"Nobody Here But Us Fair Minded And Even Handed 'Journalists'"

From Fire: `New York Times' Disappoints

I am, to say the least, disappointed by Joseph Berger’s column in The New York Times today concerning Evan Maloney’s film “Indoctrinate U” and free speech on campus in general. I have been corresponding with Joe for several weeks, and even had lunch with him this past Friday. I had hoped that after such extensive interaction, I had demonstrated to him that a serious and ongoing free speech problem exists on campus. I also hoped that I had convinced him that taking student fee funding away from a student newspaper for printing a controversial article is censorship. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

As for the article, I don’t know which is worse: that Berger uses the single example of Vassar College’s handling of a controversial article as a tool to refute the idea that there is a serious censorship problem on campus, or that he chose to praise the outcome of a case in which the school did, in fact, punish a student publication for what would be clearly protected speech outside Vassar’s gates.

It’s worth quickly reviewing the case to understand my disappointment in Berger’s column. Back in 2005, The Imperialist, a publication of Vassar’s Moderate, Independent and Conservative Alliance (MICA), published an opinion piece criticizing what the anonymous author perceived as the balkanization of campus along the lines of race and sexual orientation. The article read:

How is diversity achieved when those students are voluntarily confining themselves to ghettos of the ALANA [African, Latino, Asian and Native American] Center and Blegen House [“A lesbian and gay center for the study of social change”]? I find the objective of diversity to be utterly meritless, suggesting that our colleges should become some zoological preserve in some paternalistic attempt [to] benefit our ‘non diverse’ students….

While it’s understandable that students might be upset by this article, one could easily argue that the central point expressed here—that students should not be encouraged to divide into race- and orientation-based enclaves—is in fact anti-racist and egalitarian. However, Berger presumed throughout my interview that the article was simply hurtful and of little redeeming value.

In today’s column, Berger sums up the situation thusly:

[S]tudents complained that the language was insulting and called for banning The Imperialist. For weeks, the issue was debated by the student association, which finances the publication. Ultimately, the group withheld its money for one year and publication was suspended.

Withholding money is most certainly punishment. And any journalist should recognize that suspending a newspaper is a drastic step. Nonetheless, Berger overlooks the disturbing ramifications of The Imperialist’s punishment, content instead to praise Vassar’s student body for responding “without violence”:

What was notable was that Vassar, a college of 2,360 students founded in the 19th century on progressive ideals—and a place where conservatives remain a distinct minority—hashed out the matter without violence and did not trash or burn newspapers as has happened at other campuses.

While I can think of few things more chilling than employing violence, theft and destruction to suppress unpopular opinions, lauding students—as Berger does here—simply for not resorting to such illegal, illiberal and immoral tactics is stunning. The bottom line is that a student newspaper criticized the polarization of students by race and orientation—and, for doing so, the newspaper lost funding and was suspended for a year. Exactly how is that an acceptable outcome at an American liberal arts university?

And then we come to the clincher. Berger writes:

Vassar deserves credit because, as students explained, the dispute was not focused on whether The Imperialist could argue that a center exclusively for minority students fragmented the community; it was over whether the language used to express the idea was offensive.

This blows me away. So, according to Berger, the problem wasn’t the viewpoint, it was the provocative language used to express the viewpoint. Apparently unwittingly, then, Berger is making one of censorship’s most basic arguments, relied on by censors the world over for centuries. As we point out in FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech On Campus:

[John Stuart]Mill addressed one of the major rationales for imposing constraints on free speech on campuses today, namely that speech should be “temperate” and “fair.” Mill observed that while people may claim they are not trying to ban others’ opinions but merely trying to banish “intemperate discussion…invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like,” they never seek to punish this kind of speech unless it is used against “the prevailing opinion.” Therefore, no one notices or objects when the advocates of the dominant opinion are rude or uncivil or cruel in their denunciations of their detractors. Why shouldn’t their opponents be equally free to show their disdain for the dominant opinion in the same way? Further, Mill warned, it always will be the ruling orthodoxy that gets to decide what is civil and what is not, and it will decide that to its own advantage.

I quoted a lot of that, but I thought it was exceptionally well done. It should be clear that the "liberals" or "progressives" of today, or at least those at elite organs like the New York Times, care for liberalism not at all. If they did there is no way they could be as callous or ignorant of its primary tenets as they most assuredly are.

The truth is the so called "liberals" of the New York Times know and honor Gramsci more than Mill, prefer Nietzsche to Madison, and put Foucault into practice rather than Dewey or Lippmann. This explains why Berger is surprised that the large majority at Vassar didn't employ violence against the distinct minority on campus. He doesn't believe there are rights that people hold by merit of their standing as human beings. Instead of such rights, he believes in might makes right. By Berger's standard conservatives at Vassar should count themselves lucky that violence wasn't used against them, as it has at many other places (as Berger states (advocates?) so matter of factly.) They were allowed to express their opinion without violence through the forbearance of the majority opinion alone. To the liberal mind that is the barest minimum we should expect from our fellow citizens. For Berger it is a heroic deed.

It is a sad and slightly disgusting performance.