The unrest that brought Charles Murray’s talk at Middlebury College in March to an abrupt end, as well as several notable examples since then of protests against speakers on campuses, has prompted several months of soul-searching among American academics. In my case, it has made me think a lot about my students.
Clark University, where I teach, is one of 10 or so small colleges in central Massachusetts. It is probably the most liberal of the bunch; a recent study pegged it as the 11th most liberal college in the country. On September 15, the Harvard political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield spoke at Assumption College, a small Catholic institution a few blocks away from Clark. Mansfield is a well-known conservative who has occasionally been a source of controversy at Harvard, though these controversies have never reached Murray-esque proportions.
His talk was a somewhat big deal for Assumption students because it took place just two weeks after the college rescinded an invitation to Murray. Assumption administrators cited the risk that outside agitators would disrupt the talk. I don’t know if they were thinking about my students, but they could well have been. And they might have been right — I’d like to think not, but we’ll never know.
After Mansfield’s talk, students peppered him with questions about his views on campus free speech. How did he feel about the Murray cancellation? Did Mansfield sometimes run into the same sort of opposition that Murray had encountered? In response, Mansfield sought to draw a distinction between someone like Murray, who has a Ph.D. from MIT and a job at a well-regarded think tank, and who writes books with some academic merit, and speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos who, in Mansfield’s accounting, merely seek to provoke. It wasn’t a response that was distinctively owned by conservative political theory; it was a distinction many people across the political spectrum might seek to draw. It sounds reasonable, but I don’t know that it helps us all that much.
This is where political theorists, legal theorists, and the spate of new books on campus free speech have left us — we want to err on the side of open, free debate, but we don’t necessarily want that freedom to be exploited by those who would come to our campuses to insult us or our students, or who would be there only to stir up trouble. The problem is that we can’t draw that line very accurately.
Provocation is not easily measurable, nor is academic merit. The risk we take in distinguishing between the Murrays and Yiannopouloses of the world is that we don’t get much help in dealing with the tougher cases (such as, for instance, Ben Shapiro’s recent speech at Berkeley), and we perhaps put too much emphasis on our own academic arguments about what scholars are and how they should behave.
In lieu of big principles, then, I would propose that we shift the debate away from grand theory about who can talk and who can’t and toward much more practical concerns. It seems to me that the following suggestions offer a better guide to ensuring a diverse range of speech on campus:
First, we should apply a “what have you done for me lately?” standard to visiting lecturers. What is strangest about the opposition to Murray’s speeches is that it is based almost exclusively on the content of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, a book that he cowrote in 1994. Murray has written quite a bit since then, and is not giving talks these days to promote the ideas in that book. He hasn’t disowned them, but he has moved on. It seems reasonable, and generous, to evaluate visiting lecturers based on the things that they actually intend to talk about. And we do not have to argue about the merits of The Bell Curve in order to do this.
Second, the sponsors of these talks are relevant. Many of the speakers in the “provocateur” category receive their funding from organizations that are not actually affiliated with the colleges where they speak. If a college is not paying for a lecture, it should have the ability to apply greater scrutiny to the relationship between that talk and what is happening on campus. This doesn’t mean lectures sponsored by outside groups should not happen. Reputable right-leaning organizations such as the Jack Miller Center (which sponsored the Mansfield talk) or the Intercollegiate Studies Institute frequently fund guest lecturers that small colleges never would be able to afford on their own. But colleges should have a right to bar speakers if the sponsor can’t show that it cares about academic integrity and/or if related expenses threaten to be a burden.
In the case of Berkeley, for instance, the university had spent an estimated $1.4 million for security expenses related to controversial visiting speakers this year even before the recently canceled “Free Speech Week.” I’m sure Berkeley has the money to pay for this, but the much smaller and less wealthy private colleges in my neighborhood would have difficulty finding the money to provide security if there were to be a string of similarly provocative speakers on our campuses.
And third, the best way to counter the idea that speech is being suppressed is to be proactive. Many colleges (including mine) have a decentralized approach to visiting lecturers; there are all sorts of different pots of money, and individual faculty or student groups use this money to invite their friends to come and speak. This can be a nice arrangement, but ultimately no one has responsibility for establishing norms about visitors.
An alternative approach is practiced by Carleton College, which has a series of weekly lectures, scheduled outside of class time, that students are encouraged to attend. Carleton’s convocations are planned in advance by a committee that has sought to balance different disciplinary and ideological viewpoints. Students and faculty can still bring other speakers, but the convocations offer a statement about the range of views that the college wishes to be heard. If done well, this approach can demonstrate that a wide range of viewpoints must be part of the college experience.
It would be easy to conclude that today’s campus battles are just another instance of the left/right polarization that we see in much of American politics. But it is my hope that colleges can change that paradigm and restructure the conversation on campus by following these pragmatic, not ideology-driven, suggestions.
Robert G. Boatright is a professor of political science at Clark University and the director of research at the University of Arizona’s National Institute for Civil Discourse.
