No Platform for Heresy
When a dissident feminist speaker gets shouted down at a law school, some on the left take the side of the bullies
The perennial battle over campus speech has flared up again this week at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, where activist students tried to shut down a talk by writer and feminist dissenter Christina Hoff Sommers — first by demanding that it be canceled, then by aggressively disrupting it with rowdy behavior. And now, the debate rages in opinion columns and on social media: Was this incident a stark demonstration of the danger to free speech and liberal principles from the campus left, or a raucous protest cynically blown out of proportion by the right? Are Sommers’s liberal supporters being naïve about the much bigger threat of Republican dominance in government?
I have no doubt that some people rallying to Sommers’s side are political opportunists who defend free speech only when it suits them. I also fully agree that the attempt to silence Sommers at Lewis & Clark is not the biggest threat to American democracy right now. Nonetheless, it is very much a part of a culture in which liberal values are increasingly under attack from both left and right.
Full disclosure: I consider Sommers a friend, despite some disagreements. Also, until a few years ago I was on the speakers list of the Federalist Society, the conservative/libertarian legal group whose Lewis & Clark Law School chapter sponsored the event. Ironically, I was dropped from that list in 2013 because some students took offense at a talk I gave on the politics of sexual assault, the same issue that partly drove the objections to Sommers. (I’m glad the organization is no longer caving to such complaints.)
Sommers, an author, scholar, and host of a video blog called “The Factual Feminist,” is sharply critical of modern feminism; she has argued since the 1990s that the cause of equality had been hijacked by gender-war radicals who malign men and paint women as frail victims. She is often branded right-wing, a label she rejects; despite her affiliation with the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, she is a registered Democrat with moderate-to-liberal views on such issues as abortion and gun control.
To her foes at Lewis & Clark, Sommers is nothing less than a “known fascist” — according to a statement issued before her appearance by several student groups, including a chapter of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, the Minority Law Student Association, the Jewish Law Society, and the Women’s Law Caucus. Their list of Sommers’s alleged offenses included emboldening “male-supremacist groups” and “call[ing] the epidemic of sexual assault on campuses and the gender wage gap ‘myths.’”
Even the Southern Poverty Law Center, which recently took a jab at Sommers in a post on “male supremacy” hate groups, concedes it’s absurd to brand her a fascist. Retroactively, some Sommers detractors have seized on her appearance in late 2015 on Red Ice Radio, an alt-right, white supremacist podcast. Sommers, who is Jewish, has posted a screenshot of her January 2016 email to the program’s producer in which she faults herself for “carelessly” accepting the invitation without vetting it and asks for the interview to be taken down (it was not). This certainly illustrates the fact that foes of far-left “political correctness” need to be vigilant about odious would-be allies on the far right. But it hardly shows Sommers to be an extremist.
The SPLC’s own guilt-by-association tactics in tarring Sommers as an enabler of misogynistic men’s groups are only slightly less ludicrous. Yes, there are misogynists who bang the drums of some issues she supports, such as wrongful accusations of rape or the needs of boys in schools. But by that logic, anyone who supports Palestinian human rights issues, for instance, is a terrorism enabler. (For what it’s worth, a chief villain of the SPLC post, “men’s rights” activist Paul Elam, has repeatedly assailed Sommers as a stealth feminist.)
As for Sommers’s arguments on the wage gap and sexual assault statistics, they are hardly fringe. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin wrote recently that disparities in earnings are due primarily to men working longer and less flexible hours and women devoting more time to caregiving. Claims of a sexual assault epidemic have been challenged by Atlantic magazine contributing editor Emily Yoffe.
Do the groups opposing Sommers’s appearance believe that such views are beyond the pale? Apparently so.
“We now understand how language works, and how it can be used to reproduce the systems of oppression we know we must resist at all costs,” they write, with the scary certitude of zealots who have found Truth. “Free speech is certainly an important tenet to a free, healthy society, but that freedom stops when it has a negative and violent impact on other individuals.” (“Violent” is anything the activists deem an assault on “marginalized people’s humanity.”) One is reminded of the Soviet Constitution which affirmed “guaranteed freedom of speech” — but only “in accordance with the interests of the people.”
“There is no debate here,” the anti-Sommers statement grimly declared. And the protesters tried to make sure there wasn’t.
When Sommers was about to start, several activists rushed to the front of the auditorium and began a cult-like chant of such slogans as “Rape culture is not a myth,” “Microaggressions are real,” and “The gender wage gap is real.”
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After that, Sommers managed to speak for a while — until the protesters broke into song about “No platform for fascists,” vowing to “fight for justice until Christina’s gone.” Then, a phone or some other gadget was used to play loud music. A dean who was present removed the device; Sommers was able to resume, but was soon was asked by the dean to wrap up — about halfway through her talk — and move to the questions.
With such ugly tactics and authoritarian rhetoric, one would think that the activists would find few if any defenders. Yet there has been no shortage of excuses and deflections.
Thus, on Twitter, writer David Klion has mocked the hand-wringing over people being “rude” to Sommers and argued that freedom of speech gives her no right “to lecture students without being interrupted.” But this isn’t about rudeness or interruptions; it’s about actions meant to prevent someone from talking and being heard. While it is not a First Amendment issue since the speech suppression doesn’t come from the state, it is arguably a civil rights violation — certainly in the moral sense.
City University of New York history professor Angus Johnston, who has elsewhere defended shout-downs of heretics as “noisy contestation,” has focused on arguing that Sommers is a “right-wing anti-feminist” misleadingly presented as a liberal feminist. Even if true, that doesn’t address the question of why people who want to hear her speak, and perhaps engage her in debate, should be prevented from doing so.
Splinter News’ Alex Pareene has chimed in with a snarky analogy suggesting that if Sommers can speak at Lewis & Clark, he should be able to come to her defenders’ workplace and make them listen quietly while he berates them. (Even accepting the dubious equivalency, no student was forced to attend Sommers’s talk; the only people forcing their speech on an unwilling audience were the protesters.)
Still others have deflected by going after New York Times op-ed contributor Bari Weiss, the online left’s favorite whipping girl, who wrote a piece deploring the treatment of Sommers. Glenn Greenwald has charged that Weiss is a hypocrite because, as a student at Columbia University in the mid-2000s, she led protests against pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist Middle-Eastern Studies professors. Yet the Columbia controversy was vastly complicated, with claims that students were punished for disagreement and even verbally abused. Whether it’s okay to disrupt a talk is a much simpler question. Notably, while Weiss was among the students who protested a 2006 lecture by vehemently anti-Israel, Hezbollah-sympathizing political scientist Norman Finkelstein, nobody tried to drown him out.
Meanwhile, Slate political correspondent Jamelle Bouie agrees that there are valid concerns about left-wing students’ efforts to “no-platform” politically incorrect speakers; he just thinks this is a very minor threat to free expression compared to actions by government. One could debate Bouie’s examples: he mentions state laws that were proposed but not passed, as well as Trump’s unheeded call for football team owners to fire players who protest police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. But there is a bigger point, too.
The problem with no-platforming is not that people like Sommers are silenced (yes, they do have other outlets). It’s the normalization in universities — even among law students — of the pernicious belief that undesirable ideas or debates are “violent” and that “bad” speech must be stopped.
Such attitudes undermine cultural support for free speech — and that endangers everyone, including protesters and critics of government. When left-wing bullies have no qualms about shutting up their opponents, it increases the danger of right-wing authoritarianism in several ways: by setting a precedent of speech suppression; by provoking backlash, including (as Bouie notes) overbroad measures to curb campus protests; and by emboldening bullies on the right to use similar tactics.
So enough with the apologetics. Enough with disingenuous claims that those who oppose attacks on campus speech want “safe spaces” (Klion) where speakers are not “challenged” (Johnston). I have had campus events where I was vigorously and even confrontationally challenged, sometimes even as part of an organized protest, and I can tell the difference. (I also had one experience, at St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, Canada in 2015, in which protesters chanted “rape apologist scum” and pulled the fire alarm; thankfully, they were forced to stay outside.)
Bring on the challenges. Don’t excuse bully tactics as robust dissent.
