In July of 2015, The Chronicle published our essay suggesting that some of the manifestations of a new moral culture emerging at colleges in this country were incompatible with the traditional academic mission. Since then, it has become clear that this is so. In the last few years, activist students and faculty, sometimes with the support of administrators, have increasingly attacked the ideals of free speech.
The new activist culture calls for colleges to confront the small, perhaps unintended slights known as microaggressions, to provide trigger warnings for course material that might offend or upset, and to become safe spaces where ideas go unchallenged. It is characterized by extreme moral sensitivity, and in this way is similar to honor cultures of the past where men were highly sensitive to insults and responded to perceived slurs against their character with duels and other forms of violence.
The new culture is less concerned with slights against individual character than with anything perceived as furthering the oppression of victim groups. In either case, though, extreme moral sensitivity presents a problem in an academic environment. As we warned, “Honest inquiry and communication are bound to offend someone,” so if colleges are to be places of inquiry and communication, “they must have a climate where people are less — not more — prone to outrage than elsewhere.”
The dignity culture that began to replace honor culture in the 19th century cautioned against excessive moral sensitivity. People were taught to have thick skins and to ignore insults. Speech and violence were distinct, as seen in the aphorism commonly taught to young children: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
The new activist culture rejects this distinction, as did the honor cultures of old, and this has had major consequences for the free expression of ideas. For instance, in the honor culture of the antebellum American South, it was dangerous to be a newspaper editor. If a gentleman thought the paper had published anything unflattering about himself or a family member, he might challenge the editor to a duel (if he perceived him to be a social equal) or else simply beat him with a cane or whip. Honor could disrupt universities, too, with students turning to violence against their professors. In their book Rot, Riot, and Rebellion, Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos describe how honor culture imperiled the University of Virginia in its infancy. In one incident, two recently expelled students horsewhipped a professor who told them they had disgraced themselves. “Neither of them pretended I had done him any injury,” the astonished professor wrote. But of course, in the eyes of the two students, the professor’s insult was the injury.
Today’s campus activists are concerned with different kinds of offenses: statements they see as slighting members of disadvantaged groups or in some other way furthering oppression. But they similarly view such statements as injurious, as akin to violence. Some go further, arguing that speech they view as oppressive is actually violence. And if speech is violence, universities must prohibit it. If they don’t, activists are justified in doing so themselves as an act of self-defense.
At the University of California at Berkeley, for example, after rioters forced the cancellation of a talk by the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the Daily Californian, an independent student-run newspaper, published a collection of articles called “Violence as Self-Defense.” The premise was that since Yiannopoulos’s speech would have been harmful, rioting to prevent it was appropriate. One protester wrote that “letting Yiannopoulos speak was more terrifying to me than potential injury or arrest.” Another proclaimed, “Our shields are raised against you. No one will protect us? We will protect ourselves.” And a Berkeley alumna wrote that “asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who literally do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”
The same logic has been the impetus behind efforts to prevent or punish dissent at universities around the country. At Yale University, students vilified Nicholas and Erika Christakis, leading them to resign their positions as the heads of one of Yale’s residential colleges, because Erika had questioned the university’s involvement in policing offensive Halloween costumes. At Middlebury College, student protesters forced organizers to move a talk by the political scientist Charles Murray to a secret location where it could be recorded for broadcast, and then surrounded the participants and assaulted a professor who was there to debate Murray. At Claremont McKenna College, students blocked the entrance to a talk by the police defender Heather Mac Donald. And at Evergreen State College, activists targeted a professor, Bret Weinstein, because of his objection to a “Day of Absence” where white people were asked to leave campus. At one point Weinstein had to hold class off campus when the police told him his safety couldn’t be ensured.
These kinds of events keep occurring as the new culture spreads, but they also provoke opposition from those who still hold to dignity culture and its distinction between speech and violence.
One hopeful sign is the University of Chicago’s policy on free expression, called the “Chicago Statement,” which 33 colleges have now adopted or affirmed. This commits the institution to “the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” And it even makes clear that while members of the community are welcome to criticize and contest any view, “they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.” The Chicago Statement thus rejects the idea that offensive speech is akin to violence and that the shutting down of speakers is self defense.
The authors of the Chicago Statement on the one hand, and the authors of the “Violence as Self-Defense” symposium in the Daily Californian on the other, draw from different and irreconcilable moral frameworks. Each position has support within their universities, so the campus culture wars are likely to continue for some time. Right now the outcome is uncertain, but what is certain is this: If the activists prevail in blurring the boundary between speech and violence, it will mean the end of academe as a place of serious scholarship and debate.
Bradley Campbell is an associate professor of sociology at California State University at Los Angeles and Jason Manning is an associate professor of sociology at West Virginia University. They are the authors of The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
