By now you’ve probably seen the video of a student screaming at Nicholas Christakis — the master of Silliman College at Yale — over his refusal to apologize for an email written by his wife, Erika Christakis, which some found insensitive for its suggestion that students “look away” if someone wore a Halloween costume that offended them.
Another incident occurred in mid-October at Williams College, where Suzanne Venker, a conservative critic of feminism, was disinvited from giving an on-campus lecture because the students who ran the speaker series — called “Uncomfortable Learning” — had encountered so much negative reaction in anticipation of her speech.
In the wake of such incidents, both liberal and conservative advocates of free speech have begun to push back, raising anew the question of what it means for colleges and universities to create a “safe space” for learning. “College Is Not for Coddling” shouts one headline. “Closed Minds on Campus” scolds another.
The debate about what constitutes offensive speech and whether students should be protected from it is important but also begs for a closer examination of the tactics that have been used to censor potentially offensive points of view, before those tactics break out of the college incubator and permeate the larger society.
In a recent book, I examined the roots of hard-core science denialism about things like climate change and evolution. By now we are used to viewing such issues through a political lens, in which right-wing ideologues have undermined public trust in science by suggesting that liberal scientists are, at best, milking the issue of climate change to get more grant money, and at worst are involved in some kind of conspiracy. What I discovered, however, is that ideologically motivated denial doesn’t start with politics. It starts with a set of innate cognitive weaknesses shared by all of us — and brilliantly cataloged by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow — that can lead to a form of “willful ignorance.”
Willful ignorance is when we know that there are other ideas out there, but we refuse to consider them. We believe in our own position so strongly that no amount of evidence can persuade us to change it, such as when vaccine deniers continue to insist that the shot for measles, mumps, and rubella causes autism, despite a mountain of scientific studies that have discredited that view. Eventually, after refusing to listen to the other side long enough, such a stance can harden into full-blown denialism. The other side becomes not just wrong but deranged. Even demonized. And I’m afraid this may be the road we’re on in the debate over offensive speech on campus.
Are debates about values equivalent to scientific debates about facts? No. But even where our beliefs may concern values — such as the appropriate level of cultural sensitivity regarding a Halloween costume — it is dangerous for us not to listen to anything that is said by the other side. In science, our disputes can be settled by empirical evidence. With values, we must engage in debate.
“Walk away, he doesn’t deserve to be listened to,” one protester shouted at Nicholas Christakis, who later tweeted a defense of the student, saying: “No one, especially no students exercising right to speech, should be judged just on basis of short video clip.” But consider the phrase (if not the person who uttered it): “He doesn’t deserve to be listened to.” This is a precursor to willful ignorance: I know that there’s another point of view in this debate, but it’s not correct so I don’t want to hear it. It’s not worth my time. Besides, the person making this claim is my enemy and should just go away. But what happens when “I don’t want to hear it” becomes “I refuse to believe it,” even in the face of logical rigor or refuting evidence?
Many people on the left believe that willful ignorance happens only on the right, that there are no good examples of left-wing science denial. Those people are wrong. The mistaken belief that vaccines cause autism is bipartisan. According to a 2012 Gallup poll, 41 percent of Democrats believe that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” And a 2014 study by the University of Texas at Brownsville sociologist Mark Horowitz found that a substantial proportion of academic sociologists (85 percent of whom self-identified as either liberal or radical) were resistant to even the least-controversial evolutionary explanations of human behavior.
No matter our politics, we all suffer from “confirmation bias": We look for data to support what we already believe and tend to discount evidence that conflicts with it. Psychologists have also studied what happens when we join a community (online or on campus) of like-minded people, who validate our prejudices and make us less likely to entertain contrary beliefs. This is how confirmation bias revs up and is joined by “motivated reasoning,” which is when we interpret evidence to validate the position we already hold. This is what occurred on election night 2012, when Karl Rove refused to believe that Obama had won Ohio (and thus the presidency) and continued to insist that Romney could still win in a landslide, long after his own network (Fox News) had called the race for Obama.
The danger of existing in a silo, or embracing tribalism rather than evidence, is just as acute on the left as it is on the right. And it is just as threatening to academe’s long-term commitment to a free interchange of ideas about values as it is to science.
Denialism breeds in environments where people refuse to hear other points of view. But education is meant to challenge us. To make us uncomfortable. To prepare us for a world in which we will be called upon to defend our views, but also to teach us the critical-thinking skills that will help us to shape them. For all their rhetorical emphasis on diversity, how many colleges today make an effort to admit students who will challenge the prevailing political orthodoxy on campus? And if we are genuinely concerned about not just hurt but also fairness, shouldn’t we anticipate the day when Muslim students might take offense at Halloween costumes that reveal too much skin, or when Christian students might challenge their philosophy professors for teaching the “problem of evil” as a microaggression against their theist beliefs? (A similar incident already occurred when Duke University assigned all of its first-year students to read Alison Bechdel’s widely lauded memoir Fun Home, which was challenged by some students as contrary to their values.)
Where intellectual diversity does not already exist, we are sometimes compelled to import it. Except when we disinvite the speaker. Wouldn’t it have been better to have Suzanne Venker come to Williams and face those students who disagreed with her? If her views were so wrong, what could make shorter work of them than the searching criticism of a well-educated audience?
Certainty is dangerous, especially on a college campus, where ideas are supposed to be questioned. An education that shields students from discomfort turns colleges into country clubs that give credentials. College becomes the kind of place that prepares us for a life described in E.E. Cummings’s poem about “the Cambridge ladies,” who live in “furnished souls” and have “comfortable minds” that are never challenged by an actual thought.
But much worse is the prospect of denialism. Or the simple arrogance of being so certain that one is on the right side that tactics do not matter. In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse argued that, given the power structure in Western industrial society, the left wing is entitled to challenge — and even to silence — its conservative critics, but that those on the right enjoy no such moral liberty. Where did I learn this? In college, of course, where we furiously debated Marcuse’s ideas.
Are there future scientific questions that will be settled by empirical evidence? Surely yes. But what about all the nonscientific questions that — but for our willingness to participate — can be settled only through spirited debate? Will we make progress on them, too? If we remain too comfortable, we may never find out.
Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and author of Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age (Routledge, 2015).