Truths and Needs

As part of an improvised series on free speech, I want to consider this year's big public demonstrations against Donald Trump and the continued ascent of the far right in terms of what protest does and can mean as a general phenomenon.

The Women's March and the March for Science have been two large gatherings of liberals organized around the idea of common needs, and both have met with significant critique from the left based on claims to truths.

To summarize: Women's Marches in large US cities confronted the election of a president who revels in misogyny and whose party is threatening women's rights extensively. However, liberal feminism's history in the US ties deeply to racism, and not incidentally, as much as many progressives plead good faith today. While many women's organizations oppose the limitless wars progressive and conservative elites have supported, they have not meaningfully renounced the savior-politics that are part of these projects' logic. Furthermore, activists have especially criticized the Women's Marches' jovial tone and non-threatening attitudes in a stark contrast to protests for life against death.

The March for Science opposed climate-denialism, the defunding of research, and the know-nothing politics championed by the right in general. The march itself has not incited critique from the left like the Women's March has, and the left's criticism of politicized science is more muted and academic than that against progressive feminism. However, it is impossible to deny that scientist ideologies supported slavery and colonialism, denigrating all non-Western ways of knowing as irrational superstition, and that knowledge has often been extracted from people without power.

This is not to suggest that all these protests show is a deep left-liberal divide, or even that my framework of need and truth can simplify all political protest. However, it speaks persistence of the concerns about how to tell the truth urgently and how to demand justice. For me, these questions are at the heart of a politics of free speech, of protest politics.

This politics focuses on two prominent questions: how to listen to and act with to others' truths and how to live with radical difference within a shared community. I don't for the moment imagine a protest form that does both of these, and I'm certainly not convinced that professional partisans or academics have productive answers.

This year's protests arose in manifest need for autonomy in life and to support research the market will not bear, and these are needs the left must organize around seriously if it is a left at all.

Yet demand for these obscures the truth of whom the technologies and knowledges were secured against. The histories of modern science and humanistic feminism do not make them unalloyed goods. Though this may be difficult to fit on a protest sign, and is even harder to make into a fun slogan, it demands the recognition of the privileged progressives who oppose ignorance and disenfranchisement when they're directed at them.

Consideration of the stakes of protest does not readily suggest a synthetic compromise that will answer the left critiques of liberalism and make a harmonious movement. It rather points beyond protest, the politics of showing up for something, to different ends speaking out aims for.

Speaking for Us

Since my last piece, I have had time to consider both some thoughtful responses to it and the range of issues bound up in individual questions of the application of the principle of free speech to college campuses.

I had hoped to avoid the broadest issues but just say I did not equate denial of specific platforms and audiences to the suppression of speech.

Of course, it is not that simple. A federal judge ruled Auburn had to let Richard Spencer speak because of school policies that let space to anyone, which liken public universities to public accommodations.

I don't know the jurisprudence, but I really doubt the law is bound by precedent to always regard a college quad as no different from a public park just because the state pays some of the bills for both.

In terms of administration, I'm encouraged that public schools like Texas A&M are making policies more consistent with the view that we take part in distinct institutions within distinct communities where not anybody can make demands on our space.

In this, I think we need only to ask why Spencer and Milo Yannopoulos are drawn to universities in the first place.

Presumably, if they had talks at hotels or community centers, they wouldn't get the same promotion opportunity as saying "Auburn Presents ___" or something to this effect. And in keeping with how I think about public accommodations, I don't think the people who work in hotels or community centers are understood to be responsible for whom they do business with in the same way as we are. 

I was trying to say that in this dynamic of provocation and offense-at-offense, we don't have to be passive. We don't have to "present" whoever wants us to present them. 

However, our communities are shaped by practices of free speech, as Ulrich Baer has argued. In this moment, what ends those practices serve- why speech needs to be free- need questioning and consideration on campus and off.

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.