Milo’s coming: What are we going to do?
That question was being urgently asked at the University of California at Berkeley not long ago. Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing jester and provocateur, was scheduled to speak on the campus. Yiannopoulos is self-dramatizing (he calls his college lecture circuit the Dangerous Faggot Tour); radically right wing (he equates feminism with cancer); Oxbridge handsome (good glasses, great hair) and somehow bumbling and self-assured at the same time. He’s also, as documented in a recent piece on BuzzFeed, a rather pernicious force in helping to spread the doctrines of white nationalism. Yiannopoulos was scheduled to come for Free Speech Week, an event hosted by a student group called Berkeley Patriot.
What was the progressive population of the university to do? Shut Yiannopoulos down, violently if need be? He would emerge as a First Amendment hero. Boycott the talk? That would be ceding the field to the forces of reaction. Show up and debate Yiannopoulos, who claims to love give and take? There’s something demeaning about a credentialed professor going toe to toe with an entertainer — and something risky about challenging a speaker as smooth on his feet as Yiannopoulos.
The Berkeley Battle ended quickly, but a war is looming.
Luckily for Berkeley, Free Speech Week fizzled, apparently due to the host’s lack of organization, and most of the talks were canceled. After a 15-minute pop-in on Sproul Plaza (what was Mario Savio’s ghost thinking?), Yiannopoulos went away. The Berkeley community sighed its relieved sighs and went back to being itself.
The Berkeley Battle ended quickly, but a war is looming. For years the extreme right has been looking for ways to get its ideas heard on campuses and to make universities look like what it takes them to be, bastions of intolerant liberals. With the speaker issue, the right has found a perfect wedge.
I’m not against Yiannopoulos and company having the right to speak, far from it. But should universities be sponsoring them? Shouldn’t universities sponsor scholars, scientists, and artists, as well as bona fide statesmen and women? One could not reasonably say that Yiannopoulos qualifies as any one of those. Free Speech Week was sponsored by a student group, and yet it seems to me an open question whether students should be allowed to issue such invitations. It’s an honor to be asked to speak at a university, and I think it should be reserved for authentically accomplished men and women, not entertainers.
Beyond the authority issue, there’s the matter of expense. Cal Berkeley spent $600,000 on security for the conservative provocateur Ben Shapiro. In Frederick Wiseman’s wonderful film At Berkeley, an homage to what might be the greatest university in the world, one learns that the grounds crew has access to only one lawn mower to manicure the campus. There seemed to be no room in the budget for another. One might justly prefer a lawnmower, or two or three, to a bracing lecture by Ben or Milo.
University speaker programs are an extension of the intellectual and pedagogical life of the institution. And that life should be directed by the faculty. We are the ones who know, or should know, what outside speakers are likely to be edifying. Sure, there are potential speakers our students know about and we don’t. From students, I’ve learned about the work of the tech critic and futurist Jaron Lanier and the poet Michael Robbins. I’d be pleased to see them come to my university.
In the past 20 years, many colleges and universities have become retirement spreads for the young. New gyms, seven kinds of lunch, plush chairs, soft lighting, a half-dozen counselors and students-service deans at your beck. Is the freedom to invite entertainers who pretend to be thinkers an exercise of our students’ intellectual rights? Or is it another extension of their consumer privileges?
If the student Republican club wants to invite Yiannopoulos, that’s OK with me. But I think he should talk downtown at the local theater and let those who want to come hear him. But I’m not sure the radical-right billionaires would be interested in funding that endeavor. What they want, I’d guess, is not so much to subsidize intellectual exchange as to make universities look like Stalinist enclaves for the suppression of free speech. After the Berkeley debacle, they’ll no doubt refine their game.
But maybe the right- wing assessment of universities isn’t completely wrong. Would we in the humanities and social sciences manage to invite anyone to the right of Che Guevara?
I recall hearing a respected colleague say there was no way she would invite the social critic Shelby Steele to our university. I pointed out that many of Steele’s ideas about the need for African-Americans to take more responsibility for their lives were shared by Barack Obama. I asked if my colleague would be willing to have Obama on grounds to talk about race. She conceded that she would, though I sensed a sliver of reluctance.
We’d have to rise to the occasion. Presenting a balanced slate of speakers would be our job, just as it’s our job to offer counterthrusts to the overall direction of our teaching. I give a course on ideals every year — wisdom, courage, compassion — and I celebrate those virtues. But I include works and thoughts by anti-idealists, too: Freud and Nietzsche, but also George Orwell and Richard Rorty. A good course always has ways to perforate its own bubble.
Fair-mindedness is part of our contract with students and, especially at state universities like Virginia and Berkeley, with the general public. Taking over the right to invite speakers would compel faculty to be responsible and open — and I think we can be. Plus, the media and the citizenry would be watching.
Our taking on the job of inviting speakers is good pedagogy: We need to oversee the intellectual life of our schools. But it’s good pragmatic policy, too. There are two sites in America now where violence is likely to start, and maybe burst into something like civil conflict. (An article in Foreign Policy suggested the chance of civil war in the American near-future to be about 35 percent. Sounds a bit high to me, but still. …) One flash point is Confederate war monuments, the other universities. Inviting right-wing showmen onto campus means the arrival of antifascist protesters who inevitably follow them. Campus cops have little training in dealing with violent demonstrations, and the police in small cities don’t have much more, as recent events in Charlottesville demonstrate.
I see why professors, especially professors who came of age in the ’60s, would be reluctant to enact the changes I’m endorsing. It would seem retrograde: an insult to the spirits of Mario Savio, Jerry Garcia, and Country Joe and the Fish. In our hearts of hearts, we fear little so much as being labeled Old Farts. We know what Wilde means when he says that the “tragedy of being old is not that one is old, but that one is young,” for we are still young. Yet from time to time we probably must play the grownup part, even if it pinches a bit.
Milo is coming. What are we going to do?
Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Correction (10/16/2017, 4:58 p.m.): Because of an editing error, this article stated that Berkeley spent $800,000 on security when it hosted Ben Shapiro. That amount was spent on security surrounding an event planned by Milo Yiannopoulos. The amount spent for Mr. Shapiro was $600,000. The article has been updated to reflect that correction.
