Toward a Freer Speech on Campus

Recent protests at Mizzou, Claremont McKenna, and Yale have swept the nation as of late, and like many, we are gripped by the accusations of cultural insensitivity, racial injustice, and institutional culpability of our universities. As UC Berkeley seniors, we have long watched as students on our campus and across the country have taken to the quad and newsfeed to air their grievances and condemnations. In light of the recent metastasis of such displays as exemplified by the actions of the Concerned Student 1950 group at Mizzou, we too are driven to enter the conversation—albeit for rather uncommon reasons.

We are concerned with that strain of student activism—oft adopted by a number of our fellow collegians—which flagrantly undermines the principles of free inquiry that underpin the essence of the university. At its core, the university is about the pursuit and dissemination of truth, which may sometimes be at odds with the prevailing winds of public opinion outside its august doors. As students arm themselves with trigger warnings and claims of micro-aggressions, our universities increasingly resemble infirmaries for those of fragile feelings rather than strongholds for the audacious. The voice conspicuously missing in all the hullabaloo of the past few weeks is that of the student who recognizes the pernicious ramifications of such displays, the voice of Concerned Student 1791, if you will. What, then would such a student find so problematic about these displays?

Perhaps most harmful to the possibility of a healthy intellectual community is the appeal protesters frequently make to a peculiar epistemology of essentialist solipsism. Their arguments take the form, because you are not a woman/African American/homosexual/illegal immigrant/Muslim/poor person, et cetera you are incapable of understanding the struggles inherent in and particular to members of said group. Take seriously the claims of cutting-edge theories of intersectionality, and it becomes manifestly apparent that a cisgender half Pacific Islander, half Native American ninety-nine percenter cannot possibly understand the plight of a skoliosexual half Pacific Islander, half Native American ninety-nine percenter. This epistemological attitude takes as impossible the ability of human beings to empathize with and evaluate the claims of their brothers and sisters across barriers of time, culture, and identity group. To accept this position is effectively to deny the possibility of commonly understood literary, intellectual, and human experiences, at least if one does not share the gender, socioeconomic status, and race of a book’s author or of one’s interlocutor.

How then do we account for the disjuncture between this essentialist solipsism in victimhood and the pragmatic broadness of coalitions in resistance?

Read the rest over at the Burke Society at UC Berkeley.