Nobody Has to Invite Nazis

With the pedanticism and predictability of high-school debaters bringing up Voltaire in defense of disagreement, academics are touting high liberal principle to protect the right to reprehensible speech. However, when it comes to Richard Spencer, the intellectual racist they should know better about, liberal professors end up doing far more than safeguarding free expression.

This morning, the jurist Geoffrey Stone in the Times defending Spencer's right to speak at Auburn University after the school wanted to cancel an agreement to let him do so, citing security concerns. Stone discusses the precedent of the ACLU arguing that Nazis had the right to march in Skokie in 1977. Later today, a judge ruled Auburn had to host Spencer's talk, citing the First Amendment. The university also has a policy to let space to all comers.

Here I don't want to ask how the First Amendment does or doesn't apply, but to question how universities deal with situations like these. Colleges attract extremists intoxicated with views of cultural superiority, and they need to respond to them not only looking beyond the neutralities Stone and others say we are institutionally bound to represent but to understand what our institutions are for in the first place. 

However free-speech law does or does not apply with Auburn's policies, the prohibitions against censorship in the First Amendment come from a tradition concerned with governance. The liberalism of the turn of the 19th century created a concern with the state, and it developed alongside police power as adversary and complement to it.

I can't say from his article what police office Stone is worried about denying Spencer's rights. Not giving someone a state (university) forum to speak is not the same as the state suppressing speech. 

I can't think of anyone who says the US constitution is OK with the police stopping Spencer from saying whatever he wants at whatever venue wants him. 

But a university is not any venue. It's not a park bench for anyone to talk and listen, and it's not an art gallery where it's enough just to be very provocative. It's an institution and a community built around inquiry, yes free inquiry, but inquiry that is supposed to develop students and challenge scholars to contribute to a shared world.

Those contributions have standards that Spencer and his intellectual "alternatives" do not meet, but more importantly, when he espouses and amplifies the unconscionable, there is nothing in academic liberalism that forces us to include him.

Thinking of the university as a space where every viewpoint deserves an invitation seriously misreads its work of inclusion and purview to try to understand the world. Science departments have no liberal obligation to invite climate-deniers, nor art departments to invite iconoclasts because those kinds of opponents contribute nothing to the work scholars are supposed to do. And, political scientists who study fascism do not need to invite fascists.

Believing that we can and should ask scholarly questions about anything does not mean our doors are open to anyone who wants to answer them.

What recognition is owed to human subjects is a question that challenges liberals, and maybe they cannot answer, but no answer obliges intimacy with and confrontation of the university community Spencer uses to promote his agenda and standing.

This is not to endorse the idea of universities as exclusive places for exceptional people, though it is blatantly hypocritical for the University of Chicago's president to affect open neutrality on the one hand, and say he has no problem with Spencer lecturing there, while our institution's publicity and self-image depends on just such a elitist view.

It is rather to consider a different institutional genealogy, ironically one promoted by another academic apologist of the alt-right, Rachel Fulton Brown (why are they all U of C?). Now, Brown has no evidence to support her claims that today's college students are "threatened" by the muscular Christianity of Trump's cheerleaders, and these serve only a narrative of false persecution.

However, she is entirely correct that when Western universities foregrounded their Christian vocations, the idea that being part of the community connected to a sharing in pursuit of goods was much clearer.

What I suggest is not a reinscription of Christian or liberal commitments as a standard of admission for students, teachers, or visitors but an acknowledgement of where our commitment to inclusion comes from and how it shapes how we work and how our space is open.