Back when universities taught serious academic subjects, students likely learned Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: “damn with faint praise.” Damning with faint praise means “to praise something or someone in such a weak way that it is obvious you do not really admire them”—quite the opposite, in fact. If students no longer are taught this in class, those attending any of the ten academic campuses in the University of California (UC) System were treated recently to a real-life example of faint praise by the System’s president, Janet Napolitano.
The UC CEO penned a piece in the Boston Globe titled, “It’s time to free speech on campus again.” I was encouraged on seeing this title. Having praised the University of Chicago’s defense of free speech on campus, I thought the University of California was offering its support. I thought that this might signal the beginning of the restoration of free speech—and with it, of learning—on America’s increasingly politicized, repressive college campuses.
Her observations are spot-on. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of her prescription for what we should “do about it.” Her prescription flies in the face of the ethos she claims to praise through quoting Thomas Jefferson, who, among his other accomplishments, founded the University of Virginia. Napolitano cites Jefferson’s declaration that the University of Virginia “will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
Jefferson’s maxim, she tells us, was not realized until the “Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s,” which “established that the only limits on free speech should be those defined in the Constitution, at least as far as our nation’s public universities were concerned.” She then asks, “Has this concept now been turned on its head?”
Back when universities taught serious academic subjects, students likely learned Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: “damn with faint praise.” Damning with faint praise means “to praise something or someone in such a weak way that it is obvious you do not really admire them”—quite the opposite, in fact. If students no longer are taught this in class, those attending any of the ten academic campuses in the University of California (UC) System were treated recently to a real-life example of faint praise by the System’s president, Janet Napolitano.
Her surprising answer is “not necessarily.” And here the argument betrays both its title and, worse, the freedom it claims to defend. “Our students today, as opposed to the ‘60s, have “changed.” “In the 1960s, when the Free Speech Movement began, our student body was 55 percent male and overwhelmingly white. Today, 53 percent of UC students are women, 42 percent are the first in their families to attend college, and nearly 40 percent of this year’s entering class identified themselves as either black, Latino/Latina, or a member of another historically underrepresented ethnic or racial group.” Additionally, “sexual identity was hardly on the radar in the 1960s. Today, students self-identify in myriad ways.”
What, we may ask, do these admittedly changed demographics have to do with students’ and professors’ constitutional right to think and say untimely thoughts without persecution? Her answer is surprising: Because students “come from a much broader range of backgrounds,” they “often benefit from gathering with others of similar backgrounds.” Therefore, “at UC we have many different types of student centers and student activities; some of our newest are for undocumented students. You can call these ‘safe spaces,’ but I call them a good idea.”
And I call her argument “equivocation,” as in the logical fallacy of equivocation, something else universities used to teach. The website, www.logicallyfallacious.com, provides an amusing illustration of this error. Defining equivocation as “using an ambiguous term in more than one sense, thus making an argument misleading,” it illustrates the fallacy with the following example: “I want to have myself a merry little Christmas, but I refuse to do as the song suggests and make the yuletide gay. I don’t think sexual preference should have anything to do with enjoying the holiday.”
Just as this example confuses two meanings of the word “gay,” UC’s president falsely equates “safe spaces” with “student centers.” UC’s leadership knows better. It knows that a safe space is, as the site SafeSpaceNetwork defines it, “a place where anyone can relax and be able to fully express, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, religious affiliation, age, or physical or mental ability.” Safe spaces are universities’ psychological equivalent of Intensive Care Units, although you likely will enjoy more free speech in a hospital than on many college campuses today.
The most important difference between a safe space and a student center revolves around one thing—the lack of free speech in the former. Yet it is free speech that UC’s leadership insists it is championing.
UC’s president discloses her speech-suppressing agenda further when she asks, “What about those so-called trigger warnings that have been so vilified by some?” Her solution to trigger warnings is to continue the very practices that have produced such warnings’ “vilification.” To make trigger warnings conform to free speech, she tells us, “the academy must rely on its faculty” to “create an inclusive learning environment.” How? “If a professor tells students that a piece they are about to study explores the difficult topic of race . . . that could be construed as a trigger warning . . . that also helps students appreciate what they are reading so as to bring their perspectives into even richer classroom discussion.”
Seriously? Again, the UC administration knows better, as does every professor who suffers under these warnings. All know that trigger warnings serve only to stifle, not encourage, “even richer classroom discussion.” The UC president’s “solution”: More of the same. But it has been through “relying on its faculty” that trigger warnings grew to become a national scandal in the first place. This is why a professor penned (anonymously!) an article last year titled, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me,” which I reviewed here.
The key point in the UC president’s essay that gives the lie to its freedom-friendly title comes when she comments on the University of Chicago’s defense of free speech, which I reviewed here. Her swipe at Chicago surfaces as she explains her “object[ion] to the word ‘coddling.’” She remarks, “I’m not especially fond of the letter recently sent by the dean of students at the University of Chicago that seemed to support free speech Darwinism.”
“Free speech Darwinism”? What this means, UC’s president does not tell us. The online dictionary, Brittanica.com, informs us that “Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer . . . The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism.”
With this, the UC administration’s submerged intentions come up for air. The University of Chicago’s attempt to take the First Amendment seriously carries the risk that capitalism and conservativism might win the hearts and minds of students. UC’s leadership may fear that, in the marketplace of ideas, where students are free to think and learn, the “wrong side” might prevail.
Why not say this directly? Why resort to damning freedom with faint praise? Here’s one possible explanation: The UC administration fears—indeed, all universities now fear—becoming the next campus to get “Mizzou’d.” At the University of Missouri last fall, spiritless administrators caved to the radical demands of a few protesters—causing prospective students to avoid, and donors to flee, this haven of intellectual intolerance. As I wrote here, the damage done to Mizzou by its own hand has been profound. This year’s freshman enrollment dropped by approximately 1,500.
This precipitous decline in Mizzou’s enrollment has sent waves of angst through the Academy. Rightly so. Large numbers of Mizzou’s prospective students voted with their pocketbooks to endorse the University of Chicago’s defense of robust free speech on campus.
What, then, are university leaders elsewhere to do with these pesky members of the public, who seem to embrace Jefferson’s vision, which UC’s administration only dismisses as “free speech Darwinism”?
The answer: Give them a dog-and-pony show. Praise free speech at the same time that you seek to justify learning-killing restrictions on same.
Will this tactic work? Or will the public see through it? On the answer to these questions, the future of freedom depends.