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It’s kind of hard to remember these days, but one of the loudest themes in 2010s prestige journalism was worrying about Free Speech on Campus and the dread Cancel Culture. A new censorious leftism was supposedly building thanks to woke social justice warriors doing things like protesting the fascist Milo Yiannopoulos when conservative campus groups would invite him to deliver a speech.
Outlets from the center-left to the far right published a bulging container ship–sized load of this stuff. Here’s Bari Weiss in The New York Times whining about a protest of Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis & Clark College. Here’s Conor Friedersdorf in 2015—in one out of about an Avogadro’s number of Atlantic articles—complaining about a micro-controversy over sandwiches in the Oberlin dining hall. Here’s Ben Shapiro in 2017 complaining that people get mad at him when he gives campus speeches arguing that transgender people do not exist and white people are the most victimized racial group.
It should go without saying that while left-wing social media mobs have gone way too far on occasion, most of these incidents were hugely exaggerated, especially in the monomaniacal focus on wealthy private schools. There are almost 4,000 credentialed colleges and universities in this country, yet almost all of these articles focused on a small handful of Ivy League or elite liberal arts schools (because that’s where elite reporters went to school).
But now, it’s Donald Trump and the Republican Party who have the whip hand, and they are setting up, without exaggeration, a fully totalitarian attack on campus free speech and academic freedom writ large. Not only is it a thousand times worse than the most exaggerated caricature of wokeness gone mad, it is the most extreme such attack in American history. And unsurprisingly, many of the most frenzied erstwhile critics of illiberalism on campus are either silent or participating in the attack.
The most recent example happened in Texas, at its A&M University. A student recorded herself complaining in class about being taught basic gender and sexuality in a young adult literature class. “I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president there’s only two genders, and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology … I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws, as well as against my religious beliefs,” she recorded herself saying.
When the professor replies that what she’s teaching is not illegal, and the student has a right to leave if she wishes, the student makes clear what is going on. “I’ve already been in contact with the president of A&M and I actually have a meeting with him in person to show all of my documentation.” In short, the whole thing was a setup. |
