F ree speech is dying on the American campus — or so we’ve been told. The culprit is left-wing political correctness.
But this narrative doesn’t pass scrutiny. Given the media attention that left-wing PC attracts, our conversations are driven largely by confirmation bias. We seek out the most scandalous examples of left-wing campus radicalism — Berkeley, Oberlin, Reed, Yale — and then ask people to react.
This focus on the left obscures the same PC tendencies on the right. Far less media attention is devoted to incidents involving conservative “censors,” as when Catholic University’s seminary disinvited the Rev. James Martin, a Catholic priest in good standing, because it had come under fire from right-wing sites that disagreed with his pro-LGBT views. (The university itself did not endorse the seminary’s decision.) Or when Trump supporters at Whittier College shouted down a talk by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat. Or when Newman University canceled a talk by a justice of the Kansas Supreme Court out of concern for students’ safety due to an “unsettling” social-media campaign by anti-abortion activists.
We’ve been operating for too long with a double standard when it comes to political correctness. We’re quick to diminish left-wing concerns as fragile students taking offense, or to frame worries about campus safety in the face of incendiary speech as PC censorship when the alleged censors are from the left.
But when conservatives limit left-leaning speech, we’re spared the handwringing about campus echo chambers, “crybully” students, and the end of free expression.
Take a recent incident at Liberty University. An evangelical pastor who was critical of President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s support for the Trump administration was removed from campus and threatened with arrest if he returned. When Falwell was asked about the situation, he replied, “If we allowed him to come on campus and protest uninvited, then the next group that comes in might be a violent group, and we’ve seen recently what that can lead to,” alluding to violent white-supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va.
That justification is barely distinguishable from how a cautious university administrator might explain removal of a controversial right-wing speaker. But because high-profile opportunists like Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Ann Coulter are right-wing figures hunting for disinvitations from the left, we form our impressions about what constitutes political correctness based on complaints from the right.
I have personal experience with the double standard we apply to political correctness. In magazine pieces and TV appearances, I’ve made arguments against giving people like Spencer, Yiannopoulos, and Coulter a campus platform. I’ve said something similar to what Falwell argued — specifically, that safety is an important precondition for teaching and learning. When a conservative Christian like Falwell makes that argument, the media give him a pass. But when a left-of-center professor like me says it, I receive death threats, and my college gets countless messages demanding that I be fired.
The implications of this double standard are twofold. One, it fuels confirmation bias by framing the left as the sole enemy of free speech when the facts say otherwise. Two, it makes those who have actual power to enforce speech complaints — and thus to actually chill speech — more likely to do so against left-leaning speech that runs afoul of right-wing political correctness.
In fact, one of the most troubling developments has been the persecution of left-wing faculty members whose speech has offended right-wing PC sensibilities. By this point, a long list of professors — including Johnny Eric Williams, at Trinity College in Connecticut; Dana Cloud, at Syracuse University; and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, at Princeton University — have experienced harassment, threats, and intimidation, and in some cases penalties from their own institutions for such speech. Some, like Lisa Durden, of Essex County College, have been outright fired. Many of these persecuted faculty members are women, people of color, or adjuncts who are more vulnerable to institutional power (Durden is all three).
The effectiveness with which those in power listen to and act upon right-wing complaints about the speech of left-wing faculty members is mirrored in student attempts to disinvite speakers for political reasons. The “Disinvitation Database” of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) catalogs attempts to disrupt or disinvite campus speakers. According to a FIRE report from February, although a majority of disinvitation attempts come from the left against the right, a greater proportion of attempts to shut down speakers are successful when they come from the right than from the left — 55 percent versus 33 percent. The sheer quantity of attempts to limit speech on campus would suggest that left-wing political correctness is more prevalent, but right-wing PC is more effective.
With campus politics at the epicenter of the wider culture wars, and with students and faculty members perpetually in the media, the failure to identify right-wing political correctness, particularly when it becomes an instrument of censorship, has serious consequences beyond the campus. A handful of specious and anti-democratic ideas have become privileged and protected at the highest echelons of political power, such that when journalists and other public figures speak out against such ideas, they face persecution.
Those ideas include, for example, the idea that Robert E. Lee was “an honorable man” fighting for his state and not for the preservation of slavery; that it’s “inappropriate” for the press to question high-ranking military officers; and that those who protest during the national anthem should be penalized. The insistence that Lee fought for state’s rights above the preservation of slavery is counterfactual, right-wing PC. Similarly, the sentiment that military personnel must be shielded from criticism — or that peaceful protesters should be punished — contradicts alleged conservative principles of free speech and a distrust of government. Were a left-wing student to call for action against a peaceful conservative protester, the right would be apoplectic.
At issue here is not whether you agree with any of these positions. At issue, rather, is that while we assume the most dangerous thing you can say on a college campus is something like “There’s no such thing as rape culture,” the consequences of doing so — of defying left-wing political correctness — pale in comparison to what happens when someone says something like mass shootings are perpetuated by “the white supremacist patriarchy.” At Drexel University, George Ciccariello-Maher was placed on leave after receiving death threats, and eventually driven to resign, for saying exactly that.
If we want to have a more accurate picture of the influence of political correctness on campus and in our wider culture, we need to stop framing it as a left-wing phenomenon. And we should be awake to the fact that the right’s championing of free speech is hardly motivated by an honest desire for intellectual exchange. Take a closer look and you’ll see that the right has been just as active in shutting down speech with which it doesn’t agree.
Aaron R. Hanlon is an assistant professor of English at Colby College. His first book, The Politics of Quixotism, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.
