I’ve had two fairly recent personal experiences with “free speech”-related kerfuffles.
1) I attended the Leadership Lakeland Alumni forum at Grasslands a while back concerning the strong/executive mayor effort, of which I am a supporter and public advocate.
Leadership Lakeland brought in a former Miami city manager to speak about his point-of-view, which was generally hostile to the idea, although he acknowledged his ignorance of Lakeland’s specific circumstances.
At one point, he rattled off a series of pointed rhetorical questions that Lakelanders should ask strong mayor supporters. I’m paraphrasing here: Who’s really behind this effort? Are there ulterior motives? Who stands to benefit from cronyism, etc?
After like the fourth question, I spoke up and said: “I can answer those questions if you like. I’m sitting right here.”
The speaker took the idea that I might answer his questions to his face as an attack of some sort. The assembled “leaders” — probably 75 percent of whom know me personally or know of me — murmured and tut-tutted amongst themselves for a bit. Then it was decided that the crowd could ask questions after the speaker finished. That was fine, of course, except I had no questions. I only had answers to his questions.
I waited until the speaker finished and then again offered to answer the questions he had asked, which apparently made people feel very awkward. Former City Commissioner Jim Verplanck expressed his support for the speaker, in his lovable curmudgeonly way, by loudly declaring: “You don’t have to answer his questions.” Of course, I had asked no questions, nor planned to. I had only offered answers.
To recap: an out-of-towner addressed Lakeland’s “leaders” about the strong mayor concept, which he generally opposes. He then urged these assembled leaders to ask pointed and rather snide questions of strong mayor supporters and organizers. As one of those supporters, I offered to answer these questions on the spot. I was not allowed to. More than that, I was deemed rather impertinent for offering. And it was generally agreed that the speaker did not need to answer any of the questions I did not ask.
In my experience, this is pretty typical of how self-declared institutional leaders and leadership groups behave. It’s typical of the “free speech” behavior of institutional power.
2) As I’ve documented pretty thoroughly, The Ledger back in September dedicated virtually an entire editorial to criticizing my writing about police relationships with the public — and then telling me to shut up. Really, it did.
Such nonsense must stop — otherwise we’ll struggle to reverse the ever-rising escalator of tension in police-public relations. We don’t call for passivity when police brutality and bad judgment arises, particularly if they result in the loss of innocent life. But criticism of abuse of power must be just, anchored in fact and leavened with respect.
The editorial did not label any specific sentence I wrote as unjust or non-factual. It did complain about a few incidences of “snark” in my writing style. And The Ledger essentially ignored my requests to run a response I sent to them almost immediately. As I wrote at the time, if the situation were reversed, the person I criticized would have instant access to respond here at Lakeland Local.
I am a fully-grown 43-year-old white man with a house, a job, and platform for my thoughts that a few people actually read. In Lakeland, Florida in 2015, I occupy a pretty secure social space. I’ve also lived and observed enough of life to find the incidents I cited above entirely predictable. They straddle the line between amusement and annoyance; but they do not surprise or disillusion me. I don’t think I have many illusions. More importantly, I can defend and assert myself, for now, without putting much of my life or career at risk.
But if I were a young, inexperienced person, it might be easy to conclude that the institutions of leadership and discourse in our city care not an iota about free exchange of ideas. And if I were a person from a vulnerable population, I might think their treatment an extension of the way my country thinks about and acts toward me. I might think of this treatment as a logical extension of the arguments leading politicians in the Republican party are making about me right now.
In short, let’s call these two examples precisely what they are: “political correctness.”
This is what PC looks like in the real world, where institutional power and the “leadership” class asserts itself and controls the speech of those people that make it uncomfortable. This is where most political correctness occurs — and where it’s most damaging to actual, real-world discourse.
This type of political correctness is generally overlooked — or willfully ignored — by the same people who complain about culturally or politically weak groups demanding sensitivity in the rarefied air of college campuses.
“The truly evil side of social control”
All that leads me to a recent column by my new friend Bruce Anderson, a Florida Southern College political science professor. Bruce is a fellow supporter of the Lakeland strong mayor effort. He and I have been arguably the two most public advocates. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know him and trade thoughts.
At the same time, The Ledger has made the very wise decision to bring on Bruce as a political columnist. He’s been writing learned pieces for the last few Saturdays. His most recent column focuses on the perennial question of identity-based campus activism. It’s pretty complex and even-handed for the most part. But in the end, it’s an anti-PC column, with PC defined as identity and offensiveness-based. It’s tied to blow-ups at the University of Missouri and Yale.
Bruce ends the column like this:
Colleges and universities are places where people form opinions, learn about each other, explore all sorts of odd ideas (and some not-so-odd), and grow into functioning adults. When we restrict speech because it makes us uncomfortable, we let in ignorance: when we ban ideas (even those considered terrible ideas by the majority), and how they are expressed, we build the walls that separate us. My students teach me things every day, but perhaps the most important thing they teach me is that when there is respect for the ideas of others, and the trust that ours, in turn, will be respected, we all learn.
When anyone moves to impose some notion of “correctness” on speech or ideas, we have lost that respect and gone over to the truly evil side of social control. When anyone tells Americans what they can think, or what they can hear, or what they can say, I find that truly offensive.
That last paragraph is pretty strong stuff. And it moves from college to “anyone.” I’m generally careful about throwing around “evil.” It’s a tiny little word that must cover enormous, fraught ground. I think we would do well not to make it stretch from genocide to unwise campus speech rules. I don’t think anybody or anything involved in the experiences I mentioned above is evil. Insipid, maybe. Annoying. Cowardly. Unprofessional. Silly. Petty. Sure, maybe all of that. But not evil.
However, if you’re going to use it, I guess I have to ask: Is The Ledger evil, Bruce?
The things kids weaponize
Full disclosure, Bruce and I exchanged a few thoughts about this on Facebook. He took exception to me saying that I find life at elite colleges “divorced” from life as lived in the rest of the country. He thought I was talking about Florida Southern. But I wasn’t. I was talking about Yale and Wesleyan, where some of the recent PC flashpoints have ignited.
And here I can draw on my own experience a bit. I graduated from what’s considered an elite liberal arts college — Amherst College in Massachusetts. Wesleyan was one of our key rivals, in sports and U.S. News. Amherst and Wesleyan hit whatever metrics the powers-that-be decide make a place elite. FSC doesn’t. Yet. That’s the extent of the stock I put in those metrics. But I treasure my Amherst experience and education, which I received because of rural southern white boy affirmative action. Somehow I have managed to survive that stigma. Amherst’s quintessential liberal arts experience proved a fabulous resource to draw on as I pursued the rest of my ongoing education — otherwise known as living my life.
I treasure my Amherst experience despite — or perhaps because of — having lived there during the first great round of the PC wars. PC as a buzzword came into popular use around 1990. I attended Amherst from 1990 to 1994. The climax was probably the Rodney King verdict and civil unrest in 1992. There were sit-ins and creative protests and harsh words and angry crowds. It’s hard for me to compare the intensity of that moment to the confrontations of today because I’m not on these campuses now. I would guess it’s pretty similar. But that’s only a guess.
I think it’s safe to say that during this time, we athletic, socially confident, partying white dudes perceived ourselves to be under unfair scrutiny. We believed, generally, that we could not get away with saying and doing certain things that other classes of people could. Or that we could not get away with doing and saying things at Amherst that we would be able to do and say out in the real world. It was never really that clear who we thought had power if we didn’t — women, gays and lesbians, people of color, whomever. It was more that we assumed we were assumed to be the bad guys. Victim status can be a powerful feeling.
I think the perception had far more bark than bite. In fact, my senior year, the football team, which was almost entirely white, had a “party” in the basement of my dorm that became a hideous festival of booze, vomit, piss, and feces. With some wall violence mixed in. The janitors refused to clean it. They were right to do so. The school made the players clean it up, which was the extent of punishment to my knowledge. As a side note, it’s rather shocking how often athletic, socially-confident, partying white dudes at college seem to end up playing with their excrement. It was a common recurring theme at Amherst. Some portion of drunk, entitled boys like to play with their poo in public. Odd, but real. I only raise this graphic pathology because it’s relevant to today’s PC wars. One of the key events of the Mizzou battle was the discovery of a swastika drawn in feces on some bathroom wall.
Among the dreary buzzphrases emerging from the new PC wars, you’ll find anti-identity-PC people lamenting that today’s college kids are figuratively “weaponizing” their grievances or victimization. Well, over the years, a whole lot of frat boys have literally “weaponized” their shit. Now that’s a viral incident — or maybe bacterial. I’m not proud of a number of my alcohol-related behaviors in college. But at least I never played with my poo.
I did once tell a fellow student whom I did not know — and who was black — that “black people need an immigrant experience.” I was repeating something I had heard elsewhere, having never been taught in high school — or college for that matter — about the Great Migration. The poor guy looked at me like I was high, which I probably was. I don’t remember him being very nice to me. But he was nicer than I deserved. Although our exchange would fall under “discourse,” it wasn’t really. It was me telling someone I did not know what was wrong with him based on ignorance. This was an exercise in power, even if I did not recognize it. Years later, I don’t remember this discourse at all. I don’t remember a word he said. I remember the visceral quality of his response. It was, by and large, Fuck You. And he was right to communicate that to me.
Today, I think we call these moments of poo-flinging — both literal and in my case, figurative — “micro-aggressions.” I’m not a big fan of jargon, and I think all sides would serve their causes better if they tried to avoid it. But the PC-police really don’t offer much of a remedy for people on the receiving end. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe kids from vulnerable college populations just need to endure what all other generations of vulnerable kids endured — punctuated by the occasional high-minded campus meeting in which we work out our problems like Roman senators (other than that time when they slashed Julius Caesar to death). But the idea that the vulnerable kids of mass incarceration/drug war/post-crash America need their college professors and administrators to teach them the importance of endurance is darkly hilarious.
When kids accustomed to social power create repetitive discomfort for those who don’t have it, maybe the only decent remedy is respectful, patient explanation of why you’re being an asshole. But that’s a lot to ask of kids. Ever seen a brother and sister share a house? How do those micro aggressions get worked out? Kids “weaponize” their grievances by creating discomfort. Many protesting kids have been made to endure discomfort forever. Why would they not flip that in service of their perceived interests?
You can make a good case that whatever scrutiny I imagined I lived under in college was justified. And whether it was justified or not, the feeling of scrutiny based on my appearance and associations — and occasionally behavior — taught me a useful lesson. I am glad to have lived under it for a few years. It was one of the more valuable aspects of my Amherst experience. And it ended the moment I left campus. I went back into a country made for me. For many kids, that dynamic works in reverse. Most of the kids protesting on campus live under much worse scrutiny in the real world. And in truth, I’m not sure how real my college scrutiny ever was. I don’t remember many, if any, aggressive white dudes getting kicked out or even meaningfully disciplined for their behavior. Mostly, those of us who grew tired of dealing with those guys just had to suck it up, like everybody else.
A lot of those poo-players went on to make a lot of money using the Amherst name and credential. You can probably blame some of them individually for the stock market crash. But I don’t know that. I do know that today many of them are your American elites. I also know the world isn’t fair.
Of power and honesty
And here we come to the core difference between how Bruce and I see these campus issues. He thinks this all relates to discourse and scholarship and the spread or rejection of ideas. And that discourse and scholarship and the spread or rejection of ideas sort of decides the fate of the country.
I don’t. I don’t think American history provides much evidence that ideas — in and of themselves — drive change. Consider abolition and state rights (as ideas) vs. slavery and free labor (as a way of life). The idea of abolition or states rights never remotely matched the power of the clashing labor systems and lifestyles of north and south. And it took vast applied power to resolve the impasse.
I find the ideas — rather than the technologies — that form on college campuses tend to affect the country only if power decides to adapt them. In that case, they can be useful or harmful in important ways.
But I challenge anyone to show me a time when America reasoned itself, through campus-based moral intellect alone, into better and more humane distribution of power and freedom. Visceral confrontation moves the needle more than reason. It always has. Our greatest civil rights movements do not have roots in reason. Indeed, the reason of power often urged patience and restraint. Instead, successful civil rights movements used moral confrontation or the exercise of unified micro-economic or social power. Power and confrontation, not wisdom, makes things happen. Power is not always or even mostly wise. And the kids of Yale and Wesleyan and Mizzou aren’t fighting over discourse. They’re experimenting with power.
I’ve read it several times now, and I’m pretty sure that Bruce’s entire column about discourse and campus disputes doesn’t once use the words “power” or “honesty.” That’s telling to me. Above all else, the value I cherish most in discourse is honesty. I think scholars or leaders in training need exposure to honesty much more than civility. It’s what I find that they most lack — particularly honesty about themselves. And I will agree with Bruce that the PC wars, on all sides, create massive incentive against honesty or self-critical thinking. That’s because they’re about power. As long as colleges fancy themselves as training “leaders,” experimentation with power will be part of the curriculum.
Here’s what Bruce said about FSC’s leadership role for its students in his Facebook response to me:
“It is not a buzz phrase to say that we train the next generation of leaders — more to the point, they are socialized and educated to reason here.”
Take FSC out of it. I think every college president would say that same thing. And if it’s true, I think it’s obvious colleges, writ large, are doing a terrible job — and have done a terrible job for quite a while. Look at the judgment and morality of our leadership class at all levels. Who trained our leaders to invade Iraq? Or to stop paying off the debt in favor of tax cuts in George W. Bush’s first year in office? Who ran our financial system and created our housing bubble? Leaders did. Who created and sustains the Drug War and mass incarceration? Leaders. In all honesty, can speech codes make this performance any worse? You can blame us citizens if you want; but if self-described “leaders” are helpless before the public, what’s the point of having them?
In truth, I don’t think colleges train the next generation of leaders at all. They’re much more attuned to the second part of Bruce’s statement, “socializing and educating them to reason.” That’s a phrase open to wide interpretation. Here’s mine:
In the country at large, leadership is mostly defined by who controls access to money and power. Colleges don’t train people to challenge or shape that dynamic. They help provide access to it. And they model the behaviors a person needs to derive the long-term benefits of membership in that social layer. The “leaders” I described right here in Lakeland in my opening paragraphs, some of whom I’m sure graduated from FSC, provide a nice example of what “socializing and educating” a person “to reason” looks like in the real world.
By and large, power and money define large-scale discourse. And power and money have great ability to ignore micro discourse. In the country at large, the kids who pay to join frats, or who generally occupy the social high ground, are this power in waiting. With some exceptions, their parents control access to money and power and macro discourse in the country.
But America claims to want more diverse leadership, discourse, and power. I don’t know that America really wants that. In fact, we’re fighting ourselves over it tooth and nail right now. But colleges want to think of themselves as engines of diverse leadership and thought. Thus they hand a kind of power to the kids whose parents don’t control access to power and money. College is about the only place these kids are likely to taste power as a class. To think they won’t experiment with it is naive. To think that some kids who do have some power in the real world won’t gravitate to them to feel a part of a movement is also naive.
The cool kids, the poo-players, never stop experimenting with power. Before, during, and after college. Why would the activist, underdog kids be any different? If it bothers you, just wait. Out in the world, the power structure will revert. That is what I mean when I say that college life, especially at elite colleges, is divorced from life as lived in the real world. That will only change over a very, very long time.
Colleges could set up policies that kick kids out for protesting or disruption. Colleges could decide, as a lot of anti-PC commentators do with ridicule, that the protesting micro-aggressed kids are whiny babies. And they could generally dismiss the entire thing.
But all of that would run contrary to the self-described college ethic. All of that would run contrary to marketing about leadership and diversity. And so colleges are caught; and kids know it. Students haven’t weaponized their grievances. They’ve weaponized institutional bullshit. You say you’re committed to this. Well, this is what’s happening. Are you committed? Liar. The fact that these “micro aggressions” have always happened doesn’t really change the dilemma.
Bruce opens his column with this:
Recent events at the University of Missouri and Yale and spreading in protest to other institutions of higher learning, suggest that there is something fundamentally wrong in our academic institutions — that racism, sexism, and awfulness of various kinds is on the rise; or, systematically entrenched and now just coming to light.
But then he spends no more time trying to decide which of these things, if either, is true. You can’t really lament the polarization of discourse without trying to figure out if the weaponized grievances are legitimate — or rooted in fact. If they’re real, what can be done to address them while maintaining an ethic of free speech and exchange of ideas? That’s hard administrative work. It takes actual leadership. It takes honesty. It requires decisions that piss people off — and piss off money — by rearranging the structures of power on campus. Self-appointed leaders hate to piss people off in my experience.
Folks, this is the core of politics: the accumulation and application of power in the service of deciding who gets what resources. The conflicts at Yale, Wesleyan, and Mizzou and elsewhere, whether you like them or not, are teaching kids about power and politics. Some of the lessons are ugly. Some may prove valuable.
I think one of them is how little the ability “to reason,” as Bruce puts it, informs leadership — or at least who society labels as its leaders. I’m much better off as a person for understanding that. I waste zero time caring about whether anyone sees me as a leader. It is not a label that has any meaning. People who lead do make a difference. But that’s a different part of speech. That’s lead as a verb, not leader as noun.
Bruce writes in his column:
When we restrict speech because it makes us uncomfortable, we let in ignorance: when we ban ideas (even those considered terrible ideas by the majority), and how they are expressed, we build the walls that separate us.
I do not support restriction of speech on college campuses. In the abstract, I’m closer to Bruce’s view of things than the protestors — at least in the safe space versus free space argument.
But life isn’t abstract.
And I see no real evidence, at all, anywhere, that ignorance requires college speech codes to thrive. I’m sorry Bruce, colleges are not the little Dutch boy holding back the waters of ignorance with a finger in the dike. At best, you’re a life boat in long-existing ocean of human ignorance. I value you. But we’re all fighting a losing battle.
I think free speech, free discourse of ideas, honest inquiry, and good faith arguments are their own rewards. At times, on a small scale, you can weaponize them through their own power. I’ve done that occasionally, I think. But more often than not, people don’t really want to hear the answers to the questions they ask. Mostly, I think, honest exchange of ideas are important because they cement relationships, not thinking. They contribute to meaningful confrontations.
So I would rephrase Bruce’s statement like this:
“When we confront honestly, and in good faith, speech that makes us uncomfortable, we strike a blow against the ignorance of each other that most of us swim in all the time. When we consider ideas (even ideas that power considers terrible) in good faith, we chip away at the walls that thousands of years of human history has built between us.”
And understand this from my own experience: powerful people get uncomfortable just as quickly, if not more quickly, as whatever stereotype of weaponized victimization they like to lecture about. The powerful impose their PC values every day. We just don’t call it that. We call it civil discourse.
Over to you, Bruce. Let’s keep the discourse going. You can have full space here to respond, if you want.