E-Pluribus | April 16, 2024

Does Vanderbilt put free speech where its mouth is?; when it comes to college students, we get what we parent for; and the Faustian bargain some centrists have made.

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Angele Latham: Vanderbilt University claims a commitment to free speech. But does it deliver?

While private colleges are not under the same Constitutional obligations as public ones, most still strive to be as open to speech and competing ideas anyway, at least in theory. At The Tennessean, Angele Latham questions the commitment of that state’s Vanderbilt University based on recent events.

A string of student demonstrations on Vanderbilt University’s campus over the past two weeks has caused a rift at the private university, with student and faculty concerns over their free speech rights at odds with university administration.

In late March, nearly fifty students descended on Kirkland Hall, the towering administration building in heart of Vanderbilt's campus, for a sit-in of Chancellor Daniel Deirmeier's office. The students were protesting the removal of a proposed amendment from a student ballot, which if approved would have prevented student government funds from going to certain businesses that support Israel.

Four students were arrested, with three of those expelled. Others who protested inside the building were either suspended or placed on disciplinary probation.

The university said that while it is committed to “free expression” and “civil discourse,” the students’ actions violated university policy and were “not peaceful,” citing the moment students pushed their way past a university employee to get into the administration building.

[. . .]

[T]he conflict — and the arrest of a reporter covering the protests — has been a blow to the public perception of the university as a place dedicated to free expression and free speech. A number of alumni and students, for instance, have expressed confusion over what they’re allowed to express on a campus.

In an interview with The Tennessean last week, Diermeier emphasized that free speech is “alive and well” on campus, and that calling concerns over the student demonstrations a “free-speech issue” was a “red herring.”

“I think the whole free speech angle is a total red herring,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the issues. We have plenty of opportunities for our students to engage with free speech without breaking fundamental university rules. So this was something else, and I'm not quite sure what they're trying to do. There was an attempt to occupy something — I don't know, maybe they have to explain what they were doing. That's their business. But from our point of view, our free speech, just like I said, is still alive and well.”

[. . .]

Zach Greenberg, senior program officer of student organizations and campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the situation at Vanderbilt was a “complex” one, where the university stands both in the right and wrong.

“Private universities are not bound by the First Amendment,” Greenberg said. “Public schools are of course legally required to uphold student’s free speech rights. Private universities, however, are only bound by the policies they make for their students in their official handbooks, though most private universities offer rights consistent with the First Amendment.”

Based on this, Greenberg said that the school’s response to the demonstrators was correct—but based on bad reasoning.

“We’re still investigating the situation,” he said. “But to our understanding right now, Vanderbilt did the right thing. They punished students who were disrupting campus, who were violating content-neutral place-and-time restrictions—which are permissible under First Amendment restrictions—and they were doing so to preserve the safety of their campus.”

Read the whole thing.

Noah Gould: The Campus Free Speech Wars Begin at Home

Colleges are often publicly ridiculed for coddling students with “safe spaces” and other protections for their apparent sensitivity to different viewpoints. Noah Gould writing for the Acton Institute says, however, that the source of this phenomenon can be found a little closer to home - in fact, in the home. Gould suggests parents have instilled fragility in their children and without a change in parenting, colleges can only do so much.

A new documentary based on Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s work highlights the crushing of free speech on college campuses. But the mental health issues of more and more students may be rooted in something that happens well before they get to college and experience an environment of repression and faux guilt.

[. . .]

Based on Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s essay-turned-book, The Coddling of the American Mind profiles five students who were able to overcome various mental health challenges during their college tenure. The film frames the important problem of college students’ abysmal mental state in the context of free speech on campuses, showing that mental health is notably worse for students when they are taught to silence uncomfortable ideas and view themselves and others as emotionally fragile—in other words, when we treat people as fragile, they become so.

[. . .]

The average high school senior has already experienced a culture of fragility by the time he or she enters college. This is the result of a toxic mix of helicopter parenting, lack of exposure to risk, and the subsequent vacuum of opportunity to develop a strong character. This point did not go completely unacknowledged by the directors during the Q&A, but its omission from the film is notable. After the film, both Ted and Courtney Balaker acknowledged the problem of “safetyism” in parenting their own young children as a key takeaway of the film for them personally, but it wasn’t a significant part of the film’s narrative. Perhaps this is because raising children to have strong character is a much more difficult problem to solve from the outside.

[. . .]

Extreme behavior that plays well in the documentary—screaming at campus speakers, mental breakdowns, etc.—while deeply concerning, is a sideshow to the root issue. Certainly these problems must be addressed, especially the framing of all issues around the “isms” of race, sex, and class. But by the time students reach college, their “upbringing” is essentially over. What happened to the average student before they arrived in the college dorms? One possibility is that they had such a weak education at a young age that, when they encountered the ideas prevalent at their various universities, they immediately embraced them, having had no training in critical thinking or the benefit of questioning the basis of any status quo. A second possibility is that they were already receiving the same type of fragility conditioning during their grade school and teenage years. You don’t get a coddled generation from just four years of college.

Faculty and administrators may just be reacting to customer demand when they restrict certain types of speech. If parents started raising kids with strong character, they would be far less likely to demand censorship and I suspect that the campus free speech wars would be a non-issue. But free speech exists as a method of producing truth and depends on the character of those within that framework. This freedom stems from the inviolability of human conscience, but must be oriented toward truth—open debate does not happen in a vacuum; rather, it should be a catalyst. This ecosystem of dialogue depends not just on laws and rules but also on the character of those interacting within it.

We need to explore exactly how parents can move away from a model of fragility. Numerous barriers exist. Since the rise of “parenting styles” in the 1960s, we don’t raise children in community. No longer can you—a conscious adult—tell off someone else’s kid for biting your kid on the playground for fear his mom may be offended that you imposed your “parenting style” on her progeny. Raising kids in community, however, would allow them to experience free play within the boundaries of other parents’ guidance, which would curb the worst behavior.

Read it all here.

Mary Harrington: Why the centrists changed their trans tune Truth was sacrificed for status

Transgender activists and advocates have had much success in recent years winning mainstream allies, but the tide may be turning. The release of the Cass report on youth gender medicine for the English National Health Service (see here for more on that report) is making a lot of waves. Writing at UnHerd, Mary Harrington says the report is helping to expose those who sacrificed scientific and medical objectivity for acceptance by the transgender community, particularly those who style themselves as “centrists.”

How does a public consensus come into being? The Sensible Centrists like to imagine that this is a careful, deliberative process. Ideas are debated, among people of good faith, and assessed dispassionately, on their merits, in an ongoing collective striving for truth.

But this is nonsense. As we’ve seen in the wake of the Cass Report, what actually happens is a mixture of magical thinking, conformism and moral grandstanding coalesces under a thin veneer of rational objectivity — and everyone except the most stubbornly reality-oriented falls obediently into line. And amid the chaos of frantic back-pedalling and rewriting of history, this consensus can form and re-form in real time without its basic structure ever changing, or lessons ever being learned.

[. . .]

[W]hat holds this together is less the fact of its “truth” but that it’s “universally acknowledged”. That is, we’re reading a normative statement disguised as an objective one. And not just normative but prescriptive: “universal” has a faintly threatening undertone, suggesting that anyone who matters acknowledges this truth, and by extension you probably should if you don’t want to be shunned.

[. . .]

Perhaps the most totalising recent instance of this was Covid consensus-formation. It’s dizzying now to read press reports from just before the Great Covid Panic took hold. Before this happened, Ian Bremmer approvingly describes experts doing “an impressive job of calmly and professionally setting out the factual framework behind the government’s coronavirus strategy”, while Boris Johnson accepts the moderate expert advice provided by Chris Witty to wash hands, protect the elderly but otherwise carry on with “business as usual”.

It’s yet more extraordinary to remember that in the 20 days after this article was published on March 3, we witnessed a screeching media 180 from encouraging “business as usual” to near-universal calls for lockdown.

Over the period that followed, competing Covid claims and counter-claims were all larded with “experts” and “evidence”. Reviewing these now makes one thing clear: Austen’s assessment of TUA remains true. Moral consensus precedes rationalisation. The Covid vibe shift may have been presented as scientific and factual; but what powered it was a chaotic tangle of magical thinking, fear, and the threat of social ostracism. The statement made by epidemiologist Sir Mark Woolhouse to the Covid enquiry captures the social pressures boiling beneath the claimed objectivity: “The emphasis on consensus and clear messaging,” he said, “plus a sense of not wanting to ‘rock the boat’, made it difficult to discuss these issues openly at the time.”

No one likes being ignored, scorned, or shunned. No wonder so many Sensibles fall obediently into line on every TUA. Take TV presenter and quintessential Sensible Kirstie Allsopp, who last year waded vigorously into the what she called “the trans moral panic” on the Stonewall side. Her reward was a pat on the back from the Daily Stormer of gender woo, Pink News, for opinions “backed up by science and facts”. It’s more accurate, though, to describe her opinions as (at the time) robustly supported by the moral hive-mind that determines and then enforces the Truth Universally Acknowledged.

Read it all.

Around Twitter (X)

Here’s Keith Humphreys with a thought on skepticism of experts:

NPR, under fire for tolerating only left-leaning viewpoints suspends editor who wrote article criticizing NPR for tolerating only left-leaning viewpoints. Scoop from… NPR:

And finally, via The Free Press, anti-war activists in Chicago learn a new chant! Note that they first repeat the chant apparently without even knowing what it means. But once they find out, they are if anything even more enthusiastic! Click for video.