Anyone who regularly spends time at a university can’t fail to notice the gulf between the popular image of students and the quieter, far more boring reality. In the past couple of years I’ve spoken at universities across the UK and at colleges throughout the US. Each time I expect to be greeted by students campaigning to have speakers no-platformed, demanding trigger warnings, tearing down posters, burning newspapers and shrieking accusations of racism, misogyny and transphobia. Each time I have been disappointed.
Clearly, activist students determined to bring social justice to their campus exist. This week, in the UK, it is Balliol College at the University of Oxford which is under the microscope for banning — and then reinstating — the Christian Union from its Freshers’ Fair. The long-established Christian society was initially labelled “harmful” by the fair’s organizers who went on to claim that Christianity’s historic use as “an excuse for homophobia and certain forms of neo-colonialism” meant its presence might “alienate” new students. Meanwhile, in the US, students at the College of William and Mary made headlines for disrupting a talk by the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Virginia chapter on free speech. Students holding placards shouted down the speaker with chants of “ACLU, free speech for who?” and “The oppressed are not impressed.”
While these highly-charged free speech controversies grab headlines, they do so against the backdrop of a student experience which is in many ways less political than in the past. The campus left-wing factionalism of yesteryear is no more than a distant memory. In the UK, a majority of students may have voted for Corbyn in the general election but at last month’s meeting of the NUS’s National Executive Committee a motion backing a demonstration in support of free education wasn’t even discussed let alone approved.
Many people who work or study at a university are busy just getting on with their lives. Academics try to squeeze time for teaching and research in between meetings and administration. Students attend classes, complete assignments and hang out. Some have jobs, relationships, financial problems and complicated family situations. In short, most universities, most of the time, are best characterized not by social justice warriors disinviting speakers and protesting a Eurocentric curriculum but by a humdrum busy-ness and a lack of interest in politics. Talk to students at random and the impression you’re left with is an overwhelming niceness and an urge not to offend.
The conundrum, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that campus disputes in one part of the country co-exist with students quietly getting on with life elsewhere. Perhaps contrary to expectations, protests against visiting speakers, recalcitrant academics, fancy dress costumes or culturally-appropriating canteen fare are more likely to erupt at elite institutions. Universities that are academically highly selective and, in the US at least, most expensive, do not admit a greater proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds than institutions lower down the league tables. Instead, middle class, wealthy students have more time to dedicate to being offended by microaggressions and need to work far harder to prove their own suffering or to demonstrate their empathy with perceived victims. Academically successful students are likely to have best imbibed the seminar room message that words can wound.
Practical differences also make protests more likely to occur at some places rather than others. At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and liberal arts colleges in the US, students of similar age and social class background live and study side by side in small communities. The reality check provided by friends and classmates with lives and jobs away from college is lessened. New moral norms can rapidly become established and challenging dominant voices carries a far higher risk of ostracisation.
The imperative to “be nice” can mean that students passively go along with protests when they are carried out under the banner of social justice and don’t challenge censorship. This is particularly the case when free speech as a value is held in low regard. A 2016 survey of UK university students showed that only 33% of male students and 22% of female students completely agreed that universities should never limit free speech. This reluctance to challenge enables the views of small groups of student activists to appear more dominant than they really are and this, in turn, allows protests to develop a momentum of their own.
Particularly in the US, campus culture wars further inflame debates about free speech. The more free speech is presented as harmful to the cause of social justice with topics such as rape culture or “trans politics” placed beyond all discussion, the more this is met by a knee-jerk desire to shock. Speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos parachute onto campus accompanied by much hype but with little of political or intellectual substance to add to any debate. A reasoned exchange of ideas becomes impossible and the ensuing hysteria appears to reflect the battle lines for free speech.
It is this hysteria that stands in such stark contrast to the daily experiences of staff and students on campus. But the existence of this disjuncture means it is possible to talk to students about challenging and controversial ideas. On my most recent trip to the US I spoke to students and faculty at very different institutions. Each time, I criticized current directions in feminism, intersectionality and identity politics. I challenged the need for trigger warnings, argued against the concepts of cultural appropriation and microaggression and made the case for free speech.
The students I met seemed to welcome an opportunity to confront head-on issues that pervade campus life today but are rarely openly discussed. I was fortunate enough in each case to have been invited by professors who were determined to make the event work and introduced me to students and faculty so I could properly understand the particular institutional context. In my talk I tried to move beyond sloganeering to explain both why free speech is important to me personally and the academic basis for the current problematizing of free speech. This led to engaging and rigorous discussions. I certainly received challenging questions and criticisms but no one was traumatized or needed a safe space in which to recover.
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Seemingly apolitical students may often be not so much devoid of political awareness, interests, or convictions as careful about whom they get into arguments and debates with. They may have what they feel are overridingly good personal reasons for not getting into arguments with certain people, particularly with people with whom they have certain sorts of personal relationships.
As frequent AREO contributor Galen Watts recently pointed out in his March 18, 2020 AREO article “What Is Neoliberalism Anyway?,” modern society is divided into a number of distinct, more or less independent spheres or domains, governed by different sets of values, which we should not let encroach upon each other–a market or economic sphere, a civic or political sphere, a domestic or family sphere, a religious sphere, etc. Thus, “in the domestic sphere,” he noted, we have “operated with a *domestic mentality*, bound by ties of blood and affection, and venerating the values of personal integrity, intimacy and love.” Watts asked whether at home we think of our family members in the same way as we think of our fellow citizens at election time, noting that we “likely have different expectations,” based on “different norms and values.”
Similarly, in his December 12, 2018 AREO article on “Talking Politics at the Family Dinner Table,” Watts saw “family life” as “sacred” for most us, as a “space of self-expression and self-disclosure, of intimacy and emotional closeness,” where we wish to “be congenial, loving and cheerful.” He noted that no one wants to feel he or she “spoils a family get-together” by “making others feel awkward or starting an argument.” He saw this as “by no means an undesirable attitude.” He himself “would hate it” if his time with his family were “governed by the same norms that structure a graduate seminar.” Watts found it “completely understandable” to “wish only to have a nice family dinner.” No one would “want to risk getting into an argument” after enduring “a busy day at work.” We “rightly feel” that we “deserve an evening of relative peace, scattered with occasional laughs and collective reminiscing,” for which he felt no one could “blame” us. As Christopher Lasch once put it, the family often serves as a “haven in a heartless world.”
The same considerations, I’ve always felt myself, also apply to friendship–and above all to our choice of mates, of life-companions. Friendship (and romance) should no more be “colonized” by politics than family life. It is quite natural and normal, as the old proverb puts it, for “birds of a feather” to “flock together.” I would adamantly defend free personal choice in the choice of friends and marriage partners against the criticisms we so often hear these days of people being guilty of living in “bubbles” by socializing with, dating, or marrying people with similar politics to their own, almost as if we should marry or socialize only with our political opponents! Whom you marry or whom you have a beer with, I feel, should properly be of no concern to the political pundits who complain about too many liberals socializing with other liberals or too many conservatives marrying other conservatives. Nobody should be condemned as some sort of traitor to civil, open-minded politics for having a beer with a fellow Republican like himself or for marrying a fellow Democrat like herself! We should not expect friendship, romance, or family life to be a perpetual political debate, an endless missionary or didactic effort to convert the heathen and to patriotically re-educate the ideologically deviant! We should not be forced, shamed, or guilt-tripped into entering personal relationships we really do not want just for the sake of political diversity!
Also, I’d add here, the same “haven in a heartless world” right to intimacy, emotional closeness, congeniality, and cheerfulness that Watts upholds for family life also applies to friendship–and to our relationships with romantic partners. With friends (and lovers), too, just as with family members, we need those times of “relative peace, scattered with occasional laughs and collective reminiscing,” after a hard day’s work (or political arguing) that Watts sees it as perfectly normal to wish to enjoy with our families. As I noted a few days ago in a comment on Mark McNeilly’s March 23, 2020 AREO article “Why do conservative students self-censor?,” students–and others–may argue about politics to their heart’s content, but at the same also still feel a need for something more quiet, peaceful, and restful in more private, intimate times and spaces. As I put it, many people–college students and others–have what we might call a NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard!”) attitude to political controversy, their “Backyard” being what they wish could be the more quiet, private, and intimate times and spaces of their personal lives, apart from those contexts where they do accept political argument as appropriate and unavoidable. They want at least a few people in their lives to whom they don’t have to defend and justify themselves and their beliefs, who will accept and like, even love, them for just who and what they are, regardless of any political agenda.
First of all, I think Joanna Williams made an excellent point in reminding us that “[m]any people who work or study at a university are busy just getting on with their lives,” that students “attend classes, complete assignments and hang out,” with some having “jobs, relationships, financial problems and complicated family situations.” Students and faculty alike, she noted, generally display “a humdrum busy-ness and a lack of interest in politics.”
My own “take” on university and college life, which I first described to some friends a half-century ago based on my personal observations of my fellow students at the University of Virginia in the 1960’s and still find broadly valid today, is that we basically find four populations among students at most colleges and universities.
Back in the late 1960’s, as a graduate student in Modern European History at the University of Virginia, in a couple of letters to friends I divided the students (both undergraduate and graduate) I observed at U.Va., plus what I read and heard in the media about student (and also faculty) at other American colleges and universities into four main basic categories, in what I then saw (and pretty much still see) as ascending levels of intellectual seriousness:
First, I saw the vast collegiate majority of totally or almost totally non-intellectual “Joe and Jane College” types, “jocks,” fraternity boys, sorority girls, “Big Man on Campus” types, “preppies,” young men mainly trying (in the 1960’s) to avoid the military draft, young women mainly “going for their Mrs. degree,” the young people mainly interested in partying and binge drinking, the students largely focused on sporting events, etc. They included most of the students majoring in subjects like Business Management, Retailing, Accounting, Physical Education, Physical Therapy, and Speech Therapy, as well as most of the Nursing and Elementary & Secondary Education students.
My second group were the serious and dedicated but narrow-focus nose-to-the-grindstone aspiring young academic careerists devoted to mastering one scientific or scholarly specialty (whether American or British history, American or English or French literature, Southeast Asian politics, molecular biology, organic chemistry, solid-state physics, or whatever) while content to largely be quite “lowbrow” and mundane in their general interests outside their academic major field (e.g,, sports, popular movies and TV shows, etc.). They were often very much “into” brown-nosing their thesis advisors and department chairmen, sitting around the U.Va. cafeteria discussing their grade-point averages and recent or upcoming interviews, etc. Most of my fellow graduate students (ESPECIALLY among my fellow History majors, somewhat less so among the English and Philosophy majors) belonged very much to this second population, but they also included many of the more studious and academically serious undergraduates as well.
The third group were the campus political and social activists, who helped create the media and popular image we still have of “The Sixties.” This group included activists and zealots of both the Left and the Right–the civil-rights, anti-war, and early feminist & environmentalist activists, the “kids” (and younger faculty) who marched, demonstrated, burned flags and draft-cards, occupied campus buildings, and joined groups and movements like the SDS, Weathermen, and Yippies–as well as their YAF and Young Republican opponents on the Right. They were the forerunners half a century earlier, on both sides of the political spectrum, both of today’s “woke,” politically-correct “social justice warriors,” and also as well of our time’s conservative complainers about liberal intimidation and leftist academic groupthink. Sort of aligned or hanging around this student activist group was also the other population that helped set the popular image of “The Sixties”–the hippies, “flower children,” pot-heads, acid-heads, rock musicians, and Woodstockers. To them we might also, as well, add the young spiritual “seekers” who gravitated to religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, “Jesus freaks,” “Moonies,” Soka Gakkai Buddhists, and Scientologists.
Finally, the fourth and last group, who included most of my own close friends at U.Va. in the 1960’s, were an outwardly seemingly somewhat nondescript scattering of budding young mildly eccentric polymaths with miscellaneous diverse, sometimes somewhat offbeat or abstruse intellectual and cultural interests, both inside and outside their official major fields–but not politics nor social activism, that much. As I said, they outwardly did not seem to quite belong to any generally recognized student subculture or stereotype, certainly none that enjoyed a lot of media or pop-culture publicity or celebrity–they were not exactly hippies, New Leftists, or campus activists, not exactly religious cultists, but also not quite regular “straight arrows” and not quite typical narrow-focus nose-to-the-grindstone young academic careerists. They were serious in their academic studies, well-read in their major fields, but also intensely curious about all sorts of miscellaneous cultural, literary, historical, linguistic, and scientific oddments lying outside their major fields–but, as I said, generally not too much “into” politics or activism. They might follow politics to a certain extent, and mught have definite political opunions and preferences, but polyics was not really central to their lives or interests.
It might also be interesting to check out an article published in AREO just a little over a year ago, along with some of the articles its author cited. In“Virtue Signaling or Piety Display?” (AREO, March 5, 2019), M. “Lorenzo” Warby felt that we “must not…overstate the role of academics,” seeing both fellow-students and university administrators as more to blame than professors for today’s campus shenanigans.“Research,” according to Warby, showed “strong engagement with academics by students” to have “actually…a moderating effect on student opinions,” with the more studious and academically serious students–e.g., my own second and also fourth groups in my typology outlined above–usually being more moderate and nuanced, less extreme or dogmatic, in their political views whether of the left or the right. Instead, it was “intense involvement in student life, an area in which the role of university administrations is strongest,” that had the most powerful conformity effects.” He cited Scott Jaschik’s “Stop Blaming the Professors” (*Inside Higher Education*, June 10, 2014), summarizing studies showing that the more students engaged with faculty members and academics, the more their political views moderated, while student activities seemed to encourage those already leaning to the left or the right to tilt yet further. Again, Warby found university administrators to be “much more ideologically conformist than academe in general,” as described by Sarah Lawrence College professor of politics and American Enterprise Institute fellow Samuel J. Abrams in his October 16, 2018 *New York Times* article “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” Many of the “on-campus pathologies that have attracted so much attention,” Warby felt following Abrams, were “centered in university administrations rather than symptomatic of academia in general.”
The problem is that history knows examples of passive or divided majority ruled or repressed by an active and organised majority. If the majority stays apolitical and indifferent it’s that crazy minority to shape the future of western academia not because they had the best ideas or because they represent the whole community, but because others were too passive to challenge them.
Oh, what is education these days? To hold a banner stating “ACLU, free speech for who?” when, of course, it should read ““ACLU, free speech for whom?” Bring back the good old days of Paris in 1968 when students merely brought their capital city to a standstill.
The activists may be a minority, but the others are socialized into their way of thinking, accepting the demonization of ideas that are not left and far left. Then these students become the lawyers and other professionals, and some become appointed or elected public figures, putting into practice and law extremist viewpoints they have absorbed at university. An example is the radical feminist law professors who have turned the law against men generally and fathers in particular.
So glad to read this, giving much needed balance to the high-visibility reports of campus craziness.
There are students like that, especially at places like Berkeley. The questions are how many, and how much influence do they have to intimidate and limit free speech? The answer would be different, depending upon the campus, and also the speaker and his or her views. Back in the 60’s it was mostly soc. and poly sci. majors who were politically active. Thing is, it only takes a few to do it.