A university president makes a case against cowardice
(newyorker.com)468 points by pseudolus 9 days ago
468 points by pseudolus 9 days ago
I know someone who works for a university in event planning. They were putting together an event for a civil rights icon. Because of the new policies, they were forced to go through all of the brochures and pamphlets and censor any use of words such as "racism" and "black" (when referring to the man's skin color).
They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable
> But at the same time the US „antiracist“ campaign itself looks just like (reverse) racism in many case.
And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.
Talking points are nifty. But, at some point, you have to propose an actual solution that does something.
Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."
(In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
>They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable
Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE
Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.
Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without freedom of speech, your perspective will be the natural default without activism to upset it. A dangerous assumption.
Problem is that in the past two decades university admins gave in to various deplatforming causes and enforced codes. If they had stood firm before, the arguments against them wouldn't be nearly as strong. Unfortunately, they didn't. So when they now use the "free speech" argument themselves it rings hollow.
Those policies were designed to promote free speech from vulnerable groups. Political vulnerability has a huge influence on free speech (and freedom), and that's what they have been addressing.
(Picking two random groups:) If you are Pakistani and are in a room of all Indian people, and the others say how horrible Pakistanis are and how research shows that Pakistanis are less intelligent or prone to violence, that is a very intimidating atmosphere and it would be hard to endure, much less speak up.
If that one Pakistani says the same about Indians, it's obnoxious and annoying, but it's no threat to anyone. The many Indians are not vulnerable. That's the difference.
Furthermore, the dominant groups in a culture tend to create systems and knowledge that support them to the exclusion of others - sometimes explicitly and intentionally. That's systemic discrimination - the system naturally generates it if you follow the usual path. It takes some effort to create space for other points of view.
Whether the typical DEI policies are optimal is another question. I haven't heard anyone come up with a great solution. Some pretend it's not a problem and there is no prejudice, which is absurd and not a solution; it's just sticking one's head in the sand - because they can, because they are not vulnerable.
> they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized
You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.
That's a question of tactics, though. Moral outrage can be extremely effective, and it can also be counterproductive. And striking the right balance has been a challenge in American politics as long as American politics have existed.
In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln threads the needle in a way that is frankly unachievable for even most skilled politicians. "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other" seems like an acknowledgement of moral nuance, but he follows it up with, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged."
Speaking to a nation in which a part of it is in open revolt over the right to keep other humans as slaves is certainly an extreme case. But it isn't categorically different from any other political struggle. People are going to accuse one another of being immoral. It's the human condition. A legal system that protects this behavior is the bedrock of democracy. It doesn't matter how annoying you find the people doing the judging.
A lot of people are fair-weather friends of freedom of speech. It's all well and good if everybody is allowed to express themselves as long as everybody, if they don't like me, at least respects me.
I guess some people were never in favor of freedom of speech, they just wanted a world where they faced minimal interpersonal conflict, and the current order for a while was serving that purpose.
> Freedom of speech necessarily implies that a group of people might team up and loudly announce that the people they don't agree with are incorrect and immoral and should be ignored or even ostracized. That's the price of freedom of speech, and it's a fair price.
Sure, agreed. But groups and institutions taking even a dime of tax money should not get to place a thumb on the scales of those arguments. US universities, in particular, chose a side and then silenced all opposing viewpoints.
It was inevitable that the silenced would eventually mobilise, and they did. And now the group has to abandon their arguments about allowing "punching up" and instead pontificate on "free speech".
Myself (and many others) argued over the last decade and more that the pendulum always swings back, so lets be a little less extreme in the left/right argument. I, on this site, got labeled a non-thinking right-winger apologist for pointing out that the mainstream views on transgender for minors does not match the views that the powers-that-be were pushing.
You can't push for normalising the silencing of views for well over a decade without you yourself eventually falling victim to the same normalisation.
What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues? Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them? I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.
I don't mind saying this is some serious Nazi stuff going on. The federal government is trying to obstruct free speech, jailing people for free speech... we are in a bad place.
a Tufts student had her visa cancelled and then was kidnapped by ICE for publishing an op Ed saying "hey, maybe genocide is bad"
Cowardice is in the eye of the beholder and the article is self-serving.
The article makes the point that it's cowardly to cave to administration pressure to limit the activities of anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protesters.
Someone on the other side of the issue could make the argument "it is cowardly to kowtow to a small but vocal minority who justifies interfering with other students' ability to learn, as 'free speech'".
It is dishonest to describe non-speech activity such as intimidation and forceful prevention of access, as "speech", even if you like the motivation or outcome. "Speech" is talking with words. Physically using your body to prevent someone else from acting in a desired way, is something other than "speech".
The best solution here is for universities to become less involved with government money. They should have to compete for students and research on an even playing field, and we shouldn't be creating politically aligned fields through government spending.
No. Research Universities are about Research. There are non governmental sources of funding for research, but they pale in comparison with government funding. If you want to make the case that the private industry should take on research, the problem is that there is no immediate profit in it. It can take decades, and few companies can invest decades of funding hoping for some eventual breakthrough. Moreover, in that model, research is slowed because companies are notoriously bad at sharing research with competitors. So you either create national research centers, or you use research universities.
The issue with these ideas is they lack an understanding of anything really about how we fund research in this country. We collect taxes and disperse these taxes in the form of research grants that we have boards of experts in the field call for proposals about realistically achievable topics that would benefit the American citizen in health, wealth, or some other form of prosperity. We only have a few national labs and most of this research is conducted in the university system, which simultaneously trains the next crop of researchers.
Now you are proposing this work doing/training aspect be cut off. What is your replacement? You have to come up with one that gets trainees hands on experience, as well as provides economies of scale benefits for expensive experimental apparatus or sample or data/compute resources, fosters collaboration and idea generation, and shares this work with other grant funded researchers in the field so that they might further their own efforts.
Or, you could just not blow the whole system apart with a broadside strike, and enjoy the striking benefits in fields like medicine we have enjoyed over the decades.
The Trump administrations attacks are able to go so far now, because institutions already rolled over under a Democratic administration.
Take for instance University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, student anonymously projected "Let Gaza Live" onto a building. The next day then-college president Liz Magill publicly called in the FBI to investigate this as an "antisemitic hate crime". She was later forced to resign for "not doing enough" to combat alleged antisemitism.
This is rich. The Universities that caved to student activists engaged in antisemitism and other egregious activities should now fight for their rights to be cowards? Or the Universities that engaged in racist DEI programs are now going to stand on principal?
Give me a break.
If tenure was designed to protect intellectual freedom, but academics are consistently the biggest cowards failing to stand up to anything - what does that say about academia?
Then they would need to tax nonprofit religious organizations too.
Why don't they just make the special interests pay their own multi-trillion dollar war bills instead of sabotaging US universities with surprise taxes?
If you increase expenses and cut revenue, what should you expect for your companies?
Why not just make a flat tax for everyone and end all the special interest pandering and exceptions for the rich. It is a poisonous misapplication of the time of our government to constantly be fiddling with tax code to favor one group or another.
Because a lot of people, including many economists, believe capital accumulating endlessly to the same class of thousand-ish people is bad. A flat income tax exacerbates wealth inequality considerably.
Better would be to remove inheritance after death, instead distributing that wealth among the citizenship equally.
List of countries by inheritance tax rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inheritan...
Endowments are typically restricted funds (imposed by the fund provider) and can't be used (unless the restrictions are removed) to be used for general operating budget.
Harvard generally uses the interest on the fund principal to pay for things and it was a massive internal controversy when folks proposed drawing down the (absolutely enormous) principal as payment for capital expenditures (among other controversies).
Those giant university endowments are partially used to allow those who couldn't afford it but otherwise have shown they have what the university is looking for in students to attend for significantly/entirely reduced costs. Meanwhile, the most visible billionaires are using their money to try to buy elections so they can dismantle the government for personal gain while oftentimes employing people with such low wages that they depend on the government to be able to afford such luxuries as eating three meals a day. It's pretty easy to see why the large parts of the public find one acceptable and the other less acceptable.
Everyone can afford it if given a loan. If the job you get after can't afford to pay back the loan, it's time to look for another career, and for the schools to be on the hook for the miss, not the taxpayer.
And yes you are right acceptability, because polls show that the government bailing out students making poor career choices and schools paying for bloated staff is definitely not acceptable to the majority of Americans.
I consider UC's statement of diversity (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm... and then 6 months later https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/diversity-statements-u...) to be a form of ideology over truth seeking: """Candidates who did not “look outstanding” on diversity, the vice provost at U.C. Davis instructed search committees, could not advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience would be examined in a later round."""
Does it matter if they did or didn't? Universities have indisputably lost the mandate of heaven, have they not? Arguing over whether they actually did any of those things is irrelevant, if a politically powerful group of people think they did! None of them have an objective definition, so it's going to come down to values, and universities / academics as a class have alienated themselves from a substantial portion of the population.
... or have anti-intellectual media whipped up that resentment as part of their culture war?
I was a university student myself not too long ago. I experienced it personally.
Mandatory political indoctrination courses is the biggest thing. But also, having to fund left-wing events with mandatory activities fee. And it was much easier to get funding as a student group if you have the correct political opinions. Finally, if you say the wrong things, you might get reported to a political commissar (this was really rare at my uni though, there were signs everywhere saying how to make a report but in practice people didn’t do it).
Also, they require academic applicants to submit mandatory diversity statements: https://www.wesleyan.edu/inclusion/whatwedo/recruitment-reso...
I dispute that the left ever had any kind of monopoly on chilling speech. Getting people fired from their jobs for exercising speech isn't a specialty of the left. The fact that it consistently made headlines when the SJWs scored a win showed how relatively rare it was. It was and remains much more common for people to get fired for left-leaning speech, such as union organizing efforts. And which side imposed "Don't say gay" laws?
Remember when people lost their shit when it came out that the Biden administration was leaning on social media platforms to stop the spread of certain ideas? Yet now we see the current administration openly and flagrantly punishing and extorting private universities and law firms, even disappearing people for attending rallies, to thunderous silence from the right. It's as if all the outrage about free speech was a farce.
They got themselves fired. People who wrote things didn't get themselves disappeared to a holding site in Louisiana.
By the same logic the students got themselves vanished by not strictly following the rules of the visa ( one example, student had a dui ). It is not better, but the moment you erode basic speech protections it spills over to a lot of other areas.
Extremism on any side is bad, period. 'But they are worse' is sort of moot point and most people don't care about details, you simply lose normal audience and maybe gain some fringe.
One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.
The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.
It's utterly pointless to say that the starting point is the same, when one is an utter sabotage of all of society's rights and values... While the other is people affirming those rights.
>(The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
As one of the 'Free Speech folks', I'll bite.
I absolutely condemn the administration rounding up someone like Mahmoud Khalil if the only thing he did was speak a rallies. If you look up Uncivil Law's video on Mahmoud Khalil Deportation, he is saying the same thing.
Now, let's flip this around. Where are all my left wing friends willing to condemn the investigation into Trump for his Jan. 6th speech? Are you willing to join us now?
> One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.
Many people have been fired / expelled / and many more silenced by those examples. If you can't tell the truth about your side (from how you're writing I assume you think in sides) then there's no point saying it.
> The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
I haven't heard about this. Who has been sent to a Salvadoran gulag for speech?
Everything is a flip side of the same coin if you abstract away from all the important details.
Oh the right say that some things are bad? Well the left say that some things are bad too!
These lazy equivalencies only breed cynicism and give intellectual cover to the Trump administration’s executive power grab. By all means criticize the left as much as you like. But the specifics are important. The current administration’s deportation of green card holders without due process isn’t somehow a mirror image of whatever excesses of left wing ‘cancel culture’ you may be upset about.
This false equivalency, if you honestly believe it, is shallow at best.
The ‘left’ has identified speech that is likely used to belittle or negate someone else’s existence and will appropriately label it as hate speech. Any structural changes to make these words frowned upon have taken years to get into place; people were allowed to adjust (and the length of time to do so is ridiculous in its own right), and what little change has happened did so in a way where the people who must change are barely inconvenienced. There have been few legal repercussions for the use of hate speech by anyone with a modicum of power. Sure, you could identify a few, but there are a ludicrous number of flagrant violations of any such laws (which are few) which go unpunished. The ‘left’ here being any sane member of society which has publicly pointed out that certain words are singularly incendiary.
Meanwhile, the grifters of this ‘right’ have conned the honest conservatives into believing that DEI is a term of hatred against conservatives. The ‘right’ has identified that they wish to say whatever without punishment and are structurally creating a cost for using inclusive language in any official capacity. The grifting part of the ‘right’ also doesn’t mind breaking any semblance of stability for everyone else. The ‘right’ here being the near-narcissistic people who have happened upon positions of privilege and believe that they are superior, have earned it, and that only those similar to themselves should ever attain such a position in the future.
But no, you have reduced your observation to ‘two sides are banning words.’
Not really. In both cases, compulsion is the problem. Neither side has the right to compel anyone to do anything, but they operate on the premise that they do, usually characterized by indignant self-rightiousness. The irrational extremists of both sides, the ones screaming the loudest, naturally, seek to enforce their version of "how things should be" on to other people, regardless if their objections are rational or not, while also constantly changing the rules or shifting goal posts, which keeps us forever locked in a state of not knowing if we are breaking them. It's mind-numbing to a degree that apathy starts to seem like a perfectly valid option. It's also a tactic historically used by totalitarianism.
They are two sides of the same monster, like Jekyll & Hyde.
> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?
You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.
The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.
Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.
Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.
But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".
[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!
It's not an equation in what it does to people. Yes, abduction is worse than being yelled at.
However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation).
This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal values. This has been pointed out to the illiberal left time and time again, to no avail.
> while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps
Can you provide examples of people getting abducted and sent to "overseas slave camps" purely for their speech?
> it is valid to be more annoyed by the ways they are the same
Is it? One side has a vocal minority who took defense of minorities to the point of harassment and was ultimately rebuffed. The other side controls the government and is enthusiastically renditioning legal residents to prisons and defying the constitution and courts to keep doing it.
To be more upset about both sides being imperfect than the injustice of irreversible deportations to foreign prison seems ... absurd.
The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.
If you're a guest, act like a guest. Anti-Israel protests are by extension a protest against the US foreign policy, so yeah... You protest your host in a violent and disruptive manner, you probably shouldn't have been allowed in to begin with.
> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.
What comes before “filter[ing] immigrants” is due process. Resident aliens have the right to due process which the current US administration is not providing.
Alien residents with every right to be here are being removed from the US illegally and mistakenly.
I am not sure there's technically a due process right in the case of immigration visa revocation and the ensuing deportation. There is a due process right in the case of crimes, but getting your visa revoked is not a crime.
The best argument I have heard is that visa revocation may be like firing: the US can do it for almost any reason and you can fire someone for no reason, but can't do it for specific prohibited reasons. Speech would probably be one of those bad reasons under the US's civil rights framework.
If there's no due process for everyone, that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest!
Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.
Due process only means “This is the minimum required process for the government to act”. It doesn’t mean that every non-citizen is entitled to a jury trial that can escalate to the USSC.
In some cases, “due process” is “Your name made it into a spreadsheet, the President can drone strike you”
> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.
Just to point, the prerogative to "filter" immigrants does not allow the US to keep them in jail, torture, or send them to foreign countries non-supervised labor camps.
Some of that so-called activism seems to be closer to suppressing any thoughts someone dislikes. Removing that from university life is not cool, that „activism“ itself went off the rails too.