The Chronicle of Higher Ed discusses the new pushback on college wokeness

The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.

The most obvious sign of this is the congressional hearing that led to the resignation of the President of Penn, the weakening of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, and a general tendency for donors to pull their money out of colleges because of their hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that led colleges to punish minor speech transgressions (like misgendering and “microaggressions”) but to suddenly raise the banner of free speech when it came to calling for genocide of the Jews.

As I’ve said, a decent college free-speech code—one that adheres to the First Amendment—would allow for calls to kill Jews, but only under certain conditions (you can’t, for example, do it to harass someone or create a climate that impedes education). In that sense all three Presidents were right—context does matters.  But what rankled many people, including me, was that these colleges did not have decent speech codes, and what codes they had were applied unevenly. This created a kind of hypocrisy that led to the downfall of Penn’s President Elizabeth Magill, who didn’t know how to handle the issue thoughtfully and humanely, and walked back her free-speech advocacy the very next day.

The problem is how to maintain free speech, which allows students to say really offensive things, including “From the River to the Sea. . ” (a disguised call to eliminate Israel and Jews), while at the same time preserving a campus climate that is conducive to discussion and learning. That’s a hard problem, one that I’m dealing with now and trying to solve in my own way (more on that later).

After giving lots of examples and offering potential causes of the last decade’s illiberal campus climate, author Len Gutkin offers a solution, which turns out to be colleges’ adoption of the principle of “insitutional neutrality”: there should be no official statements by administrations or departments about ideology, politics, or morality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ll give (indented) quotes from the article in three sections, which I’ve arbitrarily constructed.

1.) THE PROBLEM

Author Gutkin dates the problem as really beginning with the demonization of Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale after a dust-up about Halloween costumes. This took place in October of 2015, when Erika wrote a note to the students in her residential “house” saying that the administration’s policy of specifying politically correct Halloween costumes should be regarded with some critical judgement. The students didn’t like that, as you can see from the video below, in which they go after Nicholas like gangbusters for what his wife did.  Watch the students going wild as Christakis kept his cool. (For background information, go here or read the part on “Yale Halloween Controversy” at Nicholas Christakis’s Wikipedia page.)

The result: Nicholas and Erika resigned as heads of Silliman House, and Erika left Yale permanently.

Whether or not that marks the formal beginning of a tide of wokeness, a lot of reprehensible behavior ensued, exacerbated by the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see next post). A few examples:

An almost-random sampling from June 2020: The Rutgers University English department released a letter detailing its “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”; these included a “Racism in Education Reading Group” as well as workshops on “how to have an antiracist classroom.” The latter would be “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone.” The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid issued a statement promising, among other things, to “commit to engaging more deeply in antiracism work to support our work in admissions and financial aid and in hiring, professional development, and promotions within our office.” Cornell University’s Office of Student and Campus Life issued a statement explaining that “the institution of higher education is founded on and continues to function with intentional systemic barriers in place for marginalized people, especially our Black community members.” The president of Brandeis University promised to “transform our campus and address systemic racism” via a series of “action plans”: “We must go further than dialogue and understanding. We must rapidly move toward concrete change.”

In July 2020, an open faculty letter circulated at Princeton and signed by several hundred faculty members likewise asked that the university take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” on campus. The suggested steps were many and heterogeneous, including “implement administration- and facultywide training that is specifically antiracist,” “acknowledge on the home page that the university is sited on Indigenous land,” and “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference.”

. . .Indeed, in the two years following the murder of George Floyd, it became apparent that academic freedom and activist demands — even some demands backed by administrators — were sometimes in severe tension. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh incident. Some of the cases are farcical: In 2020, a white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton, used the Mandarin word “nèige,” which means “that,” in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to “um” in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word). A joint letter signed by “Black MBA students” referred to the “emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcoming environment for us.” Patton was removed from the course. Other cases fundamentally threaten academic freedom as it pertains to classroom teaching: At the University of Michigan, Bright Sheng, a composer from China who teaches in the music school, showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface. Students were upset; Sheng apologized and agreed not to finish screening the film. That response was felt to be unsatisfactory. Sheng was removed from the course. His dean, David Gier, explained that Sheng’s misdeeds “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

And then there was the affair of the Yale Law School trap house. , ,

You may have heard about most of this, and the article gives more examples. But we already know about this tsunamis of wokeness, and how it’s inhibited students from speaking their minds.  Gilken has a psychological diagnosis of the problem which aligns with the one Haidt and Lukianoff offered in their excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind:

2.) WHAT CAUSED ALL THIS?

Gutkin sees one main cause of this atmosphere: the entitlement of students created by a new atmosphere of “safetyism”, itself promoted by the desire of students to have colleges act in loco parentis. Earlier students didn’t want that, but simply wanted independence. This atmosphere is discussed thoroughly in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book. A few quotes from the Chronicle piece:

When Erika [Christakis] asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about “bureaucratic and administrative” power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn’t fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the in loco parentis oversight of their elders on campus. “Whose business is it,” Erika had asked in her letter, “to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.” Students disagreed.

. . .The last decade’s protest culture, with its emphasis on harm and care, abandons one of the central goals of an earlier age of student activism: the nullification of colleges’ in loco parentis controls. Instead, Gersen observed in 2015, students approach college administrations with a kind of “family feeling” hard to imagine in an earlier era. Of the Yale Halloween protests, she writes: “The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent.”

These psychodynamics are crossed with other, older traditions of campus protest, including the rhetoric of the left in the ‘60s. The result is an oddly psychologized species of militancy, a blend of personal insult, wounded outcries, radical political prescription — and demands that offenders be punished. Indeed, Gersen’s observation about students’ desire for familial protection from administrators should be supplemented with a complementary account of punishment. Families, after all, are where children are trained and corrected. The last decade has been marked by a decided willingness on the part of campus activists to ask administrators to train and correct both wayward faculty members and fellow students — and a decided willingness on the part of administrators to oblige them. Although the term “cancel culture” has become tainted by partisan political bickering, it gets at the broadly punitive atmosphere of campus life now.

And I like this explanation, which comes from Lukianoff and Haidt:

In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified a disposition they termed “vindictive protectiveness,” which combines a neurotic fixation on one’s own vulnerability with a thirst for punishing others: “The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable [and] to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.” The sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen can help us understand how that disposition sometimes becomes the glue holding student activists together. In a 2017 paper, “Why Punishment Pleases,” Carvalho and Chamberlen coined the concept of “hostile solidarity,” whereby punitive rituals bind groups together at the expense of the punished. This concept, they note, might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings” — like colleges. As one protesting student told Nicholas Christakis back in 2015, “Now I want your job to be taken from you.”

“Vindictive protectiveness”! Yes, the combination of fragility and aggressiveness is not something I’ve seen on campuses before.  Aggressiveness, yes, especially during the Vietnam War and civil rights protests of the Sixties. But not the fragility, also explained by Haidt and Lukianoff as a result of overparenting and other factors.

But Gutkin skims but lightly another cause of campus unrest: the proliferation of DEI bureaucracies, which promote identitarianism and the oppressor/victim narrative (“fragility”) as well as divisiveness (“aggression”).  It’s mentioned only two or three times in the article; and, indeed, Gutkin may see DEI as simply another outgrowth of the safetyism dsecribed above. But the DEI intrusion into academia began well before the Yale incident, and is somewhat independent of it (the Bakke case was in 1978). And there’s evidence that DEI, by creating divisiveness, self-segregation, and inhibition of free expression, is contributing to this problem. Bolding in the excerpt below is mine:

Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.

Getting rid of DEI would, I think, help reduce this kind of campus tension, for DEI sets group against group and inculcates the “privileged” with guilt and the “oppressed” with resentment and fragility.

3.) WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?

This is the hard part. If you maintain a campus policy of free expression, people are going to get offended, and, without due care, it could create a climate of fear and safetyism on campus. The sole solution offered by Gutkin—a good one, to be sure—is to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality like our Kalven Report. We’ve had far less trouble in Chicago than at places like Harvard (which bought striking pro-Palestinian students BURRITOS, for crying out loud), and although we have demands for the administration to take stands on issues or divest from some corporations, the students know that this is useless, and their hearts aren’t really in it. So yes, adopt institutional neutrality.  (It’s worth noting that unlike the Ivies, which lost big donors after the House hearing, this hasn’t happened at Chicago.)

What will they do now? One possibility: Commit to the institutional neutrality enshrined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day.” No more statements from college presidents scolding the Supreme Court; no more declarations of solidarity with Ukraine. One leader adopting this approach is Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts. “Our most important mission,” she wrote to her campus, “is to teach students how to think, and empower them to do so for themselves — not to tell them what to think.” Danielle Allen, the Harvard political scientist, likewise told me that she thinks it would benefit colleges to “embrace” the Kalven Report. So did Ellen Cosgrove, the retired Yale law administrator who got ensnarled in the Trent Colbert case. Cosgrove predicts, too, that colleges will become much clearer in the future about the consequences of participating in disruptive protests.

Whatever neutrality’s intrinsic virtues, the intense scrutiny brought to bear on campus politics by Republican politicians makes it politically expedient, too. Colleges are under pressure to reverse the appearance of a political double standard on campus, and a policy of neutrality might not only remove a provocation to politicians but give colleges a tool with which to resist the imposition of a conservative orthodoxy by state legislatures.

But of course this raises the problem, recognized by Gutkin, that such neutrality doesn’t do much to dispel either the psychological tendency of students to be fragile nor the DEI-promoted rivalry between identity groups. All Gutkins can offer here is the idea that adopting the Kalven principle (so far embraced by only two schools beside Chicago) will let the air out of protestors’ tires:

If neutrality is a negative doctrine of restraint, pluralism is its positive consequence, the fruit it allows to grow. It is not conducive to “family feeling” — families tend toward consensus or else, à la the students screaming and weeping at Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, embittered antagonism. Perhaps, as happened after the explosive campus protests of the late 1960s, we are entering a new period of quiescence, all passion spent. Or perhaps not.

To be sure, this is not an easy problem to resolve.  But I think there are other things to do, like encouraging discourse between groups and ensuring that although speech remains free, there may be a few tiny curbs on the First Amendment that would facilitate interaction. One of these would be to prohibit shouting down speakers or deplatforming them. That is allowed by the First Amendment but is not salubrious for campuses. And it’s important that although free expression should be encouraged, students who violate campus rules via sit-ins, deplatforming, and disrupting classes with chants, be punished, and that those punishments be known to students. For without punishment there is no deterrence, and no way to curb disruption.

And that means no free burritos for those who violate campus rules!