and Twitter.
I care about institutional responsibility.
Real intellectual discussion (not the sort of tit-for-tat ‘debate’ YAF is promoting for its own political purposes but that to which American higher education aspires) requires careful gatekeeping, something we have lost track of since the internet started flattening the dykes that were keeping out the waters of nonsense. True, there have always been problems with the gatekeepers, but that does not mean that their role isn’t necessary.
Someone has to be able to get up and say, “This is ridiculous” backed by the power to keep the nonsense at bay. This should be the role of college administrators at Beloit and elsewhere. They should play, and act like, someone who can judge the intent of another and stand up for that judgment.
Instead, as Wilson tacitly points out, what we tend to get from most college and university administrators is something more like Bierman’s attempt to dodge the issue completely. Something that does no one any good but allows the situation to continue unresolved, as has been happening at Beloit at least since Mansfield’s talk.
What we need is for college administrators to do their jobs, even if they risk being wrong. That’s what a gatekeeper has to do; that’s what the guardians of higher education need to be doing. What we also need is administrators who are willing to admit to being wrong, if shown so, administrators who are willing to act and then face the consequences—and then change their approach, if needed.
Until we have such gatekeepers, we are going to be fed pap like that Beloit press release which risked nothing and said nothing beyond a vague threat to the least empowered campus constituency, the students. Until we have them, we are at the mercy of groups like YAF, groups whose purposes are antithetical to the ideals of American higher education–just as American society as a whole is now at the mercy of, among others, politicians who know no bounds.
We may not like them and we have to keep an eye on them, but we need gatekeepers.
Thanks, Professor Barlow, for this. I had not likened social media rationales to university administrative rationales before, but it makes sense. Both are cowardly. I’m guessing that money drives these acts of cowardice.
I don’t think I’ve ever disagreed more with Aaron than on this point. Universities absolutely do not need gatekeepers, people who close the doors and ban the “wrong” speakers invited by student groups.
The mistake Aaron makes is taking the necessary role of gatekeeping in hiring faculty (where the current faculty themselves should be the gatekeepers, not the administrators) and then applying that limited concept of gatekeeping to everything that happens in a university.
It is not true that “real intellectual discussion…requires careful gatekeeping.” There are plenty of real intellectual discussions that happen in the university (and outside it) without the controlling power of administrators. It can happen in dorms, in offices, in classrooms, in dining halls, and even in lecture halls featuring awful people. And there is no zero sum game, where banning a non-intellectual speaker somehow creates extra room for more intellectual discussions.
Intellectual discussion can happen even without intellectual speakers on campus. Yes, we do have something to learn from politicians, activists, comedians, etc. A higher education can and must include more than just listening to anointed intellectuals speaking all day long.
Administrators must not become gatekeepers, and we must not allow them to imagine that their job is to control what is allowed to be said on college campuses.
In the days before beginning to understand the consequences of the internet, I would have agreed with you, John. With the rise of the AltRight and the chaos sown by the unscrupulous, I had changed my mind, though it saddens me. Just as publications need editors, institutions need people dedicated to protecting their integrity. I still hate the truth of that.
Intellectual discussion rests on intent. It’s not a question of from whom we can learn but of the goals of the participants.
This is an important topic, one that also relates to our own attitudes toward administrators and how they are chosen–this last being a major problem. Administrators are not, by definition, bad… and, as they are the people in position to counter the chaos being deliberately foisted on us, they are the ones we need to turn to. At the same time, we need to be gatekeeping them.
I completely disagree that the freedom to have intellectual discussions should be determined by intent. Plenty of people intend to have intellectual discussions, and they should be given the freedom to fail. I don’t know how an administrator can decide that Dick Cheney (or anybody else) lacks the “intent” to hold an intellectual discussion. It is also wrong to assume that everything on campus must be an intellectual discussion. Should we ban music, comedy, study breaks, athletics, and so on from campus because they’re not intellectual? I’m also disturbed at the idea that administrators get to ban deliberate “chaos.” First, I don’t see how Dick Cheney gleefully recounting his evil deeds is “chaos.” Second, I think it’s much easier to call protests on campus a form of “chaos” and lacking in intellectual engagement. Should our gatekeeping administrators then be able to ban any protests they don’t like?
John, it has to be determined by intent. That’s a danger, I know, for we really cannot reach into the mind of another (was Trump intending a quid pro quo with Ukraine?) but we can make judgments. You reduce gatekeeping to keeping in what you like, banning what you don’t. It is not that simple.
More later. I’ve chores to complete!
I reduce gatekeeping to the administration banning people they don’t like because that seems to be what happens. What are the rules you think should apply to banning speakers? What are the speakers you want banned, and why? And how exactly would it improve the intellectual life of a campus if you ban these speakers?
In a sense, we need gatekeeping everywhere. The Republican Party abdicated its political gatekeeping, allowing the rise of Donald Trump. No one stood firmly against him–or, I should say, the group didn’t. Now, he owns the group and is refusing the attempt at gatekeeping by the House of Representatives. If the House fails as gatekeeper, he may destroy the country.
There always need to be limits, and limits require someone to enforce them.
Other names for gatekeeping include “curating.” Art doesn’t exist only in museums any more that intellectual growth exists only on campus. And, yes, museums do change art, just as colleges change discussion. To get rid of curating, though, would mean getting rid of museums completely, just as getting rid of librarians would destroy libraries. Just so, getting rid of academic gatekeepers would mean getting rid of universities.
Do we want that?
This, as I said in an earlier comment, is an important topic, one that ranges from politics and social media on down. My feeling is that our reluctance to engage in gatekeeping activities, and to sabotage it when others do, is leading to chaos that will ultimately be replaced by authoritarianism. I don’t like that thought, but I no longer see any path forward that does not acknowledge the importance of the gatekeepers. We just need to structure things so that the gatekeepers themselves don’t become authoritarian–and that’s the difficulty.
This is, of course, one of the central questions faced in the formulating of the U.S. Constitution….
I’m rather astonished that at a moment when Donald Trump is the gatekeeper-in-chief, and the most powerful gatekeeper in the world, you are advocating for authorities to have vastly more power to silence those they dislike. If Trump had his way, all of the “fake news media” would be banned and his critics silenced. Impeachment is not gatekeeping; removal is the legal process of punishment for a president. It would not ban Trump from serving in government or running for president again.
Curating is not gatekeeping. The art museum curator is assigned to curate an exhibit to protect freedom, not restrict it (just as faculty are assigned to curate the hiring of other faculty). If the college president then decides to ban the art, that’s gatekeeping, not curating. And the art museum curator doesn’t get to rule upon all the art everywhere on campus, such as a student group’s display of art.
The librarian analogy is very interesting to me. Librarians are not gatekeepers. They are curators. Librarians try to guide people to the best ideas, buy intelligent books, and invite intelligent speakers from a wide range of views. But they don’t ban bad books and purge the shelves of discredited beliefs. They don’t ban people from having bad speakers at library facilities. They don’t ban people from accessing websites with bad ideas on library computers.
I think you misunderstand what gatekeeping means. I completely agree with informal gatekeeping: when Republicans choose to denounce Trump, and when student groups choose to invite intelligent speakers rather than evil people. But we’re debating the question of formal gatekeepers, when administrators get to decide which speakers are banned from campus. That’s a completely different issue, and a dangerous power to give to anyone, but especially so in the Trump Era.