Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist's Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses 9780300248722

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Safe Enough Spaces

Also by Michael S. Roth Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters  Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past  Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, with Clare Lyons and Charles Merewether Freud: Conflict and Culture, Essays on His Life, Work and Legacy, editor The Ironist’s Cage: Trauma, Memory and the Construction of History  Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, coeditor with Charles G. Salas Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography and the Urban Landscape, coeditor with Charles G. Salas History And…: Histories Within the Human Sciences, coeditor with Ralph Cohen Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, editor Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France  Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud 

Safe Enough Spaces A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses MICHAEL S. ROTH

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College. Copyright © 2019 by Michael S. Roth. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Minion type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931177 ISBN 978-0-300-23485-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Wesleyan University

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 One. From Access to Inclusion  9 Two . The Use and Abuse of Political Correctness  52 Th r e e . Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity  86 Notes  127 Index  137

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Preface and Acknowledgments

I’ve been teaching college students since 1983, fi st at Scripps College and then at the Claremont Graduate University, UCLA, the California College of the Arts, and, for the last decade or so, at Wesleyan University, where I myself was an undergrad in the mid-1970s. For almost twenty years, I have combined that teaching with administrative work, mostly as a college president. I have a Ph.D. in history but have never been very happy staying within a single department. As an undergraduate, I was able to create my own major (history of psychological theory), and at Scripps College I jumped at the opportunity to found a Humanities Institute and offer classes across a range of fields. I later had the good fortune to run the international scholars program at the Getty Research Institute, in which artists and scholars from different disciplines come together to work on projects related to a common theme. Intellectual diversity has inspired and sustained me, mostly because I have always been eager to learn—and needed to learn—from scholars whose preparation and interests are very different from my own. Intellectual diversity, I have found, is most effective if it complements other modes of difference within an academic community. Racial, ethnic, religious, and economic diversities

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Preface and Acknowledgments

on campus increase the likelihood that students and teachers will hear different points of view, encounter a variety of experiences, and forge more inclusive projects as they connect campus learning to life beyond the university. Of course, the fact that one belongs to a specific demographic group doesn’t necessarily mean one will have a particular point of view, and campuses can become balkanized into separate silos based on identity or politics. But bringing to a c ampus students from diverse backgrounds, with a variety of ideas, creates more possibilities for learning from people different from oneself. As president of the university, I am often the one students turn to when they fi d unhappy differences—say, between their political or moral values and what they perceive to be the direction of the school. We fi d ways to discuss these confl cts, not usually with the expectation that we will land on consensus, but in order to acknowledge and clarify where we disagree and where we might continue to learn from each other (or work toward a common goal). At Wesleyan and at other universities, tensions on some issues don’t typically derail fi ding common purpose on other ones. Faculty, staff, or students who might be quite sure of their antagonistic positions on an educational policy matter fi d ways to reason together to make progress on other issues. Of course, sometimes the tensions or the differences are too great and productive conversation breaks down. These days when that happens, especially when groups of students are involved, there is almost always someone there with a phone to video the mess. But most of the time it’s not like that. Members of the campus community are used to intellectual confl ct—inside and outside the classroom—and this often means leaving their comfort zones, hearing perspectives they didn’t expect to hear. And most campuses are “safe enough” for that to happen.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

The phrase “safe enough” recalls the “good enough” parenting concept of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. A good-enough parent enables a child to flourish, whereas a parent aiming to be perfect (to orchestrate an ideal childhood) winds up creating immense difficulties for a youngster needing to experience failure in order to grow. As a teacher and university president, I fi d that schools that promote a basic sense of inclusion and respect enable students to flourish—to be open to ideas and perspectives so that the differences they encounter are educative. That basic sense is feeling “safe enough.”

v A number of the arguments here were developed in opinion pieces, blog posts, and book reviews that I’ve written over the past few years. I am grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Education, and the Chronicle of Higher Education for the opportu­nities to publish in their pages. Peter Dougherty, an editor at Princeton University Press, discussed the germ of the idea for this book, and Jennifer Banks and her team at Yale University Press, especially the manuscript editor, Julie Carlson, have been thoughtful and attentive in seeing the project through. With respect to preparing the manuscript of this book, my former student, longtime colleague, and old friend Charles Salas has helpfully provided notes on what I’ve written (and, sometimes, what I should have written). I am grateful to them all. Wesleyan University is known for its engaged student body, its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and critical thinking, and its dedication to providing an “education in the liberal arts that is characterized by boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.” As an undergraduate there in t he 1970s, I cr itically engaged with its policies and administration even as I was transformed

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Preface and Acknowledgments

by its enlivening faculty and campus culture. Now during my tenure as president, the university community has been generous with its (varied and ample!) criticism of my views. Exploring the ramifications of pragmatic liberal education in particu­ lar, and the issues facing higher education in general, is at once my responsibility as a college president, and a passionate research interest. In this, my engagement with the extraordinary students, faculty, staff, and alumni of Wesleyan University has been and continues to be essential to my thinking and my writing. I dedicate this book to them. I wrote most of this book sitting across the room (or just a table) from my wife, Kari Weil, as she worked on her own scholarly projects. For more than twenty years now, the spaces we’ve created have certainly been safe enough. She continues to teach me how to avoid getting stuck in comfort zones, how to learn from different diversities, and how to fi d joy in mutual discovery and recognition.

Introduction

S

uspicion about colleges and universities is nothing new. From their very beginnings, they have aroused curiosity and attracted critique. Is the education that students get really worthwhile? Is it relevant to the world beyond the halls of study? If students emerge from those halls changed, are those changes for the better? And who decides what “better” means? Those who taught them? Those who welcome them back home? Those who hire them? In the medieval period, universities were charged with regulating religious authority, and they were sometimes torn by theological debates or by tensions between students and teachers. Later, Thomas Hobbes blamed the English Civil War on republicans led astray at universities by the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans, concluding that “the Universities have been to the nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.” Hobbes wanted the sovereign power to take control of education to ensure sound morals and civil obedience, for only then could there be consensus and thus peace. Republican revolutionary and American president Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia, was chagrined near the end of his life to fi d that student

2

Introduction

culture was not easily controlled, whether the undergrads were demanding new fields of study or just rabble rousing on the quad and harassing “European” faculty. “Coercion must be resorted to,” he lamented, “where confidence has been disappointed.”1 Has confidence in universities today been disappointed? Is coercion on the way? As I write this in the fall of 2018, the Trump administration is weighing in against colleges using race in admissions decisions, and several states are considering legislation that would insist schools teach in a certain way, or that they modify their procedures for inviting lecturers to campus. This is a crucial time for higher education in America. It is an era of enormous achievement and promise, but also great uncertainty and danger. In some ways, the vitality of our strongest institutions has never been more apparent. American research universities dominate the lists of the world’s best, and students from across the globe have for many years seen our country as the best place to pursue post-secondary learning. But that may be changing, and here at home things have already changed. In recent years, colleges have been increasingly viewed with suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility. Institutions of higher learning are facing enormous pressures to demonstrate the cash value of their “product,” while at the same time the recreational side of campus life is attracting more attention than ever. To meet enrollment goals or climb in the rankings, many colleges trumpet the “full spa experience,” placing more and more emphasis on the value of what young consumers are learning while enjoying themselves outside the classroom. The richness of the curriculum and high quality of the instruction may receive a nod, but they are rarely celebrated. These efforts at promotion through everything ex-

Introduction

3

cept what happens between faculty and students may be good for short-term appeal, but in the long run it will make the entire enterprise of higher education more fragile. For many years American colleges and universities benefited from national policies that encouraged investment in their work and autonomy for deciding how the work would be carried out. These policies stemmed from confidence that education was good for individuals, was good for the nation as a whole, and was best managed by professional educators. Recent surveys point to erosion in that confidence, which is certainly one reason that those with political power feel the attractions of coercion. The Trump regime sees higher education as it sees the media: as a Trojan horse undermining the nation with fake learning. Alas, reduced confidence in higher education is not limited to the White House. Liberals and conservatives have few talking points in common, but they have come to agree on this: campuses have replaced teaching and learning with indoctrination and political posturing. They haven’t, but the perception that they have should trouble us all. If U.S. higher education comes to be seen fi st and foremost as a political endeavor, the country as a whole will suffer. For when education is framed as necessarily partisan, only cynicism triumphs. And cynicism is what we see growing on the Left and the Right in the United States. In recent years, higher education has become a punching bag for “knowing cynics”—conservative and progressive— who seem to discount the very possibility of rigorous inquiry that proceeds without certainty of how things might come out. Some on the Left are confident they have discovered that education was always political and that its promise of social mobility has long been an illusion foisted on the poor to keep them in line; education, in this view, serves to consolidate priv-

4

Introduction

ilege and help those who benefit most from capitalism. Some on the Right are sure they have discovered that education is just a device to indoctrinate the young into the ways of radicalism popular among otherwise unproductive professors. Both “discoveries” are at heart little more than the adoption of an attitude of cynicism—the price of admission to a desired group. Cynicism is a pose one takes on to win friends while giving up on influencing people. Cynics think they know enough to know that they have nothing more to learn; they purchase an air of sophistication by condescending to people still trying to broaden their thinking and sharpen their skills. The cynical pose toward education isn’t based on facts. There is no evidence that recent graduates of colleges and universities are far more radical than those who preceded them, or that they have been indoctrinated into the political beliefs of their professors in significant numbers. The most popular majors at American universities—including computer science, business, and communications—show no evidence of such indoctrination. Nor is there evidence that U.S. colleges are mostly turning out selfish, would-be masters of the universe whose creed is greed. On the contrary, volunteerism is robust on college campuses, as is participation in forms of engagement that build a healthier civil society. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents, who didn’t attend college themselves, little understood what happened at institutions of higher education. But they nonetheless sacrificed a great deal so my brother and I could continue our educations after high school. They had faith that doing so would give us better chances in lif e. That faith in higher education was shared by most Americans then. Have we reached an inflection point in this faith—a point at which higher education is no longer seen by most as a foundation for

Introduction

5

problem solving and the creation of opportunity, a vehicle for social mobility and a resource for personal thriving? For a number of years now, futurists under the spell of technology have been predicting the “end of college.” Higher education is going to be “disrupted,” and the university will dissolve into forms that little resemble the modern research university founded in the late 1800s. So far, the change that has resulted from the introduction of technology into new areas has not been so dramatic. More impactful have been government policies defunding community colleges and public universities. Forty-five of America’s fi y states spent less per student in 2016 than they did before 2008. The privatization of the state university and the rise of for-profit schools promising quick training for the newest jobs have together had unhappy consequences for millions of students. As completion rates at these institutions have declined, student debt has soared. Sure, millions today are served by online classes (I myself have taught more than a hundred thousand online learners), but we also are witnessing diminishing options for students burdened by debt. This, too, breeds cynicism. The best online classes, like the best courses on American campuses, encourage active learning. Successful teachers aren’t in search of more eyeballs; they seek to understand each “whole person” trying to learn from them. In this regard, they are much like nineteenth-century educational reformers who also argued for this kind of learning, and they were building on Socratic traditions. In the early twentieth century, as college enrollments increased and controversies erupted around access and who deserves to attend college, many innovators called for more vocational paths through higher education, paths more attuned to the new economy of that era. Others, like W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey, resisted the effort to

6

Introduction

turn a broad, liberal education into narrow training. Du Bois argued that education should lead to the empowerment of the whole person, not just a sharpening of skills with short-term value. Dewey, while acknowledging that education must be relevant to its time, rejected the specialization called for by educational reformers with the memorable line: “The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.”2 We must re-instill confidence in higher education without just adapting it to the perceived needs and political trends of the moment. That kind of adaptation would simply breed more cynicism. Confidence depends on the public recognizing that universities contribute to the public good while also empowering individual students to lead lives of purpose and productivity. The alternative to learning, to experimenting with other points of view and new domains of inquiry, is parochialism, or what my teacher, the philosopher Richard Rorty, labeled “self-protective knowingness about the present.”3 Such parochialism can be seen in very public refusals to listen to people with views different from one’s own, in the rejection of basic science, and in the petty nastiness that comes from the resentment that other people are learning something you don’t know. Our colleges and universities thrive when they cultivate inquiry on the basis of a variety of points of view. Their combination of research and teaching still provides the most fertile soil for creating opportunities and solving urgent problems— from medicine and technology to public policy and the arts. This doesn’t mean higher education is immune from critique; on the contrary, calls for expanded access for low-income families, greater intellectual diversity, and enhanced freedom of expression are having positive effects. More of this is needed.

Introduction

7

We improve through learning from attentive criticism, not through the cynical embrace of tribal partisanship.

v This book engages with some key themes in the contemporary criticism of higher education, rejecting both cynicism and cheerleading. I h ave been a c ollege president for more than eighteen years now, and throughout that time I have responded to books and articles about students, professors, learning, and teaching. In 2014, I published Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, in which I argued for a pragmatist approach to liberal learning. A broad education that attends to concepts, context, and methods isn’t just learning for its own sake, from this pragmatist perspective: it is learning that bears fruit for many years after graduation—for many years “beyond the university.” Here, in Safe Enough Spaces, I address some of the key controversies around contemporary campus culture and discuss popular and important critics of higher education and its politics. Chapter 1 maps out the debates concerning affirmative action, and describes how colleges and universities have shifted their emphasis from “who gets in” to “how everyone can flourish.” At many schools, offices of affirmative action or diversity have become centers for “equity and inclusion,” but tensions remain between belonging and learning. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the idea of political correctness and discusses the ways in w hich this concept has become a charged vehicle for political posturing in the past five years or so. Nobody sets out to be politically correct, but the idea has become a basic conceit in talk about college campuses and in expressing dismay about the cultures that have evolved there. Chapter 3 discusses some of the arguments concerning free speech at colleges and universities, especially those that take

8

Introduction

into account context and history as well as appeals to principle and the marketplace of ideas. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the power, indeed the necessity, of intellectual diversity to generate inquiry and reflection. Throughout this book I s take out a p ragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing higher education. The American pragmatists taught that the mission of philosophy was to help people construct a sense of who they are, what matters to them, and what they hope to make of their lives. That’s also a central part of the mission of higher education. The cynical dismissal of that mission—whether by liberals or conservatives—is especially dangerous now, when we need adventurous, rigorous inquiry more than ever. Pragmatists often fi d themselves caught in the middle between warring factions, and the process of questioning oneself and the world can be disturbing—whether one is on the Left or the Right. But the mission of higher education, whatever forms it takes, is ultimately not about constructing a p artisan position; it’s about developing self-awareness, subtlety of thought, and openness to the possibility of learning from others. It is my hope that Safe Enough Spaces will contribute to that mission.

1

From Access to Inclusion hen a fractured U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, the controlling opinion noted that the state had a c ompelling interest in a chieving diversity in the classroom. This meant that states could permit university admissions offices to create special pathways that would, in recognition of past injustices, give members of under-­ represented groups greater access to a university education. These pathways could not amount to a quota system in which seats were reserved for minority students. (Indeed, in the same court case, the University of California Davis was deemed to have had such an unconstitutional quota system in its School of Medicine, and Allan P. Bakke, a Caucasian applicant who had brought the suit alleging reverse discrimination, was ordered admitted to the medical school.) But programs that took race into account as part of a holistic admissions process were allowed by the Court. That is, while universities could not reserve a separate number of seats for only, say, African Americans, they could create an admissions program that would help black applicants have a better chance of being admitted. Such

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From Access to Inclusion

a program would make classes more diverse and consider legacies of oppression that had affected certain groups of applicants. Improved access was allowed, but not quotas. Th Bakke ruling did not settle all questions, to say the least. How special could the special pathways be? And when did this increased access effectively become a quota system? When an applicant from an under-represented group is accepted with weaker credentials than others who were rejected, how much does the justification for that decision need to depend on past injustices affecting that applicant’s own educational performance, and how much can be a matter of simply being a member of a group that as a whole has suffered discrimination? For example, should applicants from well-to-do African American families with educational advantages benefit from policies aimed at correcting the oppression of the average African American family? Apart from correcting for legacies of oppression, how deep was a university’s compelling interest in cr eating diversity in t he classroom? If everyone benefits from learning in a more diverse environment, how far can one go in creating a diverse class and still justify keeping out of the school applicants with superior qualifications? When are claims of reverse discrimination a symptom of racial resentment, and when are they legitimate pleas for fairness? The nine Court justices issued six separate opinions, giving everyone something they wanted. Mr. Bakke went to medical school, and quotas were disallowed, but affirmative action policies as they were usually practiced were legitimated. As the Wall Street Journal headline put it, Bakke was “the decision everybody won.”1 Activists in the 1970s had fought hard to develop and defend affirmative action programs, which were deemed essential if higher education was to play a role in enhancing social mobility and civil rights for minorities. As these programs

From Access to Inclusion

11

matured, however, even their beneficiaries often resented the condescension that seemed to be a by-product. The suspicion that “you only got into that selective school because of your race” grated on minority students more than the suspicion that “you only got into that school because of your wealth and connections” seemed to grate on students with connections to alumni or donors. As a professor in the 1990s, it seemed to me that institutions still defended affirmative action programs when they were forced to, but campus activists spoke little about them. There was great resentment about “special treatment,” resentment that was clearly visible in the popular support in 1996 for Proposition 209 in California and about ten years later when state voters approved the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative—to name just two referenda that voters ratified to prohibit the use of race in admissions policies at public universities. Predictably, the percentage of African Americans admitted to the flagship institutions in both states declined. At UC Berkeley, the numbers went from almost 8 percent of undergraduates to under 3 percent, and at the University of Michigan, about 5 percent of the students are African American, well short of the university’s 10 percent goal. Access to prestigious universities remains a topic around which one can reliably generate controversy. After all, even apart from affirmative action programs, it’s hard to demonstrate that the happy few admitted into Stanford really deserve to be there more than the next several thousand potential admits. Tour guides at Harvard like to say how many applicants they reject who have perfect standardized test scores. The messages they are delivering are, fi st, “look how many brilliant people are trying to get into this wonderful place,” and second, the ultra-selective master chefs in the admissions office know that the frosh class will be more interesting and productive if

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From Access to Inclusion

not everyone in it is test-perfect. At selective liberal arts colleges, where I have spent most of my career, the entering class is fewer than a thousand students and most of the ten thousand or so who apply are capable of doing the work. So many rejections of qualified candidates naturally leads to suspicion of those fortunate enough to be admitted. From the perspective of qualified but rejected candidates and their families, affi mative action policies offer an easy reason (and target) for their disappointment. By the late 1990s, opponents of affirmative action were couching their cause in the rhetoric of the civil rights legislation that had prohibited discrimination against African Americans and other minority groups. It became popular for conservative activists to adopt Martin Luther King Jr.’s language of judging people by the “content of their character” rather than by the color of their skin.2 National groups like Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute sought to have states prohibit racial and gender preferences in public institutions, whether that be in civil service hiring or higher education admissions. Connerly’s group got what it wanted in 1996 with California’s Proposition 209, which outlawed the consideration of race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions or hiring de­ cisions. A similar ballot initiative won the day in the state of Washington. In the face of this well-organized resistance to affirmative action, the Ford Foundation developed a g rant-making program to make the benefits of diversity more visible and more powerful. In 1991 the foundation enlisted Edgar Beckham, an African American academic administrator at Wesleyan University, to lead its Campus Diversity Initiative. Beckham, in partnership with Carol Schneider, the white president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, aimed to

From Access to Inclusion

13

show that the conversation about diversity should focus on the educational benefits that all students receive from being in environments comprised of people from different backgrounds. If diversification was about the educational benefits of students in general (rather than redress for groups that had suffered), it should be an important educational goal of colleges and universities, and the emphasis should be on that rather than the more controversial goal of social justice. Conversations about diversity, from this perspective, should be focused on it being an educational asset for everyone at the school—not just on the benefits that were given to one applicant over another. As an early proposal to the foundation put it, the goal was “to reframe diversity from a problem in society to be solved to an educational and civic asset necessary to create academic excellence and responsible democratic citizens.”3 The Campus Diversity Initiative expanded from evaluating the effects of diversity on under-represented campus groups to encouraging the broadening of curricula and campus cultures to enhance the educational experience of all students. In its landmark 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court recognized again the importance of diversity in higher education and that universities could employ a “narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” But the political opposition to using race in admissions decisions was strong, particularly among white, male voters. Using Connerly’s playbook, the American Civil Rights Initiative developed a referendum that in 200 6 prohibited affirmative action in Michigan’s public institutions. The initiative passed handily, but fi al action was delayed as the constitutionality of the measure made its way through the courts. In 2014, the Supreme Court decided that

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From Access to Inclusion

the initiative was indeed constitutional—that the ballot box could be used to decide what kinds of preferences would be allowed by public institutions. As in the Bakke case, there were a number of different perspectives to ponder—five separate opinions were written in the 6–2 ruling. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, emphasized that he was not saying whether states should have affirmative action, only that their citizens could decide the question for themselves at the ballot box. More recently, the Trump administration has called on schools to no longer use race as a factor in admissions decisions. Within this shifting legal and political environment, many colleges and universities have built the “narrowly tailored” roads to give students opportunities to learn from others different from themselves, while being reluctant to explicitly discuss affirmative action policies with regard to race. This approach, paved with good intentions, has been fraught for students from traditionally under-represented groups as well for those groups that have traditionally had the privileges accorded to the majority culture. Those who believe in meritocracy have criticized policies of affirmative action because individuals are benefiting from membership in groups to garner rewards they may not have earned themselves—or to get credit for hardships that they as individuals never experienced. At the same time, those who have gained access to elite institutions under the rubric of diversity have complained that they were brought there only to make privileged people feel less guilty about their privileges. Members of under-represented groups can feel that they are seen as undeserving because of a notion of affirmative action that isn’t applied to the children of elites—who, as the saying goes, believe they have hit a triple because they were born on third base. For forty years, then, debates about affirmative action

From Access to Inclusion

15

have been debates about access to institutions that offer tried and true pathways to positions of power and influence in this country. These debates are inseparable from America’s history of discrimination and its impact on opportunities for social mobility. These last words, “social mobility,” have been taking on even greater significance for universities, which, in the face of the growing economic inequality, should want to do more than just reproduce existing hierarchies. At colleges and universities that reject far more qualified applicants than they have room to admit, admissions officers have developed “holistic” selection practices that make it more likely that the campus will have a demographically balanced (vaguely representative) student body. Often the issue is whether they have “enough” students from a t raditionally marginalized group—black or Hispanic students, for example. Sometimes the phrase “domestic students of color” is used as a category meant to signal a general diversity. This category can be problematic because it includes Asian American students, who, though traditionally marginalized in the United States, have had “disproportionate” success in admissions at many highly selective institutions. But the category “Asian American” itself hides important differences among groups. Immigrants from South Asia, for instance, might have a socioeconomic experience more akin to Latinx families than to families from East Asia. Schools report on demographic categories, but they have to deal with individuals from more culturally specific contexts. Universities that commit to affirmative action want to be both meritocracies and avenues of social mobility for students whose backgrounds obscure their true potential.4 Ever since the founding of this country, we have recognized that education is indispensable to our vision of a democratic society. All men may be created equal in the abstract, but

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From Access to Inclusion

education provides people concrete opportunities to overcome real circumstances of poverty or oppression. Thomas Jefferson argued that the talented poor should be educated at public expense so that inherited wealth would not doom us to rule by an “unnatural aristocracy” of wealth. A few years after Jefferson’s death, African American shopkeeper David Walker penned a blistering manifesto pointing out that “the bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel oppressors almost to death.” Some years later, the young slave Frederick Douglass received a “new and special revelation,” namely, that learning “unfits” a person for being a slave.5 Promoting access to a high-quality education has been key to turning the rhetoric of equality into genuine opportunity, and that opportunity is not easily achieved. Throughout our history, elites threatened by equality, or just by social mobility, have joined together to block access for groups striving to improve their prospects in lif e. In the twentieth century, policies were enacted to keep immigrants out of colleges and universities and to limit the number of Jews who enrolled. In more recent decades, referenda and legislators in states both red and blue have attempted to block consideration of race at public universities, undermining opportunity for minorities, especially African Americans. Residential colleges and universities have since the time of that Ford Foundation initiative emphasized creating a diverse campus community in which people can learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. This had nothing to do with what would later be called political correctness or even identity politics. It had to do with preparing students to become lifelong learners who could navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation. Creating a diverse campus is in the interest of all students, and

From Access to Inclusion

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it offers those from racial minorities opportunities that have historically been denied them. That’s why governing boards and admissions deans have crafted policies to fi d students from under-represented groups for whom a s trong education will have a transformative, even liberating effect. When Douglass said that education makes you unfit for slavery, he was pointing out the ways in which learning to think for oneself made it possible to resist domination, to become one’s own master. But education is about more than independence of mind. It’s also about stimulating creativity, and here too diversity is valuable. As David Kelley of IDEO and the Stanford Design School has noted time and time again, homogeneity kills creativity. The key to successful brainstorming and innovative teamwork is to have a multiplicity of perspectives. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has made a similar point in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Groups are beneficial for problem solving as long as they don’t degrade into following the leader; learning takes place when people bring a variety of perspectives to the issue at hand. If you create groups in which everyone is from the same background, you run the risk of substituting mere repetition for iterative cross-pollination. Those who are adept at creative participation in diverse groups will see more opportunities in an economy that rewards innovation.6 The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that this ­diversity-is-productive defense of affirmative action should be supplemented by an “integrationist” argument for racial preferences. In a society that aspires to democracy and justice, she writes, “integrative affirmative action helps people learn to cooperate across racial lines, breaks down racial stigmatization, interracial discomfort, and habits of segregation, makes decision makers more aware of and accountable for the impact of their decisions on all racial groups, and invigorates democratic

18

From Access to Inclusion

exchange in civil society.” In our “profoundly segregated society,” racial preferences target “those who can function as agents of integration and destigmatization,” recognizing African American applicants for the crucial political and ethical work they do within an organization. Riffing against Chief Justice Roberts anti-affirmative action stance, she argues, “if the problem is racial segregation, then the most direct way to remedy this problem is to practice racial integration.”7 At residential universities, homogeneity in the student body undermines our mission of helping students develop personal autonomy within a dynamic, integrated community. That’s why we are eager to welcome students from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world to our campuses. That’s why we ask our donors to support robust fi ancial aid programs so as to ensure that our students come from a variety of economic backgrounds. A “dynamic community” is one in which members have to navigate difference—and racial and ethnic differences are certainly parts of the mix. All the students we admit have intellectual capacity, but we also want them to have different sorts of capacities. Their interests, modes of learning, and perspectives on the world should be sufficiently different from one another so as to promote active learning in and outside the classroom. At Wesleyan University, as our mission statement puts it, we aim to prepare students “to explore the world with a variety of tools.” Diversity is an aspect of the world we expect our students to explore, turning it into an asset they can use. We expect graduates to have completed a course of study in the liberal arts that will enable them to see differences among people as a powerful tool for solving problems and seeking opportunities. We expect graduates to embrace diversity as a source of lifelong learning, personal fulfillment, and creative possibility.

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More generally, selective universities want to shape a student body that maximizes each undergraduate’s ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to draw on resources from not just the most familiar places but also unexpected ones. In my own classes, I’ve seen time and time again how learning can be deepened when a student brings a surprising perspective into our conversations. In a course on virtue, for example, when an undocumented student talks about a “moral hero” from her family who has sacrificed enormously in order for others to pursue an education, it amplifies issues of justice we’ve read about in powerful ways. In a class dealing with filial piety, having students from outside the United States describe their varied relations to grandparents opens options that we might otherwise not have considered. What are a healthy connection to and a healthy distance from elders? Who determines this? When we talk about trauma and memory from a theoretical point of view in an intellectual history course, our dialogues are deepened when there are military veterans in the classroom—students are able to offer personal perspectives of their encounters with extreme events. Different diversities lead to expanded educational outcomes. Colleges and universities seek to create the most dynamic and profound learning environments. That’s the main reason they periodically come together to urge the courts to allow them to consider race and ethnicity within a holistic admissions process. When litigation threatens to force schools to use only narrow measures for admissions, they push back in the courts to prevent the retreat to a homogeneity that will stifle creative, broad-based education. Many citizens, but particularly members of racial and ethnic minorities, have often had to depend on the federal government to ensure that states and universities provide access to political and educational oppor-

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tunity. “While our Constitution does not guarantee minority groups victory in the political process,” Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor has written, “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to the process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently, forcing the minority alone to surmount unique obstacles in pursuit of its goals.”8 Opponents of affirmative action appeal to individual fairness, but it’s hard not to see that the Trump administration’s current policies are aimed to shore up educational privilege for groups that already have ready access to the benefits of higher education. These latest threats to access to higher education—like recent decisions undermining voting rights and plans for a “merit-based” immigration system—are at their core attempts by some groups to hold on to their privileges by limiting access by others to political participation, social mobility, and educational opportunity. White resentment can be stoked especially within segments of the population who feel a decline in their status relative to other groups. Defenders of affirmative action have been put on the defensive as they articulate their interest in providing real opportunity to those groups who historically have been most marginalized. College admissions offices have a responsibility to bring to their institutions students who can help create the most dynamic and profound learning environments. Different forms of diversity are essential for this kind of environment, and affirmative action programs are an important tool for creating dynamic places of learning through difference. A retreat from affirmative action would return us to the orchestrated parochialism of the past. Still, many who have been defenders of affirmative action now feel less inclined to support its rationale. There are those who question whether the individuals benefiting from these

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programs are people who actually have suffered from the legacies of historic discrimination. How can an admissions officer tell if a person who identifies with a particular marginalized group has herself suffered marginalization? Many schools are happy to fi d well-to-do members of minority groups who make the institution more diverse racially and ethnically and have the ability to pay. In such cases, they may not be questioning whether the experiences and perspectives of such students amount to experiential “differences” that would energize the learning experience. Furthermore, members of minority groups report that they often feel their peers regard them as having benefited from a system of racial preference whether or not they were actually impacted by affirmative action programs. Some have argued that preferential admissions programs based on family income are more equitable than those focused on race and ethnicity. In recent years, the statistic that is the most worrisome for colleges and universities seems to have less to do with the low percentages of students of color in higher education than with the paltry numbers of low-income students who have access to the best schools. Although there is little talk of direct affirmative action for students whose families are in the lowest quartile of household earnings, many selective (and wealthy) schools now devote considerable resources to fi ding low-­ income students who qualify for admission. This is challenging because these students are often attending under-resourced high schools that do not prepare them well for work at the college level. When the quality of a high-school education correlates with wealth, we know there are many talented students who have not yet made their way toward advanced academic work by the time they apply to college. If, however, schools can see potential in these students, it would seem to make them good

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candidates for affirmative action programs, though the label is seldom used for Pell-eligible or “fi st-generation” students.9 Low-income students who have successfully navigated admissions pathways, which can be both highly competitive and bureaucratically dense, seem to have little interest in discussing the “advantages” in the process that the institution has bestowed on “people like them.” They have overcome obstacles to pursue a higher education, and the rhetoric of affirmative action has never been a convincing way to make them feel like they have earned their highly coveted places. The rhetoric can create a stigma for those seen as benefiting from “social engineering” policies of universities looking for more diversity, and can stimulate resentment among those who feel that their social and economic advantages are being turned by schools into liabilities in t he admissions process. It’s not surprising, then, that neither the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies nor those who feel disadvantaged by them have tended to be vocal supporters of these tools for adding diversity.

v Since the 1990s, and especially over the past decade, campus discussions have shifted from concerns about diversity, admissions policies, and “who deserves to get in” to concerns about how institutions must change to help all students thrive once they are on campus. It’s not enough for a un iversity to have “good diversity numbers”; the school should be working to ensure that the institutional culture is evolving to help students from various backgrounds get the most out of their education. Of course, it isn’t very controversial to demand that those studying at an institution be provided with fair opportunities to make use of the educational resources that are supposed to be available to all. Those belonging to under-represented groups

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at many universities have questioned whether they are considered full members of the campus community—that is, whether they have access to all the opportunities that these institutions provide. If, for example, low-income students are burdened by loans, or overloaded with work-study hours, or if they don’t have ready access to alumni networks for internship and job opportunities, their presence on a campus may seem more like progressive decoration than authentic opportunity. Where talk about admissions—a zero sum game in which somebody doesn’t get in because someone else is given advantages—lends itself to controversy (especially with regard to highly selective institutions with far fewer spots available than there are qualified applicants), it is much more palatable for administrators to focus on the meaning and value of belonging to a campus community. Here progress is, of course, much more difficult to measure. In fact, since the word “diversity” may echo the controversies around affirmative action, many schools that had sung diversity’s praises have now changed their tune to underscore the importance of “equity and inclusion.” Instead of an increasing demographic difference being the mark of a progressive college, now the goal is ensuring that everyone feels equally “at home” on campus. Different groups might need different resources, but only when all students feel that they are acknowledged and that they genuinely count will everyone feel they have equal opportunities to learn. Who could be against this, one might wonder? Where affirmative action provoked opposition based on concepts of individual fairness and reverse discrimination, belonging, as it turns out, provokes opposition among those who think the price for making people feel included is to make the university inhospitable to controversial ideas: faculty and students come to feel that they can’t discuss issues others might

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fi d alienating. Words and ideas that make some folks feel marginalized can become taboo. That outcome, critics emphasize, undermines the entire educational mission of universities, turning them into hospitality centers. As they see it, the desire to have a fair and equal experience on campus is a frightening symptom of weakness, a failure to display intellectual toughness and emotional resilience. So, a few years after “grit” was popularized as a master virtue by the American religion of acquisitive individualism, we see middle-aged pundits pontificating on how the desire to be truly included in a campus community is evidence of a psychological deficit, even a moral failing. They delight in making a mockery of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” Those can’t be pedagogically useful—they must be a sign that students are unwilling to deal with the tough stuff that earlier generations addressed in their classes. Kids today are coddled, we’re told; and when they get to college, they fail to respect the rough and tumble contest of ideas that alumni remember as being part of their own college experience. No matter that when most of us oldsters were in college, the campuses were far less diverse places than they are today. No matter that there were many voices none of us got to hear because the students, to say nothing of the professors, were overwhelmingly white and male (because institutions worked hard to keep them that way). Flushed with warm recollections of their college years, many commentators can’t help wondering why kids today aren’t having the same experiences they had. The nostalgic criticisms of higher education are not, of course, anything new. During the Vietnam War, conservatives looked at colleges as breeding grounds for radicalism that undermined tried and true American values. During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, higher education was accused of

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being responsible for the “closing of the American mind,” as students and professors alike were said to be turning their backs on enduring questions in favor of the posturing of the moment. We will see in the next chapter how thinkers like Allan Bloom urged a return to foundational texts of Western civilization, and how various commentators expressed contempt at what they saw as intellectual faddishness. About the time Barack Obama became president, the handwringing shifted to a renewed concern that college campuses had become leftist, politically correct bastions of protectionist educational policies aimed at guarding undergraduates against encountering ideas with which they might be uncomfortable. These criticisms have only become more intense in the past few years, and the accusation of being “politically correct” has been weaponized by Trump supporters. More recently, we witnessed one of President Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore, expressing delight with how the tax reform bills of 2017 would undermine higher education. Moore explained that the legislation attacked universities because they had become “playpens of the Left.” Criticizing campus culture has become an easy way of making friends and influencing people—and not only in political campaigning. The University of Chicago, which has made its defense of free speech and intellectual combat a strong part of its identity in t he academic marketplace, decided in t he summer of 2016 to warn its incoming students about its toughminded approach to student demands for equity and inclusion. Chicago’s dean of students reminded the happy few chosen to be part of the class of 2020 that the university does not support trigger warnings, intellectual “safe spaces,” or the canceling of visiting speakers. “You will fi d that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion and even disagreement,” Dean Ellison intoned with seriousness,

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though it’s hard to believe that many of the incoming frosh would have protested against these things. He linked academic freedom with a r ejection of trigger warnings, but what if a faculty member wanted to give students a heads-up that they would be reading a racist text or a book about rape so as to help them understand why it was part of the work of the class? Would deciding to give this “trigger warning” not be part of the professor’s academic freedom? And what if s tudents, as Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro asked, sometimes wanted to spend time in the university’s Hillel so as to feel comfortable (safe) in di scussions about Israel? What about members of sport teams who feel comfortable hanging out together? Do we really think this sense of “safety” is problematic? And why do commentators think that campus protestors today are oversensitive, lacking the fortitude to listen to people with whom they disagree? Would students protesting a lecture by a visiting war criminal be displaying less grit or intellectual toughness than those who politely listened and then asked civil questions? At a t ime when violent racism has been exposed as a deeply ingrained facet of law enforcement, at a time when the legitimation of hatred in public discourse has become an accepted part of national politics, it seems more than a li ttle naive to tell college students that “civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us,” as the dean from the University of Chicago put it in his letter to incoming frosh. These students were about to head to Chicago, after all—a powerfully segregated city in w hich particular neighborhoods were suffering from intense violence. But perhaps the dean’s letter was aimed at a different audience—those concerned with the bogeyman of political correctness and those who worry that free speech isn’t the absolute value it used to be. The letter was part of the effort

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to set forth the values of the University of Chicago in contradistinction to trends that were thought to compromise robust intellectual debate. The University of Chicago may no longer want to be known as the place where fun went to die, but it did want to be branded as a place with a vigorous marketplace of ideas.10 That said, it is clear to just about everybody that civility is preferable to violence and that freedom of expression is essential for education and for democracy. But, as I will argue later in t his book, speech is never absolutely free; it always takes place for specific purposes and against a background of some expression that is limited or prohibited. Hate speech, defamation, and harassment fall into these legally or procedurally defi ed categories. And there are some things, after all, that a university typically refuses to legitimate or dignify by treating them as fit subjects for academic discussion. When we make a subject part of a debate, we legitimate it in ways that may harm individuals and the educational enterprise. We must beware of the rubric of protecting speech being used as a fig leaf for intimidating those with less power. Universities today are trying to ensure freedom of expression while at the same time cultivating recognition and belonging. This effort is of a piece with the shift in emphasis from the hard numbers of demographics to the complex factors of equity and inclusion, and it has to do not only with admissions, but also with every facet of the school’s culture and climate: from how one values and retains faculty and staff o how people are treated in classrooms, lunchrooms, and board rooms. It’s a shift that has taken place not just in higher education but in many other kinds of organizations as well. A decade ago researchers noted that it was unclear whether talking about inclusion rather than demographic diversity resulted in materially

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different strategies, or if it is “simply a change of phrasing to reduce backlash against the same initiatives.”11Be that as it may, on college campuses the result has been demands from students that the institution not only be demographically representative but also change in ways that will allow all students to “flourish” or “thrive.” Offices of diversity have been renamed offices of “equity and inclusion.” The shift to issues of equity and belonging is markedly visible in liberal arts colleges. These are small institutions that have long underscored the virtues of learning through a campus community, and the residential programs at these schools are vital to their overall educational goals. Most of these institutions were all male until the late 1960s and 1970s, and those who attended them were mostly from a small segment of the population—white and Protestant. Since the 1970s, the most selective among these schools (which are also among the wealthiest) have made great efforts to become more diverse— at Pomona, Williams, or Amherst, students of color (American and international) are now a majority on campus. These are all expensive schools, to be sure, but they have endowments large enough to provide fi ancial aid to more than half of the students who attend (and for many students there is practically no fi ancial cost at all). Over the past decade or so, the rhetoric of liberal arts schools (even those without the largest endowments) has shifted from underscoring the value of diversity— of learning from people with very different backgrounds—to stressing the value of inclusion, of enabling students to feel like full members of the campus community. Do students really learn more from those with different backgrounds than they do from those whose backgrounds are similar? We feel that it must be so, but it’s hard to measure, hard to know. Do students feel at home in the community? That you can learn from just

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asking them. But what’s the relationship of learning to feeling happy in one’s community? Vassar College, a prestigious small liberal arts college an hour or so north of New York City, has wrestled with these questions in recent years. Under the leadership of President Catharine Bond Hill, the school made a very strong push to increase access for low-income and minority students. From 200 6 to 2016, the percentage of domestic students of color increased from 24 percent to 41 percent, and the percentage of low-income students nearly tripled.12 Vassar was also a leader in recruiting military veterans, which it has successfully done in partnership with the Posse Foundation (Wesleyan is also part of this program). Vassar set out to become a more diverse institution, and by any metrics it made great progress in this regard. But the college also found that increasing the numbers of students from previously under-represented groups led to new challenges. Not everyone applauded progress in diversity. Predictably, some alumni were suspicious of the rapidity of change, and they expressed fears that the institution was evolving in ways that would cut it off from the strengths of its traditions. Perhaps more surprisingly, there was greater unrest on campus as students from these groups expressed doubts as to whether the institution really wanted them there. At many liberal arts colleges over the last several years, students who themselves were counted as evidence that the schools were becoming more diverse asked whether they were mere window dressing for the institution’s public relations efforts. Students of color were more numerous, but were these “historically white colleges” really any different than they had been in the past? Traditionalist alumni worried they had indeed changed, while many of the undergraduates who were beneficiaries of diversity policies

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complained that the schools hadn’t changed enough. The good intentions or progressive credibility of the institution seemed not to matter to either constituency. How demands for change were handled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, is also instructive. For many years, Reed has been known as a f orce for progressive educational programing. It long ago rejected the importance of standardized tests in admissions, and it has worked hard to increase diversity among its students, faculty, and staff. But as the school has grown more diverse, some have not been satisfied with the pace of educational change at the campus to which they now had access. In 2016–2017, Reed saw its required introductory humanities class continually disrupted by students who felt that white supremacy had long infected the college’s curriculum, and that the institution needed to change what it was teaching to an increasingly diverse student body. For several months, students protested in classrooms while professors tried to teach courses on the ancient world. The faculty’s approach to this history was deemed too white by the protestors. The faculty teaching the class, who themselves came from diverse backgrounds, expressed a reluctance to continue teaching when surrounded by protestors questioning the very legitimacy of the class.13 Although the Reed humanities class focuses on what is traditionally called the ancient world, it was anything but traditional. Lectures explored new perspectives on Greek, Roman, and Egyptian societies and cultures, highlighting ways in which current concepts of gender and social class bore upon ancient texts and what earlier generations of scholars had said about them. This was a f ar cry from what fi y years before had been presented as the foundations of Western civilization. Still, during the Black Lives Matter national protest movement

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against police brutality, “Reedies against Racism” painted the introductory class as an element of white supremacy still pervading a campus that complacently saw itself as very progressive. As one statement from the protestors put it: “We believe that the fi st lesson that freshmen should learn about Hum 110 is that it perpetuates white supremacy—by centering ‘whiteness’ as the only required class at Reed.” The protestors wanted Reed to follow through on being a more diverse campus by developing a c urriculum that would eschew the traditional elements of a humanities education, such as a required foundation class on the classical period. These student activists claimed they were being “traumatized” by a class reminiscent of one that had existed at the school before people like themselves had been encouraged to enroll. The students were using a language their teachers knew well, since many of them had themselves already pressed for curricular change to make humanities classes more inclusive and more attentive to issues of race, geography, social class, gender, and sexuality. Lucía Martínez Valdivia, an assistant professor of English and a co-teacher of the humanities class who describes herself as a “gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD,” wrote about having to overcome her own fear of speaking out against the protestors’ tactics. She wanted to lecture on Sappho without being intimidated. When the students accused her of complicity with a regime that perpetuates violence against people of color, Valdivia pushed back in the Washington Post, calling for a critical but empathetic response to texts and the professors who teach them: “Nuance and careful reasoning are not the tools of the oppressor, meant to deceive and gaslight and undermine and distract,” she wrote. “Students should read in good faith and try to understand the texts’ distance, their strangeness, from our historical moment.”14

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A year or so after the protests against the humanities class began, Reed announced that it had significantly reshaped its curriculum, even though the notion that the frosh course was “white” or classically “Western” was just wrong: over several years, the instructors had been adding material on Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, and they had long put the idea of a single, unified Western tradition under critical pressure. Nonetheless, because students often projected contemporary American racial categories onto the past—and because there was a desire to foster greater “inclusion” in r esponse to the protests—the humanities faculty had decided to conduct a full review of what they wanted students to learn in their fi st year of college. The result: a foundational class on the ancient Mediterranean was gone, replaced by “modules” centered on “a set of humanistic problems framed geographically and temporally.” Modules on Athens and Jerusalem, yes, but also on Mexico City from colonization to independence and on Harlem in the 1920s. Moving away from any idea of a cultural foundation, the emphasis now would be on fostering a “dialogue . . . between the Mediterranean and the Americas and between antiquity and the more recent past.” By using more material from the recent past, said the head of the program, they would increase the diversity of authors studied and emphasize “texts written in a m odern language that many students know well.” No module would be “privileged over another.” What was being privileged here, it seems, was the desire of students to feel closer to the material they study. Students didn’t just want access to a course concentrating on great books, even if these were put under “critical pressure.” They also wanted to be included, or to see themselves as included, in the class. Our historical moment is one in which calls for inclusion

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(for feeling at home on a campus) are bumping up against calls for confronting the strangeness of texts, ideas, and practices very different from one’s own. Many colleges and universities have been caught off guard, perhaps having assumed that expanding access to students from previously under-represented groups was itself the end goal. A more diverse student body, it had been hoped, would have just made the elite’s education available to a broader segment of the population. But this more diverse student body doesn’t want that education—at least not only that education. Students have been taught to say that they have a right “to see themselves in their education,” and at most schools the curriculum has been considerably broadened to include voices from outside of the Western mainstream. Faculty who have themselves struggled to expand the curriculum sometimes chafe at demands from students for even more identity validation from their classes. Insisting on fi ding oneself reflected in one’s courses rather than fi ding strangeness and distance undermines the very arguments for diversity that have helped reform universities over the past fi y years. At Vassar, too, the administration has pivoted in recent years from talking about increasing access for under-represented groups to talking about ensuring that all students on campus have opportunities to thrive. In a successful grant application to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the college echoed national trends by framing differences as assets to celebrate rather than as problems to overcome.15 It used to be said of students without a parent who had attended college that they were missing an orientation to higher education; now they’re described as possessing greater self-reliance and perseverance than their more mainstream peers. The changes in description are meant to prompt changes in expectation, which in turn

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should produce better educational outcomes. If asked whether this isn’t “wishful thinking,” the administrators might respond that wishful thinking works better than pessimistic thinking. Contentious issues around access and who deserves admission recede as schools focus on how they are serving the students they’ve already decided to enroll. But what does it mean to “serve” those students, to enable them to thrive, if these students from under-represented groups have goals different from the goals of those who came before them? Sure, we can see if the fi st-generation students graduate at rates similar to those who come from more traditionally privileged backgrounds, and we can conduct surveys to determine whether everyone feels “valued, recognized and respected.” But conducting a customer satisfaction survey to determine whether the student feels respected has little to do with discovering how students are being productively challenged by what they are learning. There is something clearly salutary about schools focusing on providing the very best educational experiences for all their students. Sometimes this is very straightforward, as when a college recognizes that not all students have the same chances of success in, say, introductory science classes. My science colleagues tell me about frosh who attended elite prep schools where they learned introductory biology or mathematics. Such students have obvious advantages over their classmates who attended low-performing public high schools, since the pupils from the prep schools are seeing some of the material in those introductory courses for the second or third time. The problem here is not only that some students are well prepared, but also that professors often fi d themselves steering their teaching to their “best” students, leaving behind those who may have

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the intellectual horsepower but who haven’t had the benefits of great preparation. The stakes are high. Particularly in the sciences, failure to do well in an introductory class can prevent a student from pursuing further study in the field. When highly selective universities improved access to students from more poorly performing high schools, many of those universities were un­ prepared to offer academic programs to help those students thrive. As schools came to recognize this gap, some have focused more on helping those students they do enroll acquire the skills they need rather than on expanding the cohorts from under-represented groups. The Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for example, has been a powerful engine for increasing diversity in the sciences by providing extensive programs for cohorts of students from under-represented groups. The president of the university, Freeman Hrabowski, has been a passionate advocate for increasing the numbers of black and Latinx students who major in the sciences and go on to advanced study in t hese fields. Hrabowski, himself a black mathematician, has created a team model in which minority students can derive strength from one another while pursuing fields of study with a strong history of white exclusivity. His program defi es “thriving” in a very specific way: attaining academic success in the sciences. Participants are supported with scholarships and mentors, and they are challenged by being involved early in high-level research. The results are impressive graduation statistics, with significant numbers going on to the fi est scientific research centers in the country. The program demands persistence, and it provides support. As Hrabowski says, “We push, and we love. We expect the most, and we care.”16

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Caring for students at the very least means making it affordable for them to pursue their studies without fi ancial hardship. In university fi ancial aid circles, the gold standard has long been to “meet full need” without burdening the student with debt. But what happens when caring for students and defi itions of “full need” change so that students have higher expectations for support—not just for academic success but also for the full college experience? At my own school, I’ve seen trustees and students who consider themselves champions of the positive effects of diversity turn their attention to providing more support for the low-income students already on campus rather than seeking to increase the number of these students. Although graduation rates and other basic indicators of academic success for this cohort are roughly analogous to those across the campus generally, the discussion has shifted to flourishing, and away from “mere” access. This means a shift away from affirmative action and diversity and toward equity and inclusion. It also means spending more money on the number of students currently enrolled rather than trying to spend that money on a greater number of students with fi ancial need. Colleges and universities can always fi d ways to enhance support of students from under-represented groups once they are on campus. I’ve never heard students complain that they are receiving too much funding. But this is hardly the time for schools (especially selective institutions with the highest graduation rates) to lose focus on recruiting more of those students. Although many schools have made progress in di versifying their student bodies, it is still the case that in many of the most selective institutions more undergraduates come from the top 1 percent of the income bracket than from the bottom 60 percent.17 It is clear that inequality in America has long affected

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elementary and high schools, and that it is increasingly difficult for low-income families to fi d educational opportunities that will result in them being college-ready at age seventeen. Richard V. Reeves has described “opportunity hoarding” by the wealthiest fi h of the American population. The upper-­ middle class has focused on securing special privileges for its children, he writes, adding that “education has . . . become the main mechanism for the reproduction of upper-middle class status across generations.”18 As inequality has gotten worse, the benefits of having a college diploma have gotten greater. Still, at many elite schools we continue to privilege the privileged— whether through admissions offices that give alumni relatives an advantage, or through geographically based marketing plans that aim recruiting messages at those already most likely to succeed because of the advantages they already have. The essential question is how American universities can provide more opportunity for deep learning among the most disadvantaged populations. What would it take for these schools to think of this as a civic responsibility essential to their mission? I emphasize colleges with high graduation rates because recruiting students from these groups to schools from which they are less likely to graduate is bad for them and bad for the institutions. Schools with high graduation rates often have developed sophisticated student services departments, and they are more likely to keep students from taking on excessive debt. The gap between the numbers of poor and rich folks who attend college has shrunk, but the gap between poor and rich who graduate college has grown. Far too many economically disadvantaged students are fi ding their way to colleges only to leave without a degree (and often with loans). They don’t drop out pleased to have taken some interesting classes; they leave

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frustrated with higher education in general. It is not enough to open more widely the gates to the university; there must be programs on every campus to inspire all students to succeed on campus and beyond the university.

v In 2017–2018, an academic year of intense controversies concerning race and class on college campuses across the country, a Harvard University task force published Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion.19 The report aimed to help move the university beyond increasing diversity and toward equity and inclusion in h iring and admissions, teaching and social life, working conditions for staff, and the process of curriculum development. Variations on the word “flourish” appear at least eighteen times in the glossy eighty pages. Affirmative action is mentioned only once—in the context of reports required for compliance purposes. The report does early on note the importance of “deliberate attention and effort” for achieving diversity in va rious endeavors and the necessity of overcoming biases in any particular selection process (such as admissions or hiring). But expanding access is no longer at the top of the agenda. That place belongs to inclusion: The intellectual fruits of a community’s inner diversity do not harvest themselves. To gain the benefit of diversity, Harvard must fully integrate all members of the University into academic, professional, and social contexts that support their individual flourishing and activate their potential. Excellence requires successful practices of inclusion at all levels, from the interpersonal to the organizational.20

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The “benefits of full belonging” have replaced the more straightforward goal of increased access. Belonging involves not simply assimilation to the existing institutional culture, but also a s ense of being included in t he active molding of that culture’s evolution. At Harvard, it also means that people from previously under-represented groups who have earned access to the university should have the chance to thrive—to fulfill their potential. “When students, staff, faculty members, or academic personnel are integrated into our community in ways that permit them to do their best work, we anticipate that they will experience a sense of full belonging.” The task force is confident that individuals can achieve a “sense of full belonging” and “do their best work” without having to give up their particular community affiliations. In other words, belonging isn’t reducible to successful assimilation to mainstream Harvard culture. You can stay true to your particular group and still belong to the university as a whole. There is confidence that loyalty to the practices of your own group will still allow you (maybe even empower you) to do your best work in the context of the university community. The authors of Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion are aware of the challenges of measuring (or even understanding) what counts as a person’s best work, and they well know how a sense of belonging can be shaken by argument, controversy, and the kind of criticism that is at the heart of an academic institution. Simply put, teachers can more easily cultivate belonging in their classrooms if they keep all the students happy, if they don’t ask them to leave their comfort zones. Giving most students an “A” or “A−” seems to have become a b aseline of inclusion at many very selective schools across the country. For what would happen when you learn that your idea is wrong, or that your experimental design is

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flawed, or that your conclusion doesn’t follow from your evidence and argument? Would you still feel you belong? Would you still feel you are flourishing? The Harvard task force members address these issues through the lens of academic freedom, by which they mean, in part, the freedom to tell someone that her or his idea is wrongheaded. They take as absolutely essential the university’s commitment to protect free inquiry and the ability to express one’s academic/­professional views without fear of social or political punishment. They reject the notion that there is a necessary confl ct between the value of this freedom and the desire to cultivate the value of inclusion—claiming instead that these values “provide each other with synergistic and mutual reinforcement.”21 After all, academic freedom would be an empty concept if everyone started with a similar set of ideas, if there was no diversity of viewpoints to protect. And inclusion would be meaningless at a university if it meant there were no attempts to cultivate excellence along with belonging; people may feel they belong to a resort community by virtue of using its facilities, but a university community demands intellectual growth from its members, and this process can be, should be, contentious. Despite the amenities arms race at many American schools, a university exists to instigate achievement and not just to offer the experience of a luxury spa. Academic achievement requires that bad ideas be rejected; it requires a critical attitude that exposes fallacious reasoning so as to arrive at better ways of thinking and acting. If one prioritizes inclusion, will this critical process take a back seat in favor of wanting people to feel at home in a c ommunity? The Harvard report answers “no” to this question: inclusion is joined to the idea of flourishing, of developing one’s full potential. In an academic setting, this begins with the notion that heterodox viewpoints

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will be protected to the extent that they will be carefully, respectfully, considered. This consideration, however, doesn’t mean that all ideas will be found to have equal merit—only that they will have an equal opportunity to be studied. The authors of the Harvard report recognize the challenges that follow from attempting to hold together rigorous inquiry and respectful belonging as core values, but they see this as fundamental to the future of the university. At Harvard, they want to create a culture that permits members “to be their authentic selves and that support[s] their academic and professional success, even while challenging them to grow.”22 It may well happen that one’s sense of authenticity will be challenged by what one learns, making it harder to stay true to one’s prior set of personal or communal allegiances. If part of one’s identity, for example, is bound up with a community’s rejection of modern medicine or the theory of evolution, then it will be harder to study the modern life sciences with the same sense of belonging that some other students enjoy. We might agree that the biology professor shouldn’t merely mock these beliefs, but that instructor shouldn’t have to dance around what they entail, either. There may be students who have been brought up to believe that vaccinations are forms of poison, but the professor can’t spend too much time ensuring that they feel comfortable. The authors of the inclusion report use the idea of “academic freedom” as the foundation for the professor’s responsibility to not change the biology course so as to be inoffensive to all students, but they also want all students to feel respected in t hat same class. Clearly, there will be some points of tension between helping students stay true to their authentic selves or their original communities and teaching our best ideas of what is true. The political theorist Danielle Allen, one of the co-chairs

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of the Harvard task force that produced the report, has written powerfully about all forms of education as aspiring “to direct the development of human capacities.” No matter if it’s vocational or liberal, she argues, the point of learning is to stimulate human flourishing, and a vital part of that flourishing is public life, the practices of citizenship. These practices demand a respect for differences; they require the ability to work through disagreements for the sake of communal goals. Allen underscores that education should cultivate “participatory readiness,” and recognizes the necessity of political equality for enabling effective, responsible engagement in the public sphere.23 A university community must confront the effects of inequality if it is to enable all its members to flourish, and if it is to enable meaningful political engagement. Near the beginning of this century, Harvard set out to defi e its core values and concluded with four: respect, honesty, excellence, and accountability. The 2018 report on inclusion suggests adding a fi h: “Cultivate bonds and bridges that enable all to grow with and learn from one another.”24 Learning from one another across differences is not just transactional— it also depends on building ongoing relationships that foster belonging and inclusion—relationships that sustain community. Supporting those ideas while pursuing the contentious, sometimes antagonistic path of free inquiry is the challenge facing many colleges and universities today. It is the challenge of recognizing and respecting different forms of diversity and using them for their educational benefits. We both want the benefits of antagonism and need the benefits of cooperation. Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion is a noble attempt to shift attention from admissions and access to harvesting the fruits of education. But admissions at Harvard has recently been thrust back into the spotlight thanks to the law-

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suit concerning possible discrimination against Asian American applicants. The lawsuit has been brought by Students for Fair Admissions, led by Edward Blum, a tried and true enemy of affirmative action, and a new friend to this particular demographic group. For many years Blum has led litigation efforts animated by the principle, as he puts it, that “your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in y our life’s endeavors.”25 He has attacked voting rights laws that, he thinks, attempt to elect candidates of a specific ethnic or racial group, and he has attacked educational diversity efforts that treat individuals differently because of the racial group with which they identify. The litigation against Harvard is ongoing as I write, and in the summer of 2018Blum’s group began releasing documents aimed to show that the university’s admissions policies are unfair to Asian Americans with strong test scores and grades. A white applicant with the same scores and grades would have, according to a Duke economist’s analysis of the documents, a 10 percent greater chance of admission than an Asian American, and an African American a 75 percent greater chance. Published documents from the discovery phase of the litigation seem to show admissions officers using crude stereotyping of Asian Americans to justify not accepting people who are “too driven” by grades and test scores. These practices, too overt to be called “implicit bias,” occur in the so-called personality score section of the admissions process. Usually, Blum’s group argues, applicants with the strongest academic standing also do well on the personality score. But, they claim, an “Asian-­ American penalty” is imposed by admissions officers when they rank applicants. If the plaintiffs can demonstrate that the university has a separate system of admissions criteria for these students, they can show that the so-called holistic process is

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just a cover for crude racial quotas. Such a quota would mean that the so-called penalty on one minority group (Asian American applicants) is in place to create a “bonus” to benefit members of other minority groups (African American and Latinx applicants). There are distinct tracks at many universities for athletes, large donors, and alumni relatives. Blum’s group is focused on race but not on these traditional forms of affirmative action, which surely have resulted in fewer available slots for the admission of students of color. “This lawsuit filed by Edward Blum in the name of Asian-American students,” declared Jin Hee Lee, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “is a dangerous ploy to distort the benefits of diversity for college students of all races, despite settled law on this issue.”26 Nobody is fooled, and the goal of the litigation is clear: dismantle the use of race in the admissions process. A group of distinguished research universities has filed an amicus brief in the lawsuit, reminding the court of the deference usually shown to academic institutions in r egard to how they determine the educational policies that guide them. Admissions policies are a crucial facet of constructing a learning community, and ensuring a diverse student body is a fundamental aspect of that construction. “A student body that is diverse in many dimensions,” note the brief ’s authors, “including racial and ethnic background, produces enormous educational benefits.” The schools go on to explain that to ignore race as an essential part of a person’s identity would significantly undermine this process of creating diversity “in many dimensions.” The amicus brief rehearses the arguments from earlier affirmative action cases that left room for universities to determine how best to balance a variety of factors in creating a vibrant and diverse student body. The universities point out

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that in a n increasingly polarized and segregated society, the campus provides a particularly important opportunity for people with different identities and different ideas to learn from one another. The rhetoric of inclusion may have become prevalent in on-campus discussions of diversity, but that’s only in an environment where affirmative action in admissions is a protected practice. The Harvard litigation is a reminder that without access to people from a variety of backgrounds, inclusion is pretty meaningless.27 In his fi st year in office, President Trump announced that his administration would be joining in the lawsuit against Harvard University—clearly seeing the litigation as a vehicle for undermining affirmative action programs more generally. The New York Times reported that the White House wanted the U.S. Department of Justice to “redirect resources” of its civil rights division “toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants.”28 Subsequently, the Department of Justice said that it was really just seeking “volunteers” interested in a l awsuit alleging discrimination against Asian Americans, but more recently the Trump administration made clear its interest in the case. President Trump is clearly playing to his political base, for whom the only thing more popular than criticizing affirmative action would be attacking immigrants. Under the guise of protecting the rights of Asian Americans, the beleaguered attorney general Sessions played the role of defender of white people threatened by opportunities given to minorities. But apart from the cynical political opportunism of this move, we can also see the threats against affirmative action as another effort to use higher education to protect those who already have key social advantages. As of the fall of 2018, there has

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been no criticism from the White House of the university’s policies that give preferences in admissions to athletes and the children of alumni and potential donors. These groups are predominantly white, though presumably many members of these groups don’t think of their whiteness as a primary source of their identity. In an admissions marketplace in which there are far more qualified applicants than there are available spots in a f rosh class, confl cts concerning merit, social mobility, fairness, diversity, and group allegiance are bound to emerge. Ever since Socrates asked his young interlocutors to rethink their beliefs about justice and truth, education has exposed tension points between allegiance to some aspects of one’s community and the practice of seeking better ways of thinking and living. It may be that the heightened visibility of some of these tensions today stems from the ways in w hich affirmative action and other recruiting practices that expanded access to universities created more numerous possibilities for confl cted allegiances. For decades American culture has been preaching the importance of identity validation, even if humanities professors press the point that identities are often a matter of improvisation and performance. Students from groups that have long been under-represented on a campus have been told that their authentic identities matter and that in their pursuit of an education they should be able to affirm them. For many, that’s what flourishing means. When the path of affirmation collides with corrosively critical academic practices—or just with the ways of the academic tribe—confl cts break out. Although contemporary faculty do not often face the Athenian charge of corrupting the youth of the city, they may face accusations of not showing sufficient respect for, or not accommodating, the hab-

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its or practices that students from different backgrounds bring with them to the college campus. The conversation concerning diversity in higher education is being impacted not only by campus tensions between cultures of identity affirmation and practices of critical inquiry, but also by the much broader phenomenon of accelerating inequalities in the United States. For the past thirty years or so, the incomes of most Americans have stalled, while a small percentage of families have seen dramatic increases in their wealth. Within this general pattern, over the past twenty years, the gap between low-income Americans and those at the median has not increased substantially, but the gap between the highest earners and those with median incomes has continued to expand. The wealthy are increasingly able to isolate themselves not only from the poor, but also from middle and moderately well-off Americans. “Income segregation,” the tendency of social classes to cluster in specific residential areas, is rising along with economic inequality generally.29 Money has long bought economic segregation, but until fairly recently in America this meant that rich people were separating themselves from the poor. Since the 1990s, however, the wealthy have also been purchasing distance from the lived concerns of middle and even upper-middle-class co-citizens. The implications of all this are, of course, enormous for college campuses. First, there is a basic sense in w hich rising inequality makes having a c ollege diploma more important than ever. Although the cost of a college education for most has risen greatly over the past thirty years, the return on investment remains strong. The income premium that comes from having an undergraduate degree has grown even while wages in general have stagnated.30 People without a college diploma are at a serious economic disadvantage.

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So getting into college is an important tool for earning at least a reasonable income, and many low-income students continue to see it as an important ingredient for economic mobility. But most low-income students in higher education attend institutions with the lowest graduation rates, putting them at a distinct disadvantage in climbing toward or above the median income. At most selective colleges and universities, those from the bottom half of the economic ladder make up less than a third of the student body, and there is a sharply disproportionate representation of wealthy students. These undergrads sit in the same classes, eat in the same lunchrooms, and often live in the same residence halls. Campus may be the only place many have had contact with someone from an economic class so different from their own. There should be diversity benefits from this contact, but there are also tensions for these students around what it means to feel included and to be valued for one’s authentic self. Flourishing can have different meanings when the students’ starting points are so disparate. Many schools today emphasize the recognition of low-­ income and “fi st-generation” students, but young people are put into a strange situation when they are asked to ground their authentic selves in these communities. When a student asked me about celebrating low-income culture as we celebrate, say, African American or Jewish culture on campus, we wound up having an intense discussion about his ambition to be far above the low-income bracket after graduation. At the same time, he wanted me to know, quite rightly, that he was not at all ashamed of being from a low-income family. Indeed, he was proud of his family and the sacrifices they had made so he could attend our university. But he also wanted me to know that he was determined to use his college education to earn more money and eventually support his mother. On the other side of the

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coin, a friend who is a university trustee confided to me his ambivalence about being singled out as a “fi st-gen” success story. His own children can’t identify with him in this regard; by defi ition, they can’t be fi st generation. What does it mean for them to have their own success stories on a diverse campus, he asked? Flourishing through education is clearly a complicated matter when one is supposed to be both open to change and proud of one’s roots. The challenges of fostering inclusion on diverse campuses are heightened by the dramatic inequalities off campus. Students take note when some of their classmates go off together on vacations at fancy ski resorts while others have to stay in dorms because they can’t afford to go home—or even have no home to return to. Administrators and professors may tell those left behind that it is their good fortune to be able to stay on campus and study, but many of these young people may feel they are at a di sadvantage when it comes to having the “full college experience.” In today’s economy, the middle class is under increased pressure, and students thinking about their prospects are well aware they may wind up either a happy economic winner or a sorry loser. Many feel even more competitive economic pressure because they see so little space between being wildly successful and being a dismal failure. In an environment like this, students from under-represented groups may feel at a serious disadvantage vis-à-vis their wealthy peers when it comes to feeling included or flourishing. Even at schools that claim, as mine does, to meet the full economic need of any enrolled student, these undergraduates may fi d that just being admitted into the institution does not enable them to take full advantage of its resources. Yes, they can ask professors and classmates to “check their privilege”; yes, they can demand that their school

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provide resources for tutoring, psychological services, and community building. But wealthy students have networks for internships and job hunting that even the most resourceful career center will fi d challenging to replicate. Institutions that want to enhance belonging by overcoming privileges generally have hard choices to make in allocating resources. Devote more resources to bring in more low-income students? Or devote them to helping a smaller number of students truly flourish? If a selective private school has 20 percent Pell-eligible students, it might set a target of increasing fi ancial aid resources so as to enroll 25 percent of these low-income folks in the future. Alternatively, with more resources, it can set the goals of providing greater academic and psychological support for the cohort already on campus. Most institutions fi d it difficult to do either, and very few can do both.31

v Wherever one stands on issues of affirmative action, most can agree that diversity isn’t just about admissions—it’s about the educational culture created by a university. There are different types of diversity, and they serve different purposes. As conversations about race and learning moved away from the emphasis on access through affirmative action, student groups and university administrators increasingly turned to complex issues of equity and inclusion. It wasn’t enough to have demographic diversity—the appropriate numbers of students from different racial, ethnic, and income groups. How were representatives of these “under-represented groups” experiencing the “historically white” institutions in which they were enrolled? Did all members of the university community have equal opportunities to make use of the school’s resources? How could the institution be a home for all of its students?

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Access or inclusion? For the students already on campus, inclusion is the more relevant. But critics have wondered to what extent demands by students for full inclusion are really demands to stay in their comfort zones, to not be challenged by others. How has the desire for inclusion and flourishing been re-framed as a demand for political correctness? This is the subject of the next chapter.

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The Use and Abuse of Political Correctness

T

he strange thing about Political Correctness is that “ it seems to have lots of opponents and no supporters,” wrote Roger Ebert in his 1994 review of the film PCU. “No one ever describes themselves as PC, a nd yet somehow the movement thrives.” Until very recently, one would have said that political correctness (by which I mean accusations of it) reached its heyday in t he 1990s. Baby boomers complained that college campuses were leaving behind their anarchic Animal House ways and becoming too uptight and rigidly moralistic. National Lampoon’s Animal House had been released in 1978 (the year I graduated from college), and the corrupt authority fi ure, Dean Wormer, was the unforgettable villain. But by the 1990s, it was not priggish establishment types like Wormer who were being portrayed as the enemies of liberty, pleasure, and free thinking on campus. It was the campus radicals; it was they who were cast as the new authoritarians, and their rejection of the status quo was recoded as a disguised conformism—that is, political correctness. After a h iatus in

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which the label “PC” faded somewhat as a term of public derision, in the past five years or so it has returned, “bigly.” Nothing seems easier for self-proclaimed individualists than joining in with others who reject conformism; nothing unites people quite like the moral disavowal of the priggishly politically correct. People in the United States and around the world regularly bond together by denouncing groupthink. Donald Trump realized the power of being anti-PC somewhere between his guest appearances on the Howard Stern radio show and his run for the presidency: no matter what he said or did, he could take the high ground, or at least earn credit, for not being politically correct. In one of the early debates in the 2016 election, Megyn Kelly questioned the candidate about his demeaning comments about women over the years. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he replied. Throughout the election, he turned what might have been judged moral lapses into heroic refusals to conform to politically correct moral criteria. Other candidates have now learned this lesson, especially, but not exclusively, on the Right. As Ebert put it, “Nothing creates quite such a warm inner glow as accusing others of being morally reprehensible.” If PC police are presumed to know the warmth of that feeling, those who attack them surely do as well.1 Ebert was right to point out that in his day nobody admitted to wanting the label “politically correct,” but this hasn’t always been the case. In the period between the two world wars, the words were used to describe whether a particular political action or policy was in line with a general theory— usually Marxist or Communist theory. So, for example, a group of farmers might go on strike over unfair wages (or prices for their produce), and the party ideologues would debate whether

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this labor action was really in accord with the party’s general pronouncements on rural labor, political action, and the eventual destruction of capitalism. The tactic of getting farmers to support a strike might seem effective, but if in some way it was out of step with party goals, it would not be politically correct.2 It wasn’t long before the term “politically correct” acquired pejorative connotations meant to call out those who refused to deviate from what was judged to be mindless orthodoxy. When Stalin decided to sign the non-aggression pact with Hitler, “correct” communists supported that decision despite having claimed for years that the Nazi leader was evil. Those on the Left who were dumbfounded by this alliance— like those who would later fi d party decisions (or murderous actions) corrupt and reprehensible—labeled their former comrades “politically correct” in this negative sense: in sync with official doctrine but out of touch with the moral basis of politics and the real world.3 Among those who identified with the Left in the late 1960s, there were some who fooled themselves into thinking they were at once nonconformists and also politically correct. Not the unrepentant Stalinists, who after the 1950s would probably not have viewed nonconformity as anything particularly positive. It was young Leftists in the West who had turned from Russia to China for inspiration, coating their ignorance with enthusiasm. For Americans wanting a taste of Chairman Mao’s wisdom, the English translation of The Little Red Book provided positive uses of being “correct” in a p olitical sense. As literary scholar Ruth Perry has noted, Mao’s essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” was widely read by leftist intellectuals, and in it the chairman recommended kinder, gentler ways of resolving political tensions

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(such as discussion and critical thinking) than those he practiced (leading to the deaths of millions).4 Cryptic sayings like “let a hundred flowers bloom” inspired some readers to fi d a radical politics that would be correctly in sync with the leader’s view of history and the possibilities for revolution. At the same time, Maoism was just one movement within the New Left. More broadly, the anti-doctrinaire aspects of 1960s radicalism eschewed any question of alignment with theory, any effort to be “correct.” Across the country, a youth culture developed on college campuses that opposed the deplorable war in Vietnam, dismissed establishment rules that protected racial and gender inequality, and was generally suspicious of the mores of adults. Theodore Roszak, in a prescient essay published in 1968, cast blame on the older generations for their failure to address any of the issues that were animating the concerns of the young. The adult generation, he wrote, “has surrendered its responsibility to make morally demanding decisions, to generate ideals, to control public authority, to safeguard the life of the community against its despoilers.” The counterculture, as Roszak dubbed the “great refusal” of the young, didn’t have a theoretical politics according to which it could be “correct.” It had a target to reject: the world of alienation, violence, and inequality in which the young were being asked to take part.5 Critics of this youth culture dismissed it using the sort of psychological reductionism we fi d in recent critiques of campus intolerance and political correctness. The conservative religious pundit Norman Vincent Peale, for example, wrote that “the U.S. was paying the price of two generations that followed the Dr. Spock baby plan of instant gratification of needs”; and Vice President Spiro Agnew chimed in, blaming Spock for the “permissiveness” that had led to spirited, radical disorder. These infantile explanations were embraced on the Right, and conser-

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vative adults scornfully labeled student protestors “the Spock generation.”6 Members of this generation who saw themselves as countercultural struggled with how aligned with one another they should be as they pushed back against the mainstream that they criticized for demanding conformity. Did the radical opposition have to be united, or was that just a symptom of the conformism against which it was fi hting? In looking at how the term “politically correct” was used in feminist circles, Ruth Perry takes note of a gentle dispute between two writers and activists, Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde, friends in the late 1970s. Bambara had described herself (in a Notes to Contributors) as “a young Black woman who writes, teaches, organizes, lectures, tries to learn and tries to raise her daughter to be a correct little sister.” Some months later, Lorde responded with a poem entitled “Dear Toni Instead of a Letter of Congratulation upon Your Book and Your Daughter Whom You Say You Are Raising to Be a Correct Little Sister.” Not many brief bios have inspired such poetry, and Lorde’s generous, moving lines about mothering daughters get at the disquiet of that time about being “in sync” with any doctrine, political or otherwise: As she moves through taboos Whirling myths like gay hoops over her head I know beyond fear and history That our teaching means keeping trust With less and less correctness Only with ourselves Lorde is offering a loving reminder to her friend that their daughters don’t have to “handle contradictions” correctly, and that they can fi d their own paths.

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Our girls will grow into their own Black Women Finding their own contradictions That they will come to love as I love you.7 In this tender poem of love and friendship, Lorde rejects seeking correctness in favor of fi ding one’s own contradictions. And in the 1970s, there were contradictions aplenty for young people looking for radical alternatives to convention. While Lorde was affectionately chiding her friend to resist the conformism implicit in wanting to raise a “correct little sister,” other radical feminists were angrily exposing poisonous levels of misogyny that remained in much leftist politics. In 1974, marychild called for “drastic dykes” who would reject the self-interested anti-conformism of the male-dominated New Left Males in t he 1960’s tried to turn daughters off to their mothers’ raps about how all men wanted was cunt—they turned this wise old woman knowledge that has been passed down from mother to daughter since the fall of the matriarchies into something that was known as unhip and unpolitical. The hippie chick became politically correct ass. The Male Left convinced “their” women that it was politically correct to fuck their brains out.8 The term “politically correct” is being used here much as it came to be used twenty years later: as a label that connoted hypocrisy and conformity among those who considered themselves progressive.

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As the counterculture of the 1960s splintered along lines of ideology and identity, debates as to who was really progressive intensified. A cr ucible moment for feminism in t his regard, says Perry, was a c onference on sexuality and politics held at Barnard College in the spring of 1982. The planners of The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality were faced with the question of whether there were forms of sexual pleasure for women that were so infected by male oppression that they were undermining women’s liberation. Or was it that this very question, which assumed that one could defi e a form of pleasure as progressive or reactionary, part of the problem? When the Lesbian Sex Mafia sponsored a speakout on “Politically Incorrect Sex” and were, in turn, picketed by other feminists critical of their theatricalization of patriarchal violence, the spectacle of self-proclaimed radicals fi hting with each other over what was really “correct” set conservative hearts aflame. Among activists on the Left, the use of the term “politically incorrect” was meant to signal that their radicalism was more outlaw than doctrinaire. Claiming oneself to be “politically incorrect” or accusing a sanctimonious comrade of political correctness was not atypical banter. By the 1990s, though, accusations of “political correctness” would become a theat­ ricalized staple of conservative discourse, especially popular among critics who regarded the diversity and multiculturalism on American university campuses as sterile orthodoxy. Setting the stage for this was philosopher Allan Bloom’s bestselling 1987 book, Th Closing of the American Mind. The term “politically correct” had not yet gained currency among conservatives and Bloom doesn’t use it, but his diagnosis of what was ailing American higher education echoed (and echoes to this day) in complaints about PC culture. As Bloom saw it, the

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1960s and 1970s had turned college campuses into bastions of prejudice that made serious learning all but impossible. The prejudice with which students had been inculcated since they were schoolchildren, he asserted, is that tolerance is the greatest virtue and that everyone should have their own truth (or later, their own passion). “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of,” Bloom writes: “almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”9 This leads to a moral imperative toward equality, since, in a very loose way, everyone has beliefs that deserve respect and no beliefs are better than any others. We don’t argue that only some beliefs are respectable; we assume that since we don’t know which beliefs are true, we must respect them all. Bloom isn’t thinking of the average college student here, but of the students who wind up at America’s very best colleges and universities. These fortunate young people have a shared enemy: absolutism. “The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance,” according to Bloom. The problem is not that your absolute belief may be wrong; the problem is that having such a s trong conviction may make you intolerant: “The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”10 Bloom famously painted a picture in w hich an unconscious commitment to equality and a thorough-going relativism combined to ensure that nobody would pursue fundamental questions like “how one should live” or “what the good life is” with the seriousness they deserve. He knows that the students around him think they are open-minded because of their relativism, but he sees their disinterest in truth and reason as a contemptible “openness of indifference.” Why be serious about these questions if you’ve decided in advance that all the answers

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to them are good enough? “As it now stands,” he wrote, “students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” Without the capacity to imagine the perfect soul, the longing that is essential for education disappears—replaced by a vulgar addiction to the cheap thrills of popular culture, especially rock and roll music, with its “barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”11 Although Bloom was a determined enemy of campus militants and contemptuous of the universities that in his view caved in to them, he did believe that higher education should present radical alternatives to the pieties and practices of mainstream society. There is only “one simple rule” for the university: “it need not concern itself with providing its students with experiences that are available in democratic society. They will have them in any event. It must provide them with experiences they cannot have there.” Despite the fact that this “simple rule” was in tension with the utilitarian or vocational currents that run so deep in American elite education, Bloom just took for granted that the goal of wrestling with the essential questions was fundamentally antagonistic to the goal of preparing students for success in the commercial world. Indeed, Bloom’s enemy, go-with-the-flow relativism, was “necessarily an accommodation with the present,” whereas his noble contemplation of the essential questions raised by classic texts held no guarantee of either productivity or morality.12 How is this criticism of the relativism of American undergraduates (and their teachers) related to the complaints about authoritarian student radicals that preceded and succeeded it?

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Bloom’s complaint wasn’t only that the academy in the United States was creating a new kind of conformity: his reproach was that the campus now was controlled by the same conformity that infected modern culture as a w hole. In addition to his specific objections to college life, The Closing of the American Mind summarized a lament about the trajectory of philosophy in modernity. In this story of decline, once scholars accepted the modern notion that the search for truth was inextricably bound up with history and politics, that search would soon be re-described as merely another culturally specific expression of a d esire for power or domination. Once people accepted that “we all have our own truths” or that “truth was an image projected by power,” the very idea of a “search for truth” would become suspect. This was the Nietzschean atmosphere that Bloom thought his contemporaries didn’t even realize they were breathing. There could be no serious (a word Bloom adored) confrontation with alternative ways of thinking and living in this Nietzschean “post reason” world. That world was a relativist prison house. Bloom’s effort in Closing is to open up questions that were not so much settled in the Nietzschean world as forgotten. He wants the university to be that place where we become aware, through skillful eros-infused questioning, that there are alternatives to how we live now. And not just any alternatives will do. We should be examining, wrestling with, the alternatives proposed in those traditions whose great texts are still accessible to us. “The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the non-instrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt.”13 It is in this call for openness and doubt that we can see

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the link between Bloom’s criticisms of higher education and those that will be centered on “political correctness.” The “freedom of mind” that he longed for in a university was being undermined by a campus “tyranny” that obscured the fact that there are other ways of thinking, other possible ways of living— and these should also be critically evaluated.14 Sure, students enjoyed the tourist’s view that all cultures, all alternatives, were “interesting,” but they seemed incapable of asking critical questions about how one should seek to live the best possible life. The happy relativism and celebration of diversity for its own sake that Bloom despised made students immune to the deep questions about the good life that might stir their souls, that might inspire longing for something more noble than the material satisfactions offered by a commercial republic. A healthy university asks these questions—despite the pressure of popular opinion—and keeps them audible over the din of popular culture. Bloom’s vision—and criticisms—put universities on the defensive, and, sensing weakness, conservatives of a different ilk began launching attacks of their own. American professors and students were afraid of asking certain questions for fear of offending someone, they claimed. University culture had become politically correct. These critics were little concerned with Bloom’s notion of a relativism that had resulted from reason’s critique of its own premises, and much concerned with university ideologies that might lead to leftist views being imposed on the young. Sidney Hook, a philosopher who by the late 1980s had become a conservative icon, stated that “there is less freedom of speech on American campuses today . . . than at any other recent period in peacetime in American history.”15 In 1990, Roger Kimball, two years after penning a g lowing review of Bloom’s book in the New York Times Book Review,

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wrote that “tenured radicals” in the humanities had launched “ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture.’’16 Where Bloom attacked the easygoing relativism that had grown out of the history of philosophy and the happy hedonism of the 1960s, his successors targeted dogmatic militants who refused to tolerate opposing views. Kimball’s Tenured Radicals was a loud blast in the 1990s culture wars, but the term “political correctness” played only a small role in the fi st edition, appearing fewer than a handful of times. In the following decade, Kimball would jump on the bandwagon, adding about forty references to PC in a later edition. The notion of a conspiracy of former activists indoctrinating the young greatly appealed to conservative readers, as well as folks aghast that humanities education had changed since they themselves were in school. Identifying the enemy as PC culture also drew in liberal readers who were worried about free speech, open-ended questioning, and what they were told was a new dogmatism infecting the campus. There was a specter haunting colleges in the 1990s, but it was hard to get people too worked up about either easygoing relativists or neo-Marxists. It was easier to spark concerns about intolerance and a new liberal “illiberalism” at our universities. In the early 1990s, Richard Bernstein, a cultural reporter for the New York Times, took a leave from the newspaper to research what he thought of as multiculturalism run amok: how a reasonable movement for civil rights had devolved into a strident, intolerant dogma. The result was The Dictatorship of Virtue (1994), a book meant not “to demonstrate that political correctness is a worse problem than discrimination or prejudice,” but to show that there is “the tendency of the politically correct to lurch into a kind of goody-goody ridiculousness” at best, and narrow-minded intolerance at worst.17 Bernstein’s

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move here becomes a familiar one among middle-aged liberals feeling grumpy about life on campus. They insist that while they support issues like progress in civil rights, access to education, and the like, they are appalled by the virulence, dogmatism, or silliness of specific confl cts that arise in regard to these issues. Bernstein’s title Dictatorship of Virtue is meant to evoke the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, when the good ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity provided cover for a murderous campaign that killed tens of thousands. That bloodbath was led by Maximilien Robespierre, known as the Incorruptible, who famously said that terror is an emanation of virtue. Bernstein sees a parallel “skid” in campus life from good values to terrible actions. Such rhetorical overkill in response to perceived political intolerance at universities was striking at the time; it has become fairly commonplace since. Bernstein found no guillotines as he scoured the country for tales of multiculturalist intolerance, but he did fi d people who were punished for saying things that were deemed offensive (even though it seems no offense was intended). He did fi d that the doctrine of assimilation, in w hich his own forebears had trusted when they came to this country, had been replaced by a celebration of difference. Writing almost thirty years ago, he argued that we didn’t need strong programs to remove barriers to integration for those who had been discriminated against or marginalized in earlier times, claiming that “strident anti-­ immigration sentiments” and “organized nativism” were things of the past.18 While this last claim seems in 2019 to have been rather premature, his prediction that excessive efforts to expose the negative dimensions of American history would produce a backlash to “make America great again” seems right on point. Bernstein’s book appeared at the height of the 1990s PC

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frenzy. In his 1991 commencement address at the University of Michigan, President George H. W. Bush had lambasted misguided radicals who, although they began with a laudable desire to get rid of the vestiges of discrimination, have “soured into a cause of confl ct and even censorship.” Just a couple of years later, President Bill Clinton would tell a crowd of Daniel Patrick Moynihan supporters to avoid political correctness because it undermined discussion and inquiry.19 Journalists and politicians adored fi ding anecdotes of conservative faculty or students who had been victimized by what they called the “McCarthyism of the Left.” Barbara Jordan, the fi st black woman from a southern state elected to the House of Representatives, attacked political correctness in her keynote speech at a Democratic convention: “We honor cultural identity. We always have; we always will. But separatism is not allowed. Separatism is not the American way. We must not allow ideas like political correctness to divide us and cause us to reverse hard-won achievements in human rights and civil rights.”20 As John Wilson points out in his 1995 book The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, there were certainly thorny issues in university life and in the economy in those days, but politicians found it easier to attack the bogeyman of political correctness than to address those complex problems of culture and society.

v At fi st a narrowly used term calling for ideological orthodoxy and then a double-sided label chiding the desire to be orthodox, “political correctness” seemed omnipresent in the 1990s. Everyone was, of course, against it, and so it was a convenient sticker to paste onto your enemies, at least if they were Left of center. The term fell out of fashion for a time but returned with

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a vengeance in the wake of the Great Recession. “After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission,” wrote Jonathan Chait in a 2015 article for New York Magazine. “Now it has returned.”21 Chait, a self-described liberal, was following the playbook from the days of the early “outbreak”: choose a few anecdotes about intolerant radicals and talk to some liberal friends in academia who complain that they are afraid of being denounced by students or colleagues for being insufficiently progressive or for using language that someone might deem offensive. When liberals in a cademia felt outflanked on the Left— e it 1993 or 2014—they took out the old PC moniker. Chait noted, though, that some things had changed. The PC issue was no longer confi ed to campus or critiques of education, and social media had become an amplifying factor in political life. Now writers could be swamped in tweet storms of abuse for writing things that they thought were benignly liberal. These well-meaning folks believed they were themselves progressive, and now they were afraid to speak at all. Chait concludes his article with words that Richard Bernstein could have written: “Political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left- ing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism.” By “liberalism” here Chait apparently means a commitment to civil free exchange within a temperate marketplace of ideas. Attempts to create ideological alignment are indubitably clumsy: attacking them is like a cakewalk. Anybody can do it. Just moan to your friends and colleagues (your in-group) about somebody else being censorious or oversensitive, all the while censoring that person and complaining about being hurt yourself. Just be sure that if you do roll your eyes at a demand

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to say, clean up your language, you do it in t he company of only your in-group. Otherwise, things just get worse. In a world where audience and networks are changing, what if there are folks listening who aren’t amused? Are some African Americans oversensitive about stop-and-frisk, or only about cultural appropriation? Are transgender people thin-skinned if they are concerned with bans against their participation in public life, or only if they call out misgendering? Where does one draw the line, or rather, who gets to draw the line? Because conversations and actions can be observed by broader groups of people, how does one know to whom one is speaking (and who is listening)? In the absence of an in-group constituted by affection or tradition, liberals may discover that, despite their good intentions, they are being criticized from the Left, or at least from the young or other people new to the debate. As one encounters differently diverse groups of people, it doesn’t feel good to be outflanked, and so we see a tendency to respond by calling the newcomers politically correct. In 2010–2012, traditional Republican politicians and think-tank types found themselves in a similar bind, although the energetic enforcement of right-wing orthodoxy wasn’t often labeled political correctness. When the Tea Party went after establishment conservatives who weren’t judged to be authentically conservative, those being attacked felt they were being held to inappropriate ideological standards; they were nonetheless punished in the press and at the polls for compromising with anyone who didn’t share the authentic conservative creed. Groups that have emerged from the Tea Party movement like the congressional Freedom Caucus continue to attempt to enforce alignment to an ideology that once had to do with deficits, but now is more likely to promote antipathy to immigrants, affection for tax cuts, and disdain for expertise or

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“elites.” Litmus tests about cutting taxes or rolling back abortion rights abound on the Right. Even though the label of “PC” is used mostly for the Left, the problem of enforcing ideological purity in our polarized times is not confi ed to liberals.22 Another aspect of the resurgence of PC culture that bothers Chait and other commentators is the emphasis on systems or group identity rather than on a specific person. Since the Enlightenment, the liberal tradition has insisted on the evaluation of individuals, whether in the marketplace of ideas or in the economic marketplace more generally. Those who are part of this tradition chafe at the observation made by many of today’s progressives that individual intentions matter less than the place a person occupies in complex systems of power. Liberals and conservatives alike often respond that they don’t want to be judged only on the basis of their group identity: they want to be judged for who they are, what they do, and what they say—as individuals. From the leftist or progressive perspective, the emphasis on the individual obscures power structures that make it harder for people from disenfranchised groups to operate successfully in society. A pragmatist’s view (like mine) holds that it is unnecessary to make a fundamental choice between these approaches: in some instances it is useful to focus on specific persons and in other instances, for other purposes, it is useful to focus on structures or systems. You don’t have to  repeat the obvious—that these systems don’t fully defi e people—to observe that it’s often easier for a r ich white guy to be heard, or to get something he wants, than it is for a poor woman of color to be heard or to get something she wants. How one should respond to this disparity in specific instances really does divide people, and there is plenty of disagreement even among those who don’t think of themselves as conservative. But responding to such an observation about power differ-

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ences simply by calling it “PC” doesn’t help matters any more than would labeling that response sexist or racist. Well, labeling doesn’t help matters if you are trying to continue a broad conversation, but it works great if your goal is to retreat to the safety of your own group, the company of people who think as you do. The tendency to make these kinds of retreats—whether we call it tribalism or polarization—­ certainly seems to be growing in t he United States, but it is extremely unhealthy for politics and civil society, reducing the possibilities that one might come to some form of compromise through real dialogue. And it is absolutely lethal for institutions of higher education because it means that you would try to learn only from people who share your ideas already— how much can you learn from that? On some college campuses, it has led to attempts to shut down speakers whose views run afoul of the campus mainstream—and to the monitoring of students, staff, and faculty by self-appointed groups eager to seize on any remark that might be judged insensitive, aggressive, or assaultive. These groups see themselves as protecting an environment that claims to value inclusivity while tolerating rhetoric and deeds that accentuate historic marginalization. Since the campus environment also values freedom of expression, tensions naturally arise when one value is placed above the other.

v Wesleyan University has a more intimate relation with the evolution of PC labeling than most schools. Writers and producers of the movie PCU were recent graduates of Wesleyan, and the school’s penchant for youthful radicalism in the 1990s made for an easy target in the popular press (and led to the disaffection of more than a few traditional alumni). In the fall of 2015,

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the campus was thrust back into debates about censorious activists when protests broke out in response to a conservative undergraduate’s op-ed in the student run Wesleyan Argus. Th op-ed was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to say the least, it was not well received. Around the country, and certainly at Wesleyan, there was anger about police killings of African Americans, some of which had been powerfully captured on videotape. Black Lives Matter was a growing political force born of outrage, and supporters were eager to push back against specific instances of police brutality and general patterns of racial injustice. Many on campus were sympathetic to it. This was the context in which student Bryan Stascavage published his op-ed questioning whether Black Lives Matter had rogue members calling for unconscionable violence just as some police forces had rogue cops whose brutality was well documented. His point to his fellow students was that they shouldn’t paint all law enforcement with one brush—just as they wouldn’t want to dismiss Black Lives Matter because of the outrageous statements attributed to some affiliated with the movement. Stascavage was well aware that many on the campus were eager to participate in the movement, and that they would not fi d his point of view congenial. In fact, angry protests erupted against him personally and against the student newspaper. The Wesleyan campus is no stranger to protest and debate. These are part of the university’s traditions. Freedom of speech has long been a focus of scholarly attention and public discussion on our campus. Every year Wesleyan hosts the Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression, whose speakers sometimes provoke protest as well as debate. In 2012, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the Hugo Black lecture, and the next year the speaker was Aharon Barak, president of Israel’s

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supreme court. Although we had vigorous protests at both events, the speakers had their say and the talks were followed by animated discussion. More or less what we expected—and wanted. But the uproar over the 2015 op-ed in the Argus took everyone aback. The editors doubtless thought the op-ed would spark real conversations—the kind that make newspapers a vital part of so many communities’ cultural ecology. But the editors got more than they bargained for. Some students argued that the essay was racist (I don’t think it was) or at least that it participated in systems of racist domination (what doesn’t?). Activists made the important point that opinion pieces like these could facilitate the ongoing marginalization of a sector of our student population, and they angrily accused the Argus of contributing to that marginalization. But what was the appropriate response to a newspaper article one found offensive? I was very glad these important issues were made public— however forcefully. Indeed, I fi st underestimated the level of anger on the campus, though I have always thought that angry debate is preferable to no debate at all. Those who think they favor free speech but call for civility in all discussions forget that battles for freedom of expression are seldom conducted in a privileged atmosphere of upper-class decorum. Unfortunately, in addition to sparking conversation, the op-ed also generated angry name calling and demands to punish the newspaper. Some students made a p oint of throwing copies of the free paper in the garbage, which was largely a symbolic protest since the Argus is readily accessible online. Protests against news­ papers, of course, are also protected speech, but destroying copies and demanding public apologies from news sources that publish controversial opinions could easily have a chilling effect on future expression. Amid this campus unrest, I sent out an all-campus message entitled “Black Lives Matter and So

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Does Free Speech” that I f elt would be a s alutary reminder about the issues at stake. Some received my message as an invitation to direct their anger at me rather than the author of the op-ed or the newspaper. Here is an excerpt of my message: Debates can raise intense emotions, but that doesn’t mean that we should demand ideological conformity because people are made uncomfortable. As members of a un iversity community, we always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended. We certainly have no right to harass people because we don’t like their views. Censorship diminishes true diversity of thinking; vigorous debate enlivens and instructs.23 Many students (I think the great majority) quickly realized that it would be unwise to attack a news source because of an opinion piece it published. They also realized that funding a single newspaper for the campus raised questions about representativeness and inclusion. Why were there few (if any) students of color working at the paper? Who should decide if a student’s article was publishable if not the student editors? Some undergraduates worked hard to fi ure out how to bring more perspectives to the public through less-expensive publications without undermining the traditional newspaper. They advocated creating new digital news sources that would allow students from groups traditionally not represented at the Argus to fi d an audience. Unfortunately for those concerned with the image of the university, many of these student discussions took place under the spotlight of the national press. I was struck by the asymmetry of concern as journalists became very agitated about

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attacks on a s chool newspaper while newsrooms across the country with audiences of millions were seeing their budgets slashed and their editorial autonomy threatened. Was it just easier to attract attention with a story about political correctness on campus than with reporting on how journalism itself was in danger of becoming a casualty of technology and profit seeking? At a time when individual freedom and political participation were fading under surveillance and the new normal of extreme inequality, undergrads angry about an op-ed were getting an awful lot of attention. At a t ime when legislators were calling for arming college students to make them safer, the press seemed more concerned by the “dangers” posed by political correctness to student freedom. Almost everyone at Wesleyan, including the Argus editors, recognized the benefits of encouraging different forms of diversity, but still it was the students raising issues about the representativeness of a mostly white college newspaper staff who were zoomed in on by journalists and stuck with the PC label.24 A campus free from violence is an absolute necessity for a true education, but a campus free from challenge and confrontation would be anathema to it. We must not protect ourselves from disagreement; we must be open to being offended for the sake of learning, and we must be ready to give offense so as to create new opportunities for thinking. Students, faculty, and administrators want our campuses to be free and safe, but we also acknowledge that the imperatives of freedom and safety are sometimes in confl ct. I don’t want to sound naive about these issues; confrontations on campuses can sometimes be dramatic. Conversations about race and about the economy, about bias and sexual assault, about jobs and the shrinking middle class . . . all tend to involve strong emotions, intense language, and sometimes, bruised feelings. People do get “called

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out” for their supposed racism or general privilege, and this can seem to them unfair or just painful. As a result, some people will complain that they don’t want to speak up because they fear being “criticized” or “stigmatized.” These people should recognize that their fear isn’t a sign of the environment’s political correctness or hostility toward free expression; it’s just a sign that they need more courage. Debates on campuses can get nasty, but compared to what one sees on the national political stage, I feel pretty good about the ability of college communities to tolerate confl ct. I hope there are other places in America today where arguments about important issues are taking place among people from different backgrounds, and where the conclusions aren’t set in advance. However painful this may be at times, it is important that these conversations are happening on our campuses. Education worthy of the name is not safe but risky because it challenges our beliefs. Education worthy of the name hides behind neither a veneer of civility nor the pose of combating PC c ulture. On today’s campuses, this challenge may come from deeper investigation of conservative and religious traditions—from bodies of thought and modes of inquiry that confront the liberal, secular status quo. Or it may come from recognizing that many of our ideas are just conventional, no matter how “radical” we think those ideas might be. We learn most when we are ready to consider challenges to our views from outside our comfort zones of political affiliation and personal ties. Most people need to feel “safe enough” to consider alternatives to the beliefs of their community, but growing accustomed to agreement with one’s beliefs breeds complacency— not learning. By the end of the 2015–2016 academic year, and months after the national press had moved on to the next PC hot spot,

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students at Wesleyan came to an agreement on how to maintain their newspaper’s editorial autonomy while ensuring that it continues to be open to publishing a variety of views. Issues of how best to engage writers from diverse segments of the student body were broadly discussed, and at the very least, there was increased awareness of how inclusion at an educational institution required an affirming hospitality, a willingness to welcome disputation and even to tolerate offense.

v In 2015 the American presidential campaign was under way, and the Republican candidates competing in t he primaries often positioned themselves in opposition to the activist types getting lots of attention on college campuses. At the beginning of that school year, The Atlantic published a widely discussed article that reframed the conversation about political correctness in a powerful way. The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, see themselves as liberals of a sort—Lukianoff with a libertarian tilt and Haidt as more of a center-Left Democrat. Lukianoff, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a passionate advocate for freedom of speech. He and his organization proudly defend anyone in higher education whose First Amendment rights have been compromised by some facet of their institution. Haidt is a social psychologist interested in how moral perspectives on the world “bind and blind,” how they create both bonds of solidarity and patterns of exclusion. Their article “The Coddling of the American Mind” was one of the most popular, or at least most widely read, in the history of the magazine, and within a few years they had turned it into a bestselling book with the same title. It’s a book that fits a pattern we have seen before. Middle-­ aged authors fi d the ways of college students to be alien, and

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this makes them feel out of touch, unsympathetic to the young. In the late 1960s, Ronald Reagan built his political career in California on his hostility to the ungrateful, un-American radicals protesting on Berkeley’s campus. In the 1980s, Allan Bloom transformed himself from isolated, mandarin professor to bestselling conservative scold by excoriating students for their addiction to rock music and deafness to the higher pleasures of Straussian contemplation. By the 1990s, it was common knowledge that you could attract a cr owd of supporters by attacking political correctness, and in recent years we have seen that anyone with access to a keyboard or a microphone can fi d an audience by complaining about it. This is the context for Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind.25 The marketable title, assigned to them by a savvy editor at The Atlantic, was meant to evoke Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Both books attempt to bring what Lukianoff and Haidt call “wisdom and its opposite” to light through a critical appraisal of what has gone wrong in higher education. For Bloom, wisdom was contained in the questions considered by the Great Books of the Western Tradition, books he feared were no longer studied with seriousness in the age of triumphant multiculturalism and philistine social science. In a move that would have made Bloom ill, Lukianoff and Haidt fi d “the modern embodiment of . . . ancient wisdom” in c ognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).26 Cognitive behavioral therapy, at least for the purposes of Coddling, is centered on learning a set of techniques that helps one counter unproductive thought processes. When you are aware of a tendency to let your emotions run away with you, CBT teaches you how to guide those emotions back under control, or at least to not make decisions in the heat of passion.

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When you are aware of a tendency to feel helpless in the face of people who are pushing back against your ideas, CBT helps you tap into your intellectual and personal resources. Young people today feel fragile, according to Lukianoff and Haidt. And it’s not just the kids’ fault. The authors tell a tale of overprotective parents eager to make everything safe for their offspring and young people unable to learn from their mistakes because they’ve been shielded from ever making any. “Safetyism” is a s ymptom of the “paranoid parenting styles” that the authors claim reached a peak in the 1990s. It’s a claim reminiscent of the conservatives’ put-down of 1960s radicals as products of overly permissive childrearing practices. Every age seems to have its own response to the previous generation’s supposedly poor childrearing, and Lukianoff and Haidt respond to safetyism by singing the praises of popular websites about free-range kids and supporting the current fashion of making playgrounds a little riskier.27 Coddling does an excellent job of reminding readers how the assumption of fragility can be disempowering. But are students today disempowered because they’ve been convinced they are fragile, or are they feeling vulnerable because they are facing truly nasty problems like climate change and massive inequality? Is the parenting style among middle-class families really paranoid, or are parents recognizing that the middle class is being eroded by economic policies that steer more and more wealth to fewer and fewer people? Are the millions of young people suffering from opioid addiction connected to helicopter parents, too? Are historically marginalized groups feeling absurdly risk averse, or are they appropriately wary of an American population that can be energized by racist demagogues engaging in abusive scapegoating? Lukianoff and Haidt don’t answer these questions but in-

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stead rehearse the by-now familiar litany of campus demonstrations allowed to spiral into disruption and violence. The 2017 riots in Berkeley are in the book, as is the nasty nonsense of censorious protestors trying to protect their campuses from unpopular ideas at selective liberal arts colleges. The admin­ istrators and faculty at Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, and Evergreen colleges recently seemed unprepared for their students’ willingness to abandon basic principles of free speech in efforts to prevent people on campus from being heard. These are well-worn examples of truly bad things happening, but it is misleading to paint them either as typical or as evidence that America is much more polarized today than ever before. There are certainly university employees who have been treated unfairly by protestors, but Lukianoff and Haidt up the ante on the 1990s rhetorical overkill by framing these incidents with the title “Witch Hunts” and including a brief discussion of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Millions of people were murdered in the Cultural Revolution; Lukianoff and Haidt describe employees who suffered career disruption, sometimes balanced with severance payments. In the effort to grow Coddling from a popular article into a popular book, the authors engage in what they (in another context) label as a mistake in thinking: “catastrophizing.” They turn their target phenomenon into something dramatic, urgent, and very new by utilizing the work of popular psychologist Jean Twenge, creator of the label “iGen.” Twenge used the label in diagnosing the cohort of young people born after 1995. The iGen phenomenon, too, was announced in the Atlantic, and books followed before long.28 Lukianoff and Haidt latch onto this label in characterizing the young people who arrived on campuses after 2013 as having been deprived of play, overwhelmed by anxious parents, and generally deformed into iso-

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lated, anxious addicts of social media. This is a decline even from those born into the cohort that Twenge previously tarred in a popular book as “Generation Me,” which is not to be confused with the “me Generation,” an appellation used to disparage boomers in any number of publications. Clearly the tendency to chastise the young cuts across multiple generations. It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss what Lukianoff and Haidt call the “Great Untruths” and “explanatory threads” as only so much hype dressed in CBT social scientism. The authors are right to push back hard against the cultivation of fragility and victimhood, and they are right to defend free speech as essential to the mission of higher education. I, too, have met undergraduates who tell me their parents tried too hard to protect them, and that social media almost destroyed their lives in common during some period of their schooling. Professors and students shouldn’t be afraid to express themselves, make mistakes, and fi d better ways of thinking and living through passionate disputation. There is a grand American tradition of creating “moral dependency,” an appeal to someone with authority to enforce your moral code—a tendency that one sees when campus protestors, say, demand the hiring of a d ean to lead social justice efforts. Lukianoff and Haidt go beyond simple chastisement of the young in pointing out the dangers of cultivated fragility and dependency by suggesting some practices that might correct the sorry state of affairs, practices that they believe have been validated in assessments of cognitive behavioral therapy. They want to be seen not as moralists but as pragmatists with three constructive, self-empowering lessons: seek out challenges that may feel unsafe; free yourself from cognitive distortions; take a generous view of other people.29 No argument here. William Deresiewicz is another popular diagnostician of

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what’s wrong with college students today. “Excellent sheep,” he called them in his wildly popular article in the New Republic and later in Excellent Sheep, the book.30 No movie yet. Deresiewicz’s target wasn’t PC culture, per se, at least not initially. Deresiewicz was more concerned with how young students, especially those in prestigious universities, were discovering that what they wanted most to do in life was make a l ot of money. Smart kids were becoming excellent sheep as they accepted that the only thing for a smart adult to do was to follow the well-beaten paths to corporate success. Colleges and universities were abetting this conformism by steering students to become consultants and bankers. Excellent Sheep appeared in 2014, and the tale it tells is chilling. Bright and hardworking students enter the most selective schools with a wide variety of dreams about what they want to do after graduation, only to become more and more homogeneous by the time they graduate. Look down the rows on graduation day at elite universities and colleges, Deresiewicz tells us, and two of three seniors are likely aspiring to be bankers or consultants. They just don’t know what else to do, because they’ve been trained always to go for the most prestigious prize. They’ve been taught that what matters can be measured, and money is easy to measure. As one of his sources put it: “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.” Deresiewicz argues that we have created an educational system in which young people are encouraged to conform, not to think. By training students to become better test takers and résumé builders, we create citizens less capable of thinking against the grain. While this is not a primary concern of Lukianoff and Haidt, conformism and PC culture among coddled activists do have something important in common: the desire

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for the reinforcement that comes from agreeing with everyone who matters to you. Political correctness played almost no role in Excellent Sheep (published about a year before Lukianoff and Haidt’s article and the controversies around Chait’s polemic against the resurgence of the PC social justice warrior), but Deresiewicz did not want to be completely left behind. Two years later in the American Scholar, he published his own scathing account of the inanities of PC culture. Despite (or perhaps because of) the controversies around his writing on the supposed campus herd mentality, Deresiewicz received many invitations to colleges and universities to speak. Campuses seemed eager to have an independent scholar come to tell them how little independence there was at their schools. Along with a writing class at Scripps College, these experiences provided him with anecdotes for his American Scholar piece. The assumption on selective campuses, he writes, “is not only that we are in full possession of the truth, but that we are in full possession of virtue.” Like Richard Bernstein in the 1990s, he reaches for bloody historical analogies: “regimes of virtue tend to eat their children. Think of Salem. They tend to turn upon themselves, since ­everybody wants to be the holiest.” But Deresiewicz isn’t just complaining about violations of free speech—or just insisting on the right to be regarded as an individual rather than only a  member of a g roup. He believes that beneath the core PC dogma of breaking down the power of dominant groups lies the same religion of success that turned creative, inquiring students into domesticated beasts: Political correctness is a fig eaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. It provides a moral

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cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed. . . . The moral commitments of the fi st (which are often transient in any case) are safely isolated from the second.31 If we believe Deresiewicz, colleges and universities are in worse shape than we thought. We not only get echoes of totalitarian group-think in the activists’ commitment to a dogma of supporting the oppressed, we get its opposite—the celebration of making money as the only true success. Deresiewicz does the rhetorical trick quickly so the reader may be undisturbed by the lack of any logical connections between the bogeymen of PC culture and the villain of neoliberalism. Is it that PC culture treats all moral questions as settled, and so one just joins the neoliberal herd aiming to make as much money as possible? Or does the term “herd” just mean that young people tend to think like other young people? Deresiewicz seems to be saying that the students he encountered weren’t serious about their political advocacy (it’s just a “fig leaf ”) and that they were happy to isolate their politics from their pursuit of economic success. One might say that this makes them already like older generations of Americans. Might it also be that both “PC culture” and “neoliberalism” are easy tags for commentators to affix o things they don’t like? Donald Trump is only the most vulgar and powerful of those willing to say that “political correctness is killing our country.” Yes, the fi st President Bush criticized PC censoriousness and Barack Obama admonished against PC closed-­ mindedness; they are among many politicians who have criticized political correctness as a vehicle for defending free speech. But it was Donald Trump who was willing to use this

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criticism to legitimate his own outrageous statements. As cultural historian Moira Weigel has noted: Every time Trump said something “outrageous” commentators suggested he had fi ally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.32 If some of Trump’s supporters were put off by his comments about groping women, about Mexican immigrants as rapists, or about banning entry to the United States from Muslim countries, most have proved willing to disregard particular utterances in favor of the idea that their candidate was really speaking his mind, refusing to buckle under to those who would censor others. Trump has been able to ride the wave of opinion that sees free speech always under threat—because politically correct elites always stand ready to ostracize ordinary people just speaking their minds. And in Trump’s world, the words “politically correct” are often followed by the word “elites,” allowing everyday folks to identify with the everyman billionaire who courageously violates the rules. Whether he was attacking a judge of Mexican descent or the Muslim parents of a fallen American soldier, Trump got away with pointing to his own ability to go uncensored by elites as evidence of his great bond with regular Americans. For many Trump supporters, whether they agreed with what Trump was saying or

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not mattered less than his willingness to say things that establishment types said were off limits. Indeed, in a f ascinating experiment, political psychologists showed that even people who were predisposed toward Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals tilted toward Trump if they were primed with talk about PC culture. Just being reminded of the norms to “not be offensive to particular groups” gave people the inclination to violate those very norms! No wonder so many folks felt a connection to a candidate who basked in those violations. “Support for Donald Trump,” the experimenters conclude, “was in part the result of over-exposure to PC norms.”33 When political correctness has loomed large in the popular imagination, it has been easy to predict that critics of its mores will sprout up to scold campus cultures for being sanctimonious, totalitarian, oversensitive, or in Lukianoff and Haidt’s compelling phrase, suffering from “vindictive protectiveness.”34 Before the ascent of Donald Trump, it was hard to imagine that a presidential candidate would be able to deflect all questions about his personal and business dealings with the response that he refused to be politically correct. PC culture had become such a bogeyman that one could use attacks on it as a vehicle to (at least rhetorically) violate even the most sacrosanct of norms. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” Trump famously declared at a campaign rally in Iowa, “and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” The candidate shrugged off the offensive brutality of this sentence (uttered less than a couple of months after a mass shooting in San Bernardino) by taking the posture of refusing to be “silenced” by the political correctness that is “killing our country.” Since the 1990s, professors and other pundits have gained fame and sold books by shooting fish in the PC barrel. Their opposition to youth culture appealed to readers for whom youth was a mem-

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ory, but their criticism of the young never violated the norms of grown-up civility. That would surely have seemed to them self-defeating. Donald Trump proved that logic wrong to stunning effect—jettisoning adult decorum as he fanned the flames of middle-class resentment of multiculturalism, political correctness, and elites. That resentment had been building for generations. As philosopher Richard Rorty noted in 1992: “A large portion of the American middle class has been brought to believe that the universities are under the control of a ‘political correctness’ police.” Rorty went on to ironically note that “this belief has made it possible for the racists, the sexists and the homophobes to dismiss criticism by sneering: ‘Gosh. You mean my political correctness indoctrination isn’t advanced enough?’”35 In our time that sneer has become the regular expression of the president of the United States. The champion warrior against political correctness could always cry “witch hunt” and be confide t that his supporters would never identify with the enemy. They would never think of themselves as “PC.” Of course, nobody ever has.

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ust as nobody pins the politically correct label on themselves, so nobody in higher education today renounces the principle of free speech. Sure, there are many who support limitations on what can be said in particular situations, but I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe that the right to express oneself is important. Why then are there so many free speech controversies on college campuses, controversies that either echo or animate national debates? Perhaps it has something to do with the arguments, from small campuses to the nation’s highest courts, over which actions count as speech to be protected, and which count as actions with consequences that should be avoided or prohibited. One might expect that for educational institutions, the desire for diversity and the desire for free speech would be compatible. After all, the benefits of having students from different walks of life are activated only when those students express the import of those differences. How can students learn from differences if they don’t know what they are? The benefits

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of diversity would also be sharply reduced if the only students able to express themselves are from the same demographic group. You would just have an echo chamber. And if you had absolute freedom of speech but no diversity of opinion, you would still have an echo chamber—only louder. Tensions between diversity and free speech arise on campus when talk about diversity tends toward inclusion and talk about free speech tends toward the harm that speech can cause. When people claim that they don’t feel included in an institution (or a community) because of things that are said, those blamed for saying those things may feel they are being silenced. Those who claimed not to be included (or to be marginalized) often will say they, too, are being silenced by the actions and words legitimated by an institution. Loud and repeated complaints about being silenced have become a regular, if paradoxical, part of campus culture. As paradoxical, I suppose, as FOX News complaining about conservative voices being silenced by the mainstream media. Nationally, there has been a dramatic expansion, by the courts and in the culture more generally, in the kinds of actions considered relevant to free speech. Most notably, the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 deemed campaign contributions by corporations worthy of free speech protection. Justice Kennedy in his majority opinion argued that corporations are entitled to free speech protections and that these protections allow for fuller participation in the political process. Fuller participation in that process requires spending, and if the First Amendment is to have any real meaning, it must protect the right to spend regardless of who is doing it. Corporations, or any association of individuals, cannot be made subject to special rules limiting their speech. To the objection that large corporations would overwhelm the participation of the

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public in the political process with their ability to dominate the airwaves, the majority was content with Justice Scalia’s formulation: “There is no such thing as too much speech.”1 In the eight years since the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court has had more occasions to fi d violations of First Amendment rights. In Janus v. AFSCME, the Court overturned the policy in twenty-two states that allowed for the collection of collective bargaining fees for public service unions from all employees whether they were members of the union or not; the argument was that such a charge was a violation of nonmembers’ free speech rights. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, underscored that “fundamental free speech rights are at stake” because nonmembers are not just paying for workplace benefits but might also be unintentionally supporting the union’s political work. “Significant impingement on First Amendment rights’” occurs when public employees are required to provide fi ancial support for a un ion that “takes many positions during collective bargaining that have powerful political and civic consequences.”2 Justice Kagan’s powerful dissent in t he Janus case accused the majority of fi ding a way to support the anti-union policy position, which it wanted to prevail, rather than ruling on the legal issue at hand. She went on to accuse conservatives of “weaponizing” the First Amendment in order to overrule policy decisions made by state legislators: Today is not the fi st time the Court has used the First Amendment in such an aggressive way. And it threatens not to be the last. Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it). For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy af-

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fects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long.3 The decision that people should not be forced to support speech (union activity) with which they don’t agree followed a ruling that a b aker shouldn’t be coerced into providing a w edding cake to a same-sex couple intending to be married. The nonunion members can reject fees (even if t hey benefit from a contract that the union negotiates), and the baker can refuse to serve potential customers on the basis of their identities. The union dues and the wedding cake are taken as forms of speech, and ever since Thomas Jefferson, courts have recognized that it is a violation of the First Amendment when speech is positively coerced or negatively censored. Kagan argued in her dissent that if all human activities get coded as speech, then no regulations will be permitted for any public policy goals that states and their citizens decide are worthwhile.4 In the wake of the Citizens United ruling, law professor Kathleen Sullivan observed that there were two major concepts of free speech in contention: the fi st saw freedom of speech as serving political equality; the second saw freedom of speech as serving political liberty.5 In recent years, many have remarked on how conservatives have become powerful advocates of a broad defi ition of free speech, one emphasizing that individuals and associations should not be restricted by censorship or coerced into participation. Conservatives have adopted a libertarian view of speech and political freedom. After consumer rights organizations won a victory (in Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council) confi ming the rights of pharmacists to publicize the prices of medications (to the initial dismay of drug companies), commercial organizations recognized that a free speech argument for their “expres-

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sions” to consumers could be very powerful. The corporate world may have lost in this case against Ralph Nader and his ilk, but now it had a new weapon at its disposal—free speech arguments—to use in protecting commercial interests. Whereas traditional conservatives had urged First Amendment protection for explicitly political speech only, the libertarian view sought protection for all kinds of communication; and as this school of thought has ascended, those most interested in promoting equality have come to view free speech as a threat rather than a support. As feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon puts it: “Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly ­become a weapon of the powerful.”6 “Among its victims,” observes legal scholar Louis Seidman, are “proponents of campaign fi ance reform, opponents of cigarette addiction, the L.B.G.T.Q. community, labor unions, animal rights advocates, environmentalists, targets of hate speech and abortion providers.”7 Conservatives tend to see the liberal “fl p-flop” on free speech as a result of the Left’s selective approach to individual liberty and fairness. Liberals are upset, they believe, because the First Amendment’s protections are now being used by those who don’t want to go along with the Left’s view of what counts as progress. How have these legal debates impacted the quality of expression on college campuses? Surveys show that more than 70 percent of college students believe offensive speech should be subject to disciplinary action, but we have to wonder what the subjects of the survey understood “offensive” and “speech”— to say nothing of “disciplinary action”—to mean.8 Other surveys show that young people in general and college students in particular have a greater commitment to freedom of expression than do older generations. So much depends on what one

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imagines the speech to be and who gains or is harmed by it. Are we offering protection to a provocative political point of view, or protection to a p owerless person against assaultive speech? Many students do not accept the view that neither the content of speech nor the identity of the speaker should matter; they are skeptical of the commitment to having one set of procedures for all people (or organizations) no matter what the context. What looks like procedural fairness to some looks like the defense of privilege to others. People can feel differently about the right of the dissident to satirize the dictator, the right of the corporation to express itself by giving money to a candidate who promotes deregulation, and the right of the radically libertarian organization to make available on the internet directions for making an untraceable gun on a 3D printer.9 Many college students are well aware of how the concept of free speech is being used to advance a conservative agenda on the national level. They are suspicious of any acontextual appeal to pure principle and want to know more about the ideologies or goals of those who make such appeals. This lack of commitment to the content-neutral principle of free speech is appalling to some, and they now have another reason to join in the familiar chorus of complaints about young people today. Academic leaders who bemoan the failure of students to recognize the enduring value of the First Amendment have argued that free speech is not only an essential value for any democracy; it is the value on which all other democratic values depend. (Of course, there are citizens who make that argument about the Second Amendment, too, but that’s another story.) These democratic values are aligned with educational values: freedom of inquiry is as essential to education as the ability to express political ideas is to democracy. Which is not to say that this has always been so. In the early nineteenth century, col-

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leges were characterized by “doctrinal moralism,” and Geoffrey Stone, former provost and dean of the law school at the University of Chicago, sees their transition to advocating for freedom of expression as key to their becoming more rational, more scientific. While freedom of speech was at times curtailed at universities—during political crises, for example—the path of progress is the path of greater academic freedom, by which Stone means the path toward unfettered speech at institutions of higher education.10 Advocates for unfettered speech are often following the “free market” approach: just as more competition in the economic marketplace makes it more likely that goods and services improve, so more competition in t he “marketplace of ideas” makes it more likely that better theories and practices are developed. According to this way of thinking, the cure for offensive, hurtful talk should be “more speech,” not the regulation of speech. It is through more speech that avenues for social change and scientific advances are created. It is through more speech that bigoted attitudes about minority groups are changed. More speech means both more inquiry and more debate, the combination of which should help dispel bad ideas and solidify better ones. Free speech, in this view, is the fuel for progress, bending the arc of history toward prosperity, understanding, and justice. As a teacher and president of a university, I fi d much to agree with in the free market approach to campus speech. In the words of Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago: Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the condi-

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tions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom. Gray’s statement is quoted in the University of Chicago’s Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, a report that has led to the “Chicago Statement,” a f ree speech manifesto embraced by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and by many colleges and universities across the country. The report was released in 2015, a time when many campuses were perceived as having experienced a chilling effect on discourse; together with the published “Chicago principles,” it has served to identify this specific university with an embrace of free speech that plays well in the higher education marketplace.11 I share the concern that many college students today are too open to restrictions on discourse; they fail to recognize that such restrictions have often been used by those in authority to censor those who are trying to create social change. They are too quick to ask an institutional authority to step in to curtail certain forms of speech they fi d hurtful; they are too ready to demand that community members be trained to use only certain kinds of language. I’ve experienced all this fi sthand as a university president. A few years ago, an anti-affirmative-­ action group on campus followed a national template in orchestrating an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” at the university center. The political theater was to sell cupcakes to white people at a h igher price than to members of under-represented groups. Some students of color came to my office to demand that the bake sale be closed down and the students punished. I told them that, in my judgment, however offended they were by the bake sale, the university center wasn’t any less safe for

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them because of it. There is a difference between being made uncomfortable by obnoxious analogies and being made unsafe by intimidating threats. I also emphasized that it wasn’t the job of administrators to make their political arguments for them. The students were not pleased, but they fi ured out how to make their own arguments heard. Some argue that universities should never restrict the expression of ideas. Stone has long defended this view from his Chicago perch, as have Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, administrators at the University of California and authors of Free Speech on Campus (2017). These academic leaders at UC Berkeley note their own “instinctive distrust of efforts by authorities to suppress speech” and glorify the fi st years of the Free Speech Movement a half-century ago on their campus. There is a t ouch of self-righteousness in t heir proclamation that “if you value social order and conformity more highly than you value liberty and democracy, then you will not support free speech no matter what else we say.”12 The free market approach to speech embraces content neutrality, but its commitment to pure principle can itself be a form of dogmatism. To fi d justifications for this fundamentalist approach to freedom of expression, Chemerinsky and Gillman look to the past. “History demonstrates,” they write with abandon, “that there is no way to defi e an unacceptable, punishment-worthy idea without putting genuinely important new thinking and societal critique at risk.”13 Stone has much the same view: “History shows that suppression of speech breeds suppression of speech. If today I am permitted to silence those whose views I fi d distasteful, I have then opened the door to allow others down the road to silence me.”14 Most defenders of  the free market approach rely on these kinds of “slippery slope” arguments: if any idea is regulated, all ideas are at risk

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for future regulation. The poet John Milton, who famously argued that individual opinions must be allowed to flourish if we are to pursue truth, is often appealed to in this regard (including on multiple occasions by the Supreme Court). But as Stanley Fish has devilishly pointed out, Milton defended diversity of opinion—among Protestants. Not among Catholics: “them we extirpate,” Milton wrote.15 If there is a slippery slope, we are always already on it. Fish and others have underscored that defenses of free speech always exclude something. For Milton, it was Catholics. For us today, it might be child pornography or incitements to violence. Usually, the exclusions can be enforced informally by social or professional pressure (appeals to civility, ostracism), but borders for acceptable speech also get codified in rules and regulations. And there are always borders. Even the most fervent advocates for the individual liberty approach to speech recognize that the marketplace of ideas on campus needs some regulation. Harassing speech can be punished, they aver, but only if true harassment is taking place. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s version of the Chicago principles, for example, reads like this: The freedom to debate and discuss the merits of competing ideas does not, of course, mean that ­individuals may say whatever they wish, wherever they wish. [INSTITUTION] may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of [INSTITUTION].16

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But judgments about defamation, harassment, and “genuine threats” are also political judgments about discrimination, history, and power. Chemerinsky and Gillman write that “speech should be subject to punishment if it causes a reasonable person to fear for his or her safety,” but they insist that only physical safety counts.17 This judgment about what really counts as harm is also political. Making judgments about harassment (behaviors intended to disturb or upset) is something professors and administrators have to do on a regular basis, and they don’t always conclude that when it comes to protection from harm, only physical safety counts. Does this mean they are sliding down the slippery slope leading to conformism or to authoritarian control of expression? Like most advocates for unfettered freedom of expression on campus, Chemerinsky and Gillman assume that their fervent commitment is compatible with trying to “protect the learning experience of all students.” Stone, for his part, acknowledges that “the costs of free speech will fall most heavily on those who feel the most marginalized and unwelcome,” adding with almost startling tone deafness, “all of us feel that way sometimes.”18 But the University of Chicago leader is adamant that civility, not censorship, be the path forward. Universities should help minorities and the disenfranchised “learn how to speak up, how to respond effectively, how to challenge those whose attitudes, whose words, and whose beliefs offend and appall them.” In other words, if universities, rather than creating filters for particular ideas and speakers, encourage everyone to speak up, everyone will benefit. This is reminiscent of the view that the Citizens United decision protects American democracy for all citizens. In both cases, the suffering of particular groups due to the unequal distribution of power and resources is acknowledged, but the acknowledgment is followed by ex-

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pressions of faith that this inequality is best dealt with through the uncensored mechanisms of the marketplace of ideas. It is not usually the subtleties of First Amendment jurisprudence that lead university officials to appeal to core principles of free speech; usually it’s the need to respond to highly publicized disinvitations or disruptions of speakers on campus. When sociologist Charles Murray was prevented from speaking (and was subsequently attacked) at Middlebury College in 2017, the incident received national coverage. The undergraduate protestors who thought they were on the front lines of struggle in attacking Milquetoast Murray played into the hands of hypocritical handwringers who chose to see the threat to free speech coming from the shouts of students rather than, say, the efforts by powerful interests at the national level to intimidate journalists, undermine factual integrity, and reduce access to information. Granted, targeting undergraduates is a lot easier (and safer) than trying to wrestle with government officials who refer to the press as the “enemy of the people” and news they don’t like as “fake.” Naturally, although Murray also spoke at many other schools that year without incident, it was the Middlebury story that grabbed headlines and ran in hundreds of media outlets across the country. Around the same time, Franklin and Marshall College invited its own controversial speaker, Flemming Rose, to deliver a talk about the lessons learned when he published cartoons of the prophet Muhammed in a Danish newspaper. Here, too, students were angry that their school was sponsoring a t alk by someone who not only had ideas with which they disagreed, but also, they felt, was attacking a core dimension of their personal identities. There were protests at F&M, as well, but thanks to good pre-event discussions, the protestors waited for the speech to end, then posed their ques-

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tions and made their own statements. This protest got some coverage, to be sure, but only a fraction of the national attention that the protestors at Middlebury received. The F&M story didn’t get the attention because it didn’t fit the “young people are so politically correct” narrative. Those who invest in that narrative reap political dividends when they respond to student protests of speakers by calling for stricter adherence to core principles of free speech, by which they mean that anybody who wants to say something on a college campus should be able to say it without being interrupted. In fact, regulated speech is part and parcel of the academic enterprise. In “Free Speech Is Not an Academic Value,” Stanley Fish observes that universities place a number of filters on free speech: you must be certified in order to teach; you must be reviewed by peers and editors in order to publish; when you make bad arguments, you are shut down. The classroom has never been an unregulated market, and neither are scientific laboratories or academic journals. They all have procedures to ensure that tools of inquiry are used in a legitimate way to advance work in a p articular area, and there are judgments to be made by those with qualifications about what counts as legitimate.19 When university liberals try to shore up support for free speech on campus, they are far more likely to talk about Berkeley in t he 1960s than they are to discuss either the Citizens United ruling or the importance of equity and inclusion. When they wax eloquent about the Free Speech movement and People’s Park, they rarely repeat the powerful words of its leader, the man of that moment, Mario Salvo: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and

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upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”20 It wasn’t civility this leftist icon of free speech was calling for; it was passionate disruption. Those who wave the flag for “free speech on campus” are generally convinced that the regulation of content, even when the intention is to protect the vulnerable, puts us on a path to authoritarian censorship. But the call for the free exchange of ideas no matter what the cost to “some people” doesn’t resonate with most college students who recognize that not all ideas make it to the market and that when one claims to be tolerant of all kinds of discourse, certain groups of people tend to get hurt again and again. As legal theorist Jeremy Waldron and others have noted, hate speech tends to fi d targets among groups that have long suffered from discrimination and worse.21 When markets are unregulated, real pollution, real harm, occurs— and it tends to wound groups that historically have been vulnerable. Over the past several years, the pollution has often come from right-wing provocateurs who come to speak at institutions of higher learning to add credence and energy to racist, homophobic, and sexist attitudes and practices. This dynamic increases in intensity as harmful effects are repeated. When those in positions of authority insist that this is not real harm because it’s not physical violence, or when First Amendment fundamentalists opine that “all of us” sometimes feel marginalized, it is no wonder that many students see the ideology of market deregulation at the heart of free speech dogmatism. They have learned, because they have experienced, that power matters in regard to speech as well as other things.

v The idea of a “safe space” is another favorite target of those demanding free speech on campus. Easily caricatured or ridiculed,

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safe spaces can seem like an extreme form of what Lukianoff and Haidt call “vindictive protectionism,” because they carve out areas in which certain people or certain kinds of speech are forbidden. To be sure, there are pointed examples of counterproductive catering to students feeling disappointed or stressed. Instead of teaching young people to fi d resources in  themselves to ward off chagrin and anxiety, some school officials offer handholding, beanbags, and puppies. This is of a piece with the climbing walls, lazy rivers, and gut courses that cater to those who don’t attend college for the academics. Administrators and teachers alike can be tempted to infantilize students, or to treat them as consumers who must be kept happy at all costs. Doing so can be a lot more convenient than allowing students to learn the hard way that life can be challenging (even in college) and that they have to fi ure out how to meet those challenges. A safe space, though, doesn’t have to be a place of pampering and overprotecting. The idea of safe spaces has been traced back to Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of social psychology. Shortly after World War II, Lewin was asked to help corporations discover from their employees what might be done to promote positive change at work. How could these enterprises get honest answers from workers who were worried about speaking the truth to someone with control over their careers?22 Lewin’s idea was to create “safe spaces” in which employees could speak honestly without fear of retribution or retaliation. A corporation would get useful feedback only if its employees were sure that they were not going to become targets. Which is not to say their ideas would be protected from challenge. As long as it was the idea being challenged and not the person expressing it, the space would be deemed safe. No puppies here, not even immunity from criticism—only the feel-

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ing that one can speak one’s mind without being attacked. Indeed, as the “safe space” moved from the corporate setting to the therapeutic one, a key benefit was being able to more easily change one’s mind, to “unfreeze,” if one felt safe enough to entertain criticism and alternative ideas. Such environments allowed one to “reexamine many cherished assumptions about oneself and one’s relations to others,” Irvin Yalom concluded in adopting Lewin to group psychotherapy. Members of such groups “must experience the group as a safe refuge within which it is possible to entertain new beliefs and experiment with new behavior without fear of reprisal.”23 The space was safe so that one could speak freely. In the 1970s, feminist groups created their own “safe spaces” where women could come together and share accounts of life in a sexist society. Safe spaces in the women’s movement allowed for the search for community without the threat of male intervention. In the gay liberation movement, too, the concept was important. “Because of the discrimination gay men and lesbians face,” Moira Kenney writes, “providing a safe space has been crucial for sustaining [the] energy and focus of the movement.”24 These arenas were not devoid of disagreement, but they were safe enough for the development of a political movement without the threat of intervention by dominant and hostile groups. Clearly, for different people at different times, safety will mean different things, but the baseline is certainly physical security, confidence that you will not be assaulted. Safe spaces on college campuses are understood to be zones where you can “entertain new beliefs and experiment with new behavior without fear of reprisal.” And “reprisal” here does not mean counterargument. For most of the past one hundred years, students of color were at risk on many campuses, as they were in many

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towns and cities in America. When I was a student in the 1970s, women students were routinely targeted by male professors who found it easier to get sexual partners among nineteenyear-olds than among women their own age. Back then, gay students knew that walking near a f raternity house during rush week might result in getting beaten up as part of a pledging ritual. There were plenty of campus spaces that weren’t safe for different segments of the student body. Today, campuses are safer, and it would be hard to fi d anyone arguing that this is a bad thing. Still, college women must continue to take special precautions to ensure their well-being. They pass on to each other the knowledge that at certain parties it’s just not safe to drink from a p unch bowl because some guys might spike it with knock-out pills, or that it is best to stay away from certain professors who have a history of preying on their female students. Students know that some are more vulnerable than others, and they know that some spaces (and the people who administer them) are more dangerous than others. Is this a sign that students are more fragile? Hardly. It’s a s ign that students are protecting themselves. Most critics of “safe spaces” are not looking to return to the days when students from certain demographic groups were at greater risk on some parts of a campus. Their concern is that the idea of such spaces encourages the isolation of students from questions coming from outside their comfort zones. And they particularly worry about classrooms in this regard; they fear that intellectual confrontation will be taboo and assumptions will go unchallenged because everyone’s emotional well-­ being is overly protected. Nor do such concerns come just from conservatives. Queer theorist and trans activist Jack Halber­ stam worries that “as LGBT communities make ‘safety’ into a top priority (and that during an era of militaristic investment

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in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in competitive narratives about trauma, the fi ht against aggressive new forms of exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side.”25 It would be an overstatement to say that Halberstam here is criticizing “coddled queers,” but he is clearly concerned, like Lukianoff and Haidt, that the presumption of precarity can be counterproductive. As discussed in C hapter 1, providing access to campus is one thing; creating the conditions for student flourishing is another. Student flourishing at a university (rather, than say, a spa) only makes sense in a context of academic freedom, in a context in which people can feel safe enough to challenge one another. A college classroom, then, should be a “safe space” in the sense developed by Lewin and built on by social psychologists: a space where students know that, if t hey espouse unpopular views, they will not be attacked, that there will be no reprisals. Students then feel free (safe enough) to disagree with one another and with the professor. To use the old-fashioned term, they can “unfreeze”—abandon previously held beliefs because they will not be attacked for doing so. We can think of this as “the safe-enough classroom.” By the “safe-enough classroom,” I do not mean that oft ­ imagined place where frightened teachers and undergrads “walk on eggshells” for fear of saying something that might be offensive to someone else. I have been teaching humanities classes for four decades, and I don’t see eggshells on the floor of my classrooms. Which is not to say things haven’t changed over that period. Many schools are much more concerned today about the student as consumer, and many teachers have been convinced that even if their customers aren’t always right, they never want to hear that they’re wrong. Professors must be encouraged to push back against this creep of the consumerist

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creed, and they must be supported by university administrators if their institutions are going to offer truly educational experiences, not just cushy ones that earn high marks in student satisfaction. But aren’t students today oversensitive? Isn’t their demand for trigger warnings and inclusive environments a sign of their desire to substitute comfort for intellectual rigor? As a teacher, I have not found either of these to be the case. And if other teachers do, they should do more than complain about it. If students confuse safety with feeling uncomfortable, they should be challenged in ways that undermine their comfort. One must meet them where they are, but one must not leave them in t he same place one found them. Since the 1980s, I have regularly taught a philosophy and film course, and the class has always dealt with disturbing material: genocide, murder, abuse, divorce (also justice, redemption, love). The material, much of which is presented in classic films from the 1930s through the 1950s, can be emotionally wrenching, and over the years I have come to respect that different students handle this intensity differently. I d on’t alter the syllabus to make it less upsetting, but I do prepare students for what’s to come because I’ve found that they learn more that way. On the fi st night of class we watch Night and Fog, a documentary from the 1950s about Nazi extermination camps. Before the film begins, I tell my students, “Tonight we are going to be watching a film dealing with genocide, next week we will watch a film about a murder, and then we go on to a film about child abuse.” Sometimes they laugh a li ttle, sometimes they look concerned. I want them to know what they are in for. I go on to say: “If you fi d these subjects too upsetting—and they are upsetting—if you fi d them too disturbing—and they are disturbing—then this is probably not the class for you.” I then say, “If you fi d

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these subjects delightful, please get help immediately.” That always gets a laugh. I provide a break before we start the fi st film so students can walk out of the auditorium (and withdraw from the course) without being noticed, but almost nobody does. Some students may think of my heads-up about disturbing or provocative material as “trigger warnings,” but I don’t use this term because of its simplistic connotations in regard to trauma and its reactivation. And many years ago when I taught a version of this course, I certainly didn’t use the vocabulary of “safe spaces” to describe the class, though essentially that’s what I wanted then, just as I want it now: for students to feel that they can bring their whole selves to class and be respected when they do so. When this happens, they will often have emotionally intense reactions to the films and the discussions of them. Students come to understand that not all the opinions they bring to class will be affirmed, as well as that ideas will be criticized without disrespecting the people who articulate them. As we saw in Harvard’s report on inclusion and excellence, there will be tensions between flourishing and criticizing. Education happens in that tense space: the safe-enough classroom. Some classroom situations are more tense than others, of course. When political ideas are enmeshed with identity, for instance. Can one still count on the productive tension between critical thinking and flourishing if a significant segment of a campus community is feeling threatened in its identity by a particular critique? The pedagogical challenge is to help students recognize that they can be critical of ideas without disparaging the people who hold them. Admittedly, this has never been a simple matter; people can be deeply invested in what they say or in what someone else says. Religious students, for example, have long dealt with intellectual challenges raised by

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secularism that may feel to them like existential threats. A successful classroom is one in which students (and often the teacher) feel they can change their minds and experiment with ideas without having to betray who they are. Identity politics on campus has come under fi e not only for stifli g expression but also for undermining our democratic polity more generally. This is the charge made most forcefully by Columbia professor Mark Lilla, who (like Bernstein, Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, and Haidt) expanded a provocative article in the press into a widely discussed book. Lilla is angry at liberals and moderates for failing to stop Trump, and in his 2017 book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, he ridicules campus politics for its ineffectiveness and its hypocrisy. Campus activists taking aim at economic inequality while living in college towns that “have become meccas of a new consumerist culture for the highly educated, surrounded by techie office parks and increasingly expensive homes”—this is “Reaganism for lefties.” Like Deresiewicz, Lilla wants readers to be by turns annoyed and amused by the irony of leftist campuses breeding bourgeois consumerism.26 Lilla here is sharply critical of self-styled progressives who believe that the celebration of difference is the key to creating a more just society. He argues that the scandalous ascent of Trump was made possible only by the “abdication” of liberals, particularly those who emphasize narrow identity bonding at the expense of broad solidarity building. This is a theme we see echoed in all the writers who complain about campus politics. The move away from the individual and toward identification with a group—especially since that identity tends to be non-white and not-male—is seen as undermining political progress. As discussed in Chapter 1, campuses have been increas-

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ingly focused on how historically marginalized (or under-­ represented) groups can be made to feel more included there. No question, Trump’s campaign was energized by the reaction against inclusion efforts. His campaign participated in a white identity politics that aims to restore the historically privileged status of whites—and especially white men, some of whom have been left behind in t he new economy. Lilla doesn’t say much about this racialized reaction, but he despairs of a campus politics of aggrieved, cultivated victimhood, which he is convinced is a recipe for continued electoral defeat. Victimhood does not, Lilla emphasizes, create a v ision that can animate large groups of politically active Americans. Campus radicals involve themselves in t he sorts of activism that fi d energy in protest and petitions but don’t do the work necessary to build successful electoral coalitions. Such activism represents a failure in political education, one that has dire consequences for American politics more generally. “Liberalism’s prospects,” writes Lilla, “will depend in no small measure on what happens in o ur institutions of higher education,” if only because tomorrow’s leaders will come from these insti­ tutions. In his view, a healthier American democracy depends on giving our students an education in politics that takes them beyond themselves and the groups with which they most readily identify. But so far that hasn’t been happening. What has been happening is that the increased attention to identity has obscured a noxious de-politicization among people who consider themselves progressives. Argument through testimony and confession proceeds by making “the winner . . . whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.” Academic trends encouraging students to get in t ouch with their identities “give an intellectual patina to the radical individualism that virtually

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everything else in our society encourages,” and skepticism about the capacity of government to provide authentic social justice leads to a sanctimonious “plague on all their houses” attitude. Lilla complains that in teaching students that they must “construct” their identities in a field of “power relations” to which they are subject, we are doing little more that encouraging personal branding, a “Facebook model of identity.” That may earn one points as a purist radical on campus, but it leaves the fields of local and state politics open to others with very different values, allowing them to seize power for their own ends. “Evangelism is about speaking truth to power,” concludes Lilla. “Politics is about seizing power to defend truth.”27 I agree with Lilla that colleges and universities must do a much better job of educating students to understand the mechanisms of power and how to engage in electoral politics so as to exercise that power more equitably. Sophisticated skepticism, no matter how multilayered or “intersectional,” should not be an excuse for giving up on the practices of electoral politics. The task on college campuses is not just to make each and every group feel it can flourish by digging into its own identity; it is also to fi d modes of solidarity to inspire coalitions beyond the interests of any particular group. But who can blame students and their teachers for being skeptical about calls to go beyond group identity? Calls to leave behind the “narrow” identities of race and gender, for example, have often meant erasing the concerns of women, sexual minorities, and people of color in the name of some more general solidarity. Movement politics, derided as it is by mainstream critics, is characterized by protest and civic participation not limited to the ballot box, and for these reasons, it may prove to be helpful in making our politics in the future more inclusive. One can hope, despite the occasional outbursts of intolerance, that stu-

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dents and professors engaged in the study of identity and difference will be more prepared to reject coalition building that replicates the old scapegoating and erasures. New coalitions are surely needed, but not on the terms of the old ones. This issue of whether college students are being drawn into either isolated ideological bubbles or separatist group identities at the expense of a healthy polity is not exactly new. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson sharply criticized the education of his day for producing conformity, and he advocated “aversive thinking,” as his great interpreter Stanley Cavell called it. “Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a w ider scope? ” Emerson asked. “That they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life”?28 At the different institutions at which I’ve taught, I have certainly seen that the rejection of conformity can itself become a form of imitation, the cultivated appearance of radicalism. But I’ve also seen that it can become an admirable pursuit of happiness when bound up with conversation, friendship, and affectionate solidarity. At colleges and universities across the country, the rejection of conformity often means animating the world through the arts, or discovering new modes of commonality through inquiry, expression, and cooperative endeavors. I’ve seen the rejection of conformity lead to deeper inquiry, to fi ding new ways to build community and civic education. “The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a r ejection of all standard,” Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance.”29 Aversive thinking in this context means fi ding new standards, often in concert with others. This should be at the heart of political participation.

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It is certainly a core responsibility of liberal education to contribute to the political capacity of citizens, and the challenges of this endeavor must not be reduced to setting straight so-called fragile undergraduates or politically correct student warriors. Uncritical acceptance of any faculty member’s particular policy preference or copying a professor’s hip indifference to the political realm—these are pitfalls, not contributions to political capacity. Liberal education should inspire civic participation in ways that allow students to connect with people who share their views and to engage with those who don’t. As we saw earlier, in the discussion of flourishing, political theorist Danielle Allen calls this “participatory readiness.”30 And that’s why intellectual diversity is so important on campus: it gives students opportunities for debate and not just sharing. Through engagement with difference—including intellectual difference—students will fi d their own views tested; and their ability to effect change will grow as they learn to work with people with varied vulnerabilities and aspirations. Like many, I fi d this engagement with difference to be part and parcel of teaching in the humanities and social sciences. When I teach Aquinas, for example, I try to get students to see the power of the arguments and not to assume that objections they come up with are ones that Aquinas never considered. I do the same with Wollstonecraft or Nietzsche, and most students come to see that they learn more about the texts and themselves by approaching ideas in this way. They learn that to be open to a way of thinking quite different from one’s own is a challenge and a pleasure—a skill and a practice of interacting with others. There is a great issue facing the “once and future liberal” today, and it’s not how to overcome identity politics. The great issue for liberals and conservatives alike is how to overcome

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inequality. It’s not today’s campus activists who make coalition building so difficult; it’s the dramatically increasing economic inequality that undermines the belief that the democratic process can be used to address deeply entrenched social ills. Solidarity and coalition building become more tenuous absent interactions with fellow citizens who don’t belong to your socioeconomic group. Lilla is right that we need an “inspiring, optimistic vision” for America, but that will be only shallow political branding if we don’t fi d ways to deal with economic inequality while acknowledging our differences. Finding such ways amounts to insisting that as a polity we “live up to our principles”—that we try to, in James Baldwin’s oft- uoted words, “achieve our country.” Without overcoming inequality, America will drift further and further from this task, and we will continue to propagate poverty, addiction, resentment, and the closing down of hope. Education, like democracy, depends on hope—on a belief that we can fi d ways to improve our lives in common as well as our individual lives. Cultivating that belief and making it real are momentous tasks for colleges and universities today.

v So much of the talk about higher education in recent years has been about how campuses react when high-profile speakers come to town. These reactions (many predictable) have little to do with the ongoing educational project of colleges and universities. When provocateurs fli t with (or outright embrace) hate speech, we should not be surprised when their provocations succeed. Many of these lecturers—be they scholars sponsored by partisan think tanks or entertainers sponsored by politicized media groups—seem more interested in probing speech boundaries than in communicating content.

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But how campuses deal with the provocateur is far less worrisome than the lack of “viewpoint diversity” one sees in their public spaces—a lack that gives rise to complaints about political correctness. Many critics have pointed to a parochialism all too common on campuses: an inability to engage in conversation about ideas that don’t fall into a lefty consensus on issues of race, class, and gender. Some students may even feel they have to leave their home campuses to have alternative discussions about personal responsibility, security, and freedom. And this parochialism affects research as well as teaching. A group of scholars known as the Heterodox Academy asks: “Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?”31 Whether one prays from the fi st pew in the church of free speech or the last, there’s no denying that there is a serious problem of political bias on college campuses, particularly in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. I myself share many of these biases, and until a few years ago I thought they were either just rational dimensions of scholarship or benign assumptions about social justice, fairness, and equality. But as I talked about these issues with people outside the academy, I had to confront the fact that I was taking for granted many ideas or values that were open to argument and deserved discussion. People who didn’t agree with me about the content of what I called social justice, for example, were not actually in favor of injustice. When I turned to my colleagues in the academy, many seemed incapable of discriminating between their own political views and the issues with which they were concerned in their professional work. When they studied “social movements,” they were inclined to celebrate participatory democratic ones; when they investigated “literature and social

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change,” they were inclined toward the kinds of changes they would applaud in the world outside the text. If professors talk only with those who share their assumptions, they won’t be asked to think through or legitimate these assumptions. How, then, can they teach their students to do so? Throughout American culture, groups are enclosing themselves in bubbles that protect them from competing points of view, even from disturbing information; and this siloing of perspectives is being exacerbated by economic and cultural segregation. The 2016 elections highlighted the disconnect between Americans on the coasts and those in b etween. Even within these very broad geographical areas, there are enclaves (small bubbles) of people who go against the grain but fi d a way to band together in a neighborhood or small town.32 This has always happened to some extent; it’s easier to be with people who share your views. Today, however, we are able to curate the information we receive so that we are validated more than we are informed. When people are getting their news from social media tailored to their own interests and values, their allegiances intensify and their toleration of alternative modes of thinking diminishes. While we might expect the professoriate, who after all are trained in the curation of knowledge, to be more resistant to this problem, they are clearly still susceptible. The free market approach to speech is not the solution. When some speech is amplified in contexts historically prejudicial to particular groups because of a history of racism and sexism, real harm occurs. People struggling to be included fi d that historic marginalization is reinforced. Giving a platform to overtly racist groups, or to speakers intent on targeting particular portions of a student body, is an exercise in intimidation more than intellectual debate. Nor will the free market ap-

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proach achieve what conservatives are looking for. Those who call for “more speech” in the marketplace of ideas can be ob­livious to the difficulties that under-represented conservative ideas face in getting a fair hearing. It’s not enough to set procedures that claim to allow anybody to come to a campus to say anything at all. Given the prejudicial filters for access to campus platforms, thoughtful conservative and religious scholars are not routinely invited to many predominantly secular institutions; instead only the occasional outrageous right-wing pseudo-scholar is brought to campus to incite outraged reactions from students, followed by puffed-up indignation from opinion writers. The task of colleges and universities is not to produce outrage and condescension but to promote inquiry along with creative and critical thinking about diverse ideas. They need to go beyond the “marketplace of ideas” paradigm to do so. University leaders need to acknowledge and discuss the under-representation of particular points of view, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We must do more than appeal to some version of free speech doctrine: we must proactively encourage heterodoxy. In order to create sustainable intellectual and political diversity, we need an affirmative action program for ideas emerging from conservative and religious traditions. These traditions urge us to recognize that human beings live naturally together in communities and that the health of these communities derives not from formulaic planning but from webs of trust and familiarity. We may be rational beings capable of planning our future, but we also need customs and institutions to ground and sustain us over time. For some conservative thinkers, the market will be key to this sustainability, and for others it will be religion and custom. How do faith-based communities challenge concepts of pri-

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vacy and individuality? What would it mean to build political communities without traditions and loyalty? Can one build solidarity without a c oncept of virtue? Questions like these lend themselves to reflection and inquiry across a variety of political persuasions. It is through such questioning that the benefits of intellectual diversity are activated. University leaders must be proactive in creating richer intellectual diversity, just as we have been proactive in creating ethnic and racial diversity. As a t eacher, I h ave learned much from creating more intellectual diversity in my courses. I have found it particularly (and productively) challenging to bring religious ideas and experiences into class discussion. There is certainly resistance. When I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about the immortality of the soul or salvation, my normally loquacious undergraduates suddenly start staring intently down at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with an answer: predestination, faith not works, and so on. But if I go on to ask them how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their notes. They look anywhere but at me for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In one of my intellectual history classes, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when the topic of religious feeling comes up, they prefer that I just move on to another subject. Why is it so hard for my very smart students to make this leap—not the leap of faith but the leap of historical imagination? I’m not trying to make a religious believer out of anybody, but I d o want my students to have a n uanced sense of how ideas about politics, ethics, and the nature of knowledge have

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been intertwined with religious faith and practice. This is an important facet of intellectual diversity. Given my reading list, I often ask these questions about Christian traditions, inviting students to step into the shoes of thinkers who were trying to walk with Jesus. I realize that more than a f ew of my undergraduates are Christians who might readily discuss this experience in another setting. But in the classroom, they are uncomfortable speaking out. So I carry on awkwardly as best I can: a secular Jew trying to get his students to empathize with Christian sensibilities. In recent years, I myself have become more accustomed to the awkwardness of my secular engagement with religious practice. After the death of my father, I s ought out a p lace where I could say Kaddish, the Jewish memorial prayer. According to tradition, you don’t say this prayer alone; you need a group of at least ten. I e ventually stumbled upon a s mall, eclectic group that met early in the morning for a lay service (no rabbi). I could say the prayer with them, and eventually I would stay on for study sessions. Why was this atheist praying and studying? It’s about participation, I told myself. And that was enough. The people with whom I said my prayer became part of my life. Prayer was like study, or was it the other way around? Studying with them wouldn’t mean I was abandoning my own secular worldview, I thought. I was learning about a tradition in which I’d been raised but had only dimly apprehended. I mostly ignored the question of belief; learning was enough. And I was learning more because I was among people whose worldview was not entirely strange to me but, still, a worldview I didn’t share. At least, I suspected I didn’t share it. Only through participation would I discover their views—and my own. The classroom is another kind of participation. As a his-

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torian, I want my students to learn concrete things about major events and daily life in t he past, but I a lso want them to go beyond the facts and try to imagine how it felt to live at a certain time and place; I want them to participate imaginatively in the past while recognizing that this creative act can never be accomplished fully. When we read great books together, I want them to understand why an author made certain choices, how the arguments were fi st received, and how they might be relevant to us today. When we exercise historical imagination about secular topics, we have an easier time accepting the possibility that we might be wrong, that new evidence might change our minds. Religious questions seem to cut more deeply, arousing . . . well, some fear and trembling. So why not just stick to the facts and timelines? Why not just show what is right and wrong in the work of the authors we read? After all, aren’t we now in a p osition to know the truth about many of the things that they could only guess at? Today we even know what parts of the brain light up when someone prays—or asks questions about prayer! Those are the kind of objections I get from bright, confident undergraduates, and I try to show them that many questions asked by the philosophers, writers, and artists we study have by no means been settled. Our job in the classroom isn’t to arrive at some defi itive historical or philosophical truth about the past; our job is to learn from exercising our intellect and imagination. The books we read together raise issues that challenge our assumptions, calling into doubt what many of us usually take for granted. The questions in these texts are ones to be grappled with, not answered once and for all. At Torah study, we begin with a blessing that echoes the commandment to wrestle with the biblical texts. We pledge ourselves not to memorize or obey but to engage with what we

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read. That’s what I want to offer my students: the opportunity to wrestle with enduring questions of love and judgment, justice and violence, grace and forgiveness. What they believe is none of my business, but I do want them to have a sense of what it’s like to be absorbed in robust traditions, including religious ones. And I want them to be more aware of the multiplicity of traditions and practices in the hope that this awareness will make them curious, more empathetic, and humbler about their own engagements. As the Heterodox Academy puts it, “When a community is marked by intellectual humility, empathy, trust, and curiosity, viewpoint diversity gives rise to engaged and civil debate, constructive disagreement, and shared progress towards truth. Viewpoint diversity enables colleges and universities to realize the twin goals of producing the best research and providing the best education.”33 Just as conversations about diversity have led to policies fostering inclusion, so too conversations about intellectual diversity should lead to actions that facilitate the productive inclusion of people with different perspectives and experiences in higher education. A few years ago, Wesleyan joined Vassar College in w orking with the Posse Foundation to bring to campus cohorts of military veterans on full scholarships.34 We already had scholarships for veterans, but we realized that we had to be more proactive in recruiting these prospective students if we wanted their talents, experience, and ideas as part of our campus mix. The admissions marketplace wasn’t bringing these students to us on its own. After four years of this program, I can already see the important contributions these men and women are making to the cultural, political, and intellectual diversity on our campus. Not all of them succeed, of course, and there have been plenty of bumps in the road as these young men and women transition from the military to

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undergraduate life. I am proud of the way the broad liberal education we offer is empowering many of these students to make their way in the world with purpose and confidence. In 2016, an alumnus approached me with a plan to recruit senior military officers approaching retirement to teach classes relevant to their areas of expertise. These classes would provide the officers with a bridge to reintegration into civilian life and allow them to share their knowledge of international relations, military strategy, and leadership with Wesleyan students. Perhaps not surprisingly, our fi st professor in the program initially met with a fair amount of skepticism from both colleagues and students. Within weeks, though, it was clear that he would add a valuable perspective to our curriculum in the social sciences. After a year on campus, he agreed to re-up as a faculty member. Bringing in military retirees as teachers, and veterans as undergraduates, is part of our effort to increase political and intellectual diversity on campus. This effort includes raising an endowment to support activities that will expose students to a broader range of ideas than they typically get through standard departmental offerings. This range includes such topics as “the philosophical and economic foundations of private property, free enterprise, and market economies,” “the relationship of tolerance to individual rights, freedom, and voluntary association,” “the philosophical foundations of American constitutionalism and the rule of law,” “the historical and theoretical debate regarding the proper relationship between civil society and the state,” and “the role of the military in a free society and its implications for foreign policy discussions.” I am well aware that some of my faculty colleagues see these phrases as code words for teaching by ideologues, but then again, there are plenty of people off campus who see courses in “social justice,”

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“critical race theory,” or “intersectional media studies” as ideological indoctrination, too. Of course none of these topics or courses need ever be “merely ideological” because faculty can always encourage a multiplicity of perspectives in teaching them. We are not interested in bringing ideologues to our campus any more than we want provocateurs or entertainers who spew discredited ideas in order to provoke student reactions. We are interested in b ringing in s cholars who have a deep understanding of traditions currently under-represented at our university (and many others) and are prepared to introduce, and critically consider, multiple perspectives on those traditions. Students learn not just from faculty but also from one another, and I’m happy to see undergraduates expressing a strong desire to break out of ideological bubbles on their campuses. At Wesleyan, student Republican and Democrat clubs have been jointly hosting lunchtime lectures and discussions. Catherine Cervone, a member of the Wesleyan Republicans and an organizer of the series, explained: “We recognized the necessity on this campus for dialogue and communication. We decided to reach across the divide to team up with WesDems in hosting this speaker series, a discussion forum with the purpose of really understanding what the other side thinks. Not debating, just trying to understand the logic [of one another’s arguments].”35 Trying to understand the logic of one another’s arguments­—certain academic disciplines emphasize this more than others—is a core skill to which universities should be paying more attention. We can do this well only if we bring under-­ represented points of view into the mix. This will take more than reliance on the marketplace of ideas. At many of our most selective colleges and universities, it will take conscious efforts

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(affirmative action, if y ou will) to bring scholars of conser­ vative and religious traditions into dialogue with the current social justice consensus. From my experience visiting a wide range of schools, there are plenty of students eager for these dialogues. Call this a corrective to political correctness; or, if you prefer, the “new intersectionality.” Whatever the label, the result will be a fuller, more meaningful educational experience for everyone.

v I’ve been a university president for almost twenty years now, and the opportunity to work closely with people who care deeply about education has been extraordinarily fulfilling. Campuses can be hothouses of creativity, from the arts to the sciences, from athletics to environmental activism, and it is a joy to watch students achieve their “personal bests” while contributing to their communities. Campuses are good places for idealism, but it’s hard not to be discouraged by the pollutants of cynicism and craven disregard for principle in our national atmosphere. Graduating students are entering a w orld in which invective, insult, and manipulation threaten to become the norm. Such comportment is antithetical to the inquiry, compromise, and reflection that are crucial to democratic governance and to a liberal education that aims at empowerment through learning. Regardless of what they’ve studied, I am hopeful that our students’ time at college empowers them and enhances their capacity for inquiry, compromise, and reflection. Empowerment was what W. E. B . Du Bois looked for in t he best of American education. He knew that people had to earn a living, but he believed that a truly pragmatic education would not just prepare someone to fit in to an existing occupational slot. A

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true education would increase one’s abilities to act purposefully as a citizen, a neighbor, and a family member as well as an economic provider. Inquiry, compromise, and reflection are essential ingredients for the development of these abilities. As president of a residential university, I know that a successful education means that students are fi ding satisfaction in the search for better ideas and are pursuing ways of living that are in accord with deeply held values. And when they fi d their own values to be in confl ct with those held by others, their education turns them to inquiry, compromise, and reflection either to resolve those confl cts or to learn how to live in peace with them. In this regard, the campus is an oasis. It is a place not where students are coddled, but where they develop skills to deal with the differences among people—different diversities that beyond the university are too often met with cynical disregard or avoided through economic and cultural segregation. One doesn’t need to believe in an absolute Truth in order to commit oneself to inquiry, compromise, and reflection, although many of our students surely do have such beliefs. One does need to consider the possibility that one might be wrong, that one might be blind to other possibilities, other ways of living. If you think you might be wrong, and feel “safe enough” to thrive in a context of doubt and ambiguity, you need other people with ideas different from your own in order to consider a range of alternatives. That’s one of the reasons that different diversities, including intellectual diversity, are so important on a safe-enough campus. Listening seriously to others and trying to understand why they hold the views they do without immediately judging those views—this is at the core of pragmatic liberal education. In 2019, the United States is living under an anti-educational regime. President Trump’s disregard for facts didn’t pre-

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vent him from being elected, of course, but that doesn’t mean that as educators we should give him a pass when he lies, when he incites hatred, or when he engages in reckless behavior that undermines the very notion of learning from one’s mistakes. Some may call this partisan, but it would be an abdication of our work as educators not to call out the dangers posed by this president. Even many who supported candidate Trump have been revolted by his intemperate, cruel, and dangerous rhetoric, and by some of his policies. To call attention to this degradation of our culture is not to support political correctness; it is to support our ability to learn from one another. And we should confront now the Trumpian features that may persist after the demagogue leaves office. The frightening shift in this country toward polarization and authoritarianism presents a challenge to universities. In preparing students for civic participation after graduation, universities must not be too safe— they must not coddle. But they must be safe enough to provide encounters with different diversities, enhancing the capacity of students to think for themselves while empathizing with others, making them more resistant to the growing danger of orthodoxy and authoritarianism. Partisanship may be a fact of life in politics these days, but the presence on campus of different diversities shows that education need not succumb to it.

v One of the reasons I love being a university president is that I learn so much from the enthusiasms, convictions, and reasoned arguments of our students—whether they are addressing the racist evils of mass incarceration or the persistent poison of sexual violence. Religious students have shown me what it means to integrate faith and inquiry, and conservative students have taught me to be mindful that even well-intentioned policies

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can undermine longstanding communities and individual freedom. Our campus constituencies have come together many times in recognition of unjust situations that need fixi g, but there can be plenty of disagreement, too, about which solutions will avoid creating even graver injustices. On our best days, we are able to explore our differences without fear, just as we are able to work toward positive change with courage. A campus should be a safe-enough place to explore difference, to have one’s ways of thinking tested—not just protected. Healthy student cultures at colleges and universities are generous even as they are critical; they are open to inquiry and compromise even though they sometimes erupt into loud demands for tangible change. I don’t see coddled snowflakes or ironic hipsters dominating these cultures. Instead, I fi d many studious undergrads taking time to work with refugees around the world or making room in t heir schedules to tutor poor children in local elementary schools. I fi d athletic teams raising money for cancer research, and activists volunteering their time to teach incarcerated men and women. At campuses across the country, students are working to reduce suffering and to create opportunity. In these days of rampant cynicism and flamboyant government corruption, students across the country are refusing to retreat from the public sphere. They are refusing to dismiss norms for telling the truth; they are rejecting the labeling of anything one doesn’t like as “fake.” Refusing stifli g limitations on speech and action, they are fi ding ways to make themselves heard by responding creatively to changing community norms. They are confuting the caricature of political correctness by listening carefully to those with whom they disagree, and by demonstrating a willingness to broaden their thinking rather than seeking to merely reinforce their preconceived notions.

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In op-eds, magazine articles, and books like this one, oldsters like me try to offer a few words of wisdom about the evolution of American higher education. As I look at our situation today, the wisest words I c an think of are ones our students and faculty already know well: inquiry, compromise, and reflection, words at the heart of a challenging yet safe-enough education. Having learned to work across different diversities, including intellectual diversity, students are refusing to succumb to pampered parochialism or pseudo-sophistication. They are fi ding ways to keep open-mindedness and pragmatic idealism alive. Long may they flourish!

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Notes

All internet resources were current as of January 6, 2019.

Introduction 1. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (1681), dialogue 1, p. 40; Thomas Jefferson is quoted in American Annals of Education 1, nos. 1–6 (1826): 124. 2. John Dewey, “Education vs. Trade-Training: Reply to David Snedden” (1915), in Th Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 8 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 412. I discuss Du Bois and Dewey in regard to vocational and liberal education in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 65–66 and 164–165, respectively. 3. Richard Rorty, “The Necessity of Inspired Reading,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 1996, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The -Necessity-of-Inspired/96797.

1 From Access to Inclusion 1. See, for example, Howard Ball, The Bakke Case: Race, Education and Affirmative Action (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); and Randall Kennedy, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action and the Law (New York: Pantheon, 2013). 2. See Paul M. Gaston, “Reflections on Affirmative Action: Its Origins,

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Notes to Pages 13–20

Virtues, Enemies, Champions, and Prospects,” in Diversity Challenged: Evidence of the Impact of Affirmative Action, ed. Gary Orfield with Michael Kurlaender (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Publishing Group, 2001), 277–293. 3. See Alison R. Bernstein, “Addressing Diversity and Inclusion on College Campuses: Assessing a Partnership between AAC&U and the Ford Foundation,” Liberal Education 102, no. 2 (2016), https://www.aacu.org/lib eraleducation/2016/spring/bernstein. 4. On the tension between conventional metrics of meritocracy and democracy, see Lani Guiner, The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (Boston: Beacon, 2015). Anthony Appiah reminds readers that the word “meritocracy” was invented in Michael Young’s 1958 satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy. See Appiah, The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 170–175. 5. On Jefferson and his belief in a natural aristocracy, see The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, ch. 15, doc. 61, http:// press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html; for David Walker’s manifesto, see Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, 37, https://docsouth .unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html; on Douglass, see The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892), 33. See my discussion of Jefferson, Walker, and Douglass on education in Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), ch. 1. 6. See, for example, Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali, “The Other Diversity Dividend,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 2018), https://hbr.org /2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend; Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2017); Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor, eds., Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for Democracy and a Prosperous Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 7. Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 149, 151. In 2007 Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” See Chief Justice Roberts, “Opinion of the Court,” for Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, available at the Cornell University Law School online archive, https:// www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-908.ZO.html. 8. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (with Justice Ginsburg joining) can be found in R andy E. B arnett and Josh Blackman, eds., Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (New York: Walters Kluwer, 2017), 157–159.

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9. See, for example, the work of the “Social Mobility Index,” http://www .socialmobilityindex.org. 10. Around the same time of the dean’s letter, Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer, and its former provost Geoffrey Stone, published opinion pieces on the importance of free speech in the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education, respectively. 11. Quinetta M. Roberson, “Disentangling the Meanings of Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations,” Group & Organization Management 31, no.  2 (April 200 6): 213. 12. For more on Vassar College’s efforts, see the March 17, 2017, press release at http://info.vassar.edu/news/2016-2017/170327-engaged-pluralism -mellon.html. 13. On the protests at Reed, see Vimal Patel, “Students Said a Keystone Course Was Racist. Here’s What Professors Did about It,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Students-Said -a-Keystone/243095; Colleen Flaherty, “Diversifying a C lassic Humanities Course,” Inside Higher Education, April 12, 2018, https://www.insidehighered .com/news/2018/04/12/responding-student-criticism-its-foundational-hu manities-course-too-white-reed; and Chris Bodenner, “Surprising Revolt at the Most Liberal College in the Country,” The Atlantic, November 2, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/11/the-surprising -revolt-at-reed/544682. 14. Lucía Martínez Valdivia, “Professors Like Me Can’t Stay Silent about This Extremist Moment on Campuses,” Washington Post, October 27, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/professors-like-me-cant-stay -silent-about-this-extremist-moment-on-campuses/2017/10/27/fd7aded2 -b9b0-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html. 15. From the grant application: “We believe that by fortifying our commitment to diversity, and by focusing on belonging, thriving, and engaging, we can better ensure that members of our community, regardless of background, feel valued, recognized, and respected. These are prerequisites to unlocking the potential of our students and creating and sustaining a dynamic and inclusive learning community.” 16. Freeman Hrabowski and the Meyerhoff Scholars Program have received extensive media coverage. See Hrabowski’s TED talk, https://www.ted .com/speakers/freeman_hrabowski; and Kenneth I. Maton, Tiffany S. Beason, et al., “Outcomes and Processes in the Meyerhoff Scholars Program,” Life Sciences Education 15, no. 3 (2017), https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe .16-01-0062. 17. See for example, Harold Levy, with Peg Tyre, “How to Level the Col-

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lege Playing Field,” New York Times, April 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com /2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/harold-levy-college.html. See also Raj Chetty, John N. F riedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility” (January 2017), http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents /coll_mrc_paper.pdf. 18. See Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017), 10–11, 107–112. 19. Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, Pursuing Excellence on a F oundation of Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2018), https://inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu/files/inclusion/files /harvard_inclusion_belonging_task_force_final_report_full_web_180327 .pdf. 20. Ibid., 2. 21. Ibid., 23. 22. Ibid., 22. 23. See Danielle Allen, Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), esp. 10–11 and 27–33. 24. See the August 2002 Harvard University Statement of Values, https:// www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2002/values.php. For the 2018 report, see Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion, A.1. 25. Anemona Hartocollis, “He Took on the Voting Rights Act and Won. Now He’s Taking on Harvard,” New York Times, November 19, 2017, https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/us/affirmative-action-lawsuits.html. 26. Quoted by Scott Jaschik, “Smoking Gun on Anti-Asian-American Bias at Harvard?” Inside Higher Education, June 18, 2018, https://www.inside highered.com/admissions/article/2018/06/18/harvard-faces-new-scrutiny -over-how-it-evaluates-asian-american. 27. The amicus brief can be found at https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ files/diverse-education/files/ivy_amicus_brief.pdf. For a thoughtful contextualization of this litigation, see Hua Hsu, “The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action,” New Yorker, October 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/maga zine/2018/10/15/the-rise-and-fall-of-affirmative-action. See also the collection of articles by the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Harvard on Trial,” November 1, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/Harvard -on-Trial/229. 28. Charlie Savage, “Justice Dept. to Take on Affirmative Action in Col-

Notes to Pages 47–54

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lege Admissions,” New York Times, August 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com /2017/08/01/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-universities.html. 29. See the resources at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality (https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps) and at CityLab (https://www.citylab.com/life/2014/03/us-cities-highest-levels-income -segregation/8632). 30. Until 2000, there was a steep increase in the gap between the earnings of college graduates and the earnings of those without an undergraduate diploma, and although the gap persists, it doesn’t seem to be widening at the same rate in recent years. See the fi dings of the Center on Education and the Workforce at https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/the-college -payoff. 31. It is important to note that public institutions, including the great flagship state universities, often enroll a significant percentage of low- and moderate-income students. Numbers can vary significantly. For example, at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan, 29 percent and 15 percent of matriculants, respectively, are Pell-eligible.

2 The Use and Abuse of Political Correctness 1. Roger Ebert’s review of PCU can be found on his website, https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pcu-1994. On Megyn Kelly’s questions to Donald Trump on women and his response, see Amber Phillips, “Donald Trump Is a Better Politician Than You Think. He Just Proved That,” Washington Post, August 5, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ 015/08 /06/heres-proof-that-donald-trump-is-a-better-politician-than-you-think. 2. See the article by American intellectual historian L. D. Burnett, “Politically Correct: A History (Part I),” February 7, 2015, U.S. Intellectual History blog, https://s-usih.org/2015/02/politically-correct-a-history-part-i. See also John K. Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1992); Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (New York: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2011); and Moira Weigel, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a P hantom Enemy,” Guardian, November 30, 2016, https://www .theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the -right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump. 3. See Herbert Kohl, “The Politically Correct Bypass: Multiculturalism

132

Notes to Pages 55–68

and the Public Schools,” Social Policy 22, no. 1 (Summer 1991): 33. Quoted by Burnett in “Politically Correct.” 4. Ruth Perry, “Historically Correct,” Women’s Review of Books 9, no. 5 (February 1992): 15. An expanded version of this essay is “A Short History of the Term Politically Correct,” in Aufderheide, Beyond PC, 71–79. 5. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a C ounter Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 6. Peale is quoted in David Cohen, Great Psychologists as Parents (Philadelphia: Taylor & F rancis, 2016); for Agnew’s concerns, see “Benjamin Spock, World’s Pediatrician, Dies at 94,” New York Times, March 17, 1998. 7. From The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 1997). 8. marychild, “Calling All Dykes . . . Come in Please,” off our backs 4, no. 8 (July 31, 1974): 21. 9. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 25. 10. Ibid., 26. 11. Ibid., 41, 67, 73. 12. Ibid., 256, 41. 13. Ibid., 248. 14. Ibid. 15. Sidney Hook, Convictions (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990), 297. Quoted in John K. Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 9. 16. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, 3rd ed. (New York: Ivan R. Lee, 2008), 15. 17. Richard Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994), 97–98. 18. Ibid., 211. 19. Both presidential references to political correctness can be found in Wilson, Myth of Political Correctness, 8–9. 20. Barbara Jordan’s speech, “Change: From What to What,” can be found at Gifts f Speech, http://gos.sbc.edu/j/jordan2.html. 21. Jonathan Chait, “Not a Very PC Thing to Say: How the Language Police Are Perverting Liberalism,” New York Magazine, January 27, 2015, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say .html. 22. See the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh on “patriotic correctness”: Nowrasteh, “The Right Has Its Own Version of Political Correctness. It’s Just as Stifli g,” Washington Post, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost

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.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/07/the-right-has-its-own-version-of -political-correctness-its-just-as-stifli g. 23. The message was posted on my blog: https://roth.blogs.wesleyan.edu /2015/09/19/black-lives-matter-and-so-does-free-speech. 24. In the Washington Post alone there were six separate pieces published on this issue in a month. For an account of an earlier free press controversy at a college newspaper, see Jonathan Zimmerman, Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 76–78. 25. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018). The original article of the same title appeared in The Atlantic (September 2015). 26. The quotation is from The Atlantic article; see ibid. 27. For free-range childrearing, see http://www.freerangekids.com and http://www.letgrow.com; for riskier playgrounds, see https://www.npr.org /sections/13.7/2018/03/15/594017146/is-it-time-to-bring-risk-back-into-our -kids-playgrounds. 28. Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Th Atlantic (September 2017), and iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). On her view of narcissistic millennials, see Twenge, “Millennials: The Greatest Generation or the Most Narcissistic?” The Atlantic (May 2012) and Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 200 6). 29. Lukianoff nd Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, 14. 30. William Deresiewicz, “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League,” New Republic (July 21, 2014), expanded in Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014). 31. William Deresiewicz, “On Political Correctness: Power, Class, and the New Campus Religion,” American Scholar, March 6, 2 017, https://the americanscholar.org/on-political-correctness/#.XDD91FxKgV4. 32. Moira Weigel, “Political Correctness: How the Right Invented a Phantom Enemy,” Guardian, November 30, 2016. 33. The experiment makes clear that support for Trump (and opposition to Clinton) is especially likely among those who have strong emotional reactions to restrictive norms of communication—importantly, this effect extends beyond political ideology. 34. Lukianoff nd Haidt, Coddling of the American Mind, 10, 235.

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Notes to Pages 85–93

35. Richard Rorty, “A Leg Up for Oliver North,” review of Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, in London Review of Books, October 20, 1992, 15.

3 Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity 1. See Justice Scalia’s dissent in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce 494 U.S. 692 (1990). 2. See Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in https://www.oyez.org/cases /1989/88-1569. 3. See Justice Kagan’s dissent in ibid. 4. Ibid. See also Lyle Denniston, “Has the First Amendment Been ‘Weaponized’?” Constitution Daily, June 27, 2018, https://constitutioncenter.org /blog/has-the-fi st-amendment-been-weaponized. 5. Kathleen M. Sullivan, “Two Concepts of Freedom of Speech,” Harvard Law Review (November 2010), https://harvardlawreview.org/2010/11 /two-concepts-of-freedom-of-speech. Countless times over the last decades J. S. Mill has been cited as a guide to contemporary free speech debates. 6. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “The First Amendment,” in The Free Speech Century, ed. Geoffrey C. Stone and Lee R. Bollinger (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140. 7. Louis Michael Seidman, “Can Free Speech Be Progressive?” Columbia Law Review (2018), https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent .cgi?article=3056&context=facpub. 8. See “Students and the First Amendment,” Association of American Colleges and Universities (April 2018), https://www.aacu.org/aacu-news/news letter/2018/april/facts-fi ures; and “Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges,” FIRE, https://www.thefi e.org/pub lications/student-surveys/student-attitudes-free-speech-survey/student -attitudes-free-speech-survey-full-text. 9. See Amy Swearer, “How 3D Guns Became a Free Speech Issue,” Th Hill, August 7, 2018, https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/400 623-how-3d -guns-became-a-free-speech-issue. 10. Geoffrey R. Stone, “Free Expression in Peril,” Chronicle Review, August 26, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Free-Expression-in-Peril /237568. See also Keith E. Whittington, Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 28–50. 11. See Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, University of

Notes to Pages 94–103

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Chicago, https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports /FOECommitteeReport.pdf. See also Whittington, Speak Freely, 55–56, and Osita Nwanevu, “When ‘Free Speech’ Is a Marketing Ploy,” Slate, March 23, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/when-campus-free-speech -is-a-marketing-ploy.html. 12. Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, Free Speech on Campus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 11, 27. 13. Ibid., 63. 14. Stone, “Free Expression in Peril.” 15. Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a G ood Thing, Too (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 104. 16. The foundation’s model resolution can be found at https://www.the fi e.org/model-freedom-of-expression-resolution-based-on-university-of -chicago-statement. 17. Chemerinsky and Gillman, Free Speech on Campus, 116. 18. Stone, “Free Expression in Peril.” 19. Stanley Fish, “Free Speech Is Not an Academic Value,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Free -Speech-Is-Not-an-Academic/239536. 20. Mario Salvo, “Sit-in Address on the Steps of Sproul Hall,” University of California, Berkeley, December 2, 1964, https://www.americanrhetoric .com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm. 21. See Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) and his response to recent books in t his area: Waldron, “Brave Spaces,” New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/brave-spaces-campus-free -speech. On harm, speech, and “inclusive freedom,” see Sigal R. Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 22. See Vaughan Bell, “The Real History of the ‘Safe Space,’” mindhacks, November 12, 2015, https://mindhacks.com/2015/11/12/t he-real-history-of -the-safe-space. 23. Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 529. 24. Moira Rachel Kenney, Mapping Gay LA: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 78. See also Malcolm Harris, “What Is a S afe Space? A L ook at the Phrase’s 50 Year History,” splinternews (2016), https://splinternews.com/what-s-a-safe-space-a-look-at -the-phrases-50-year-hi-1793852786. 25. Jack Halberstam, “You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of

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Harm, Danger and Trauma,” Bully Bloggers, July 5, 2014, https://bullyblog gers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal -rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma. 26. Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017). 27. Ibid., 61, 90, 87, 14. 28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education” (1837), The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 51. Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Emerson was developed over several decades. See his Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 145. I’ve written on this essay and Emerson’s importance for the American tradition of pragmatic liberal education in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 45–62. 30. Danielle Allen develops this concept in h er Tanner Lectures published as Education and Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27–50. 31. The Heterodox Academy under Haidt’s leadership, along with Debra Mashek, has been making strong arguments for intellectual diversity while acknowledging the variety of political objections and supportive arguments that arise for particular tactics to broaden discourse in the academy; see https://heterodoxacademy.org. 32. See a visualization of this data in “Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity,” New York Times, July 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive /2018/07/25/upshot/precinct-map-highlights.html. 33. See the FAQs on the Heterodox Academy site: https://heterodox academy.org/about-us/faqs. 34. Information about this program, which a few other schools have now joined, can be found at the Posse Foundation’s website: https://www.posse foundation.org/shaping-the-future/posse-veterans-program. 35. See Erin Hussey and Molly Schiff, “Debut of Partisan Speaker Series Seeks to Heal Post-Election Wounds,” Wesleyan Argus, February 23, 2017, http://wesleyanargus.com/2017/02/23/debut-of-bipartisan-speaker-series -seeks-to-heal-post-election-wounds.

Index

academic freedom, 26, 39–41, 92, 103–104 access, promoting. See affirmative action affirmative action, 9–22; diversity-­ as-benefit defense of, 12–14, 16–17, 18–21, 20–21; and equality and mobility, 14–16; and integration, 17–18; and low-income students, 21–22; opposition to, 9–12, 13–14; as reverse discrimination, 9–10, 45–46; as special treatment, 10–12; and Trump administration, 20 Affirmative Action Bake Sale, 93–94 Agnew, Spiro, 55 Alito, Samuel (Justice), 88 Allen, Danielle, 41–42, 110 American Civil Rights Initiative, 13–14 American Civil Rights Institute, 12 American Scholar, 81 Anderson, Elizabeth, 17–18 Animal House, 52 Asian American students, 15–16, 43–45

Atlantic, The, 75, 76, 78 authoritarianism, 52–53, 60–61, 123 aversive thinking, 109   Bakke, Allan P. (Bakke ruling), 9–10 Baldwin, James, 111 Bambara, Toni Cade, 56–57 Barnard College, 58 Beckham, Edgar, 12–13 belonging. See inclusion (belonging) Bernstein, Richard, 63–64, 66, 81 Black Lives Matter movement, 70, 71 Bloom, Allan, 25, 58–63, 76 Blum, Edward, 43–44 Bush, George H. W., 65, 82   California Proposition 209, 11, 12 Campus Diversity Initiative, 12–13 catastrophizing, 77 Cavell, Stanley, 109 Cervone, Catherine, 120 Chait, Jonathan, 66, 68, 81 Chemerinsky, Erwin, 94–95, 96

138 Chicago Statement, 93 –94 Citizens United Supreme Court decision (2010), 87–88, 96–97 Clinton, Bill, 65 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 58–63, 76 coddling, 24, 75–79, 122, 123, 12 4 “Coddling of the American Mind, The” (Lukianoff, Haidt), 75–79 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), 76–77 collective bargaining fees and free speech, 88–89 colleges. See higher education Communism and political correctness, 53–54 conformism and conformity, 52–53, 56–57, 61, 72, 80–82, 96, 109 Connerly, Ward, 12 consumers, students as, 2–3, 100, 103–104 corporations and free speech, 87–88, 89–90 creativity and diversity, 17 cultural segregation, 113 cynicism, 3–4, 5, 6, 121, 124   democracy, 15–16, 106–111, 12 1 dependency, 79 Deresiewicz, William, 79–82 Dewey, John, 5–6 Dictatorship of Virtue, The (Bernstein), 63–64, 81 diversity: and Asian American students, 43–45; as benefit to all students, 12–14, 16–17, 44–45; and confl cted allegiances, 46–47; and creativity, 17; and dynamic communities, 18–19;

Index and income, 47–50; intellectual and political (see intellectual and political diversity); modes of difference, ix–x; racial (see affirmative action) Douglass, Frederick, 16, 17 Du Bois, W. E. B., 5–6, 121–122   Ebert, Roger, 52, 53 economic and social mobility, 14–16 economic inequality, 15, 47, 106, 110–111 economic segregation, 47–50 education. See higher education electoral politics versus identity politics, 106–111 Ellison, Dean, 25–26 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109 empowerment, 6, 77, 79, 121–122 Excellent Sheep (Deresiewicz), 80–82   feminism, 56–58, 101 First Amendment. See free speech Fish, Stanley, 95, 98 flourishing: and academic freedom, 93, 95, 103, 105, 108, 110, 125; and inclusion, xi, 7, 28, 36, 38, 40–41, 42, 46, 48–51 Ford Foundation, 12 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 93, 95 fragility, 77, 79, 102 Franklin and Marshall College, 97–98 Freedom Caucus, 67–68 free speech, 86–99; and campus speakers, 25, 69, 70–71, 91, 97–99, 111–112, 3–11 11 4; content-­

Index neutral principle of, 90–92; and diversity, 86–87; expanding defi ition of, 87–90; free market approach to campus speech, 92–95, 113–114; versus inclusion, 24–28; limits to, 27, 95–96, 99; and political bias, 112–11 3; political equality versus political liberty, 89–90; religious and conservative views as under-­ represented, 114–118 “Free Speech Is Not an Academic Value” (Fish), 98 Free Speech on Campus (Chemerinsky, Gillman), 94–95, 96 French Revolution, Reign of Terror, 64   gay liberation movement, 101 Gillman, Howard, 94–95, 96 graduation rates, 36, 37–38, 48 Gray, Hanna Holborn, 92–93 Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), 13   Haidt, Jonathan, 75–79, 84, 100 Harvard University (Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion), 38–45; inclusion versus academic freedom, 39–41; law suit against, 42–45; shifting attention from access to inclusion, 38–39, 42 hate speech, 27, 99 Heterodox Academy, 112 higher education: control of, 1–2; and democracy, 15–16; increasing suspicion about, 1–5; today’s students, 123–125; evrsus vocational training, 5–6; ways to re-instill confidence in, 6–7

139 Hill, Catharine Bond, 29 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 Hook, Sidney, 62–63 Hrabowski, Freeman, 35 Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression, 70–71 humanities classes and white supremacy, 30–33   idealism, 121–122, 12 4–125 identity affirmation, 46–47 identity politics versus electoral politics, 106–111 ideological alignment, 66–68 iGen phenomenon, 78–79 inclusion (belonging), 22–51; versus academic freedom, 24–28; as coddling, 24; at Harvard University (see Harvard University); and income, 36–38, 49–50; increasing concerns about, 22–23, 29–30, 34, 50–51; at Reed College, 30–33; and science classes, 34–35; Trump and, 107; at Vassar College, 29–30, 33–34 income segregation (economic segregation), 47–50 individualism, 24, 53, 68 inquiry, compromise, and reflection, 121–122, 12 4–125 intellectual and political diversity: and importance of understanding other points of view, ix–x, 120–122; and military veterans and retirees, 118–120; and under-representation of religious and conservative ideas, 114–118 intolerance, 59, 63–65

140 Janus v. AFSCME, 88–89 Jefferson, Thomas, 1–2, 16 Jordan, Barbara, 65   Kagan, Elena (Justice), 88–89 Kahneman, Daniel, 17 Kelley, David, 17 Kelly, Megyn, 53 Kennedy, Anthony (Justice), 14, 87 Kenney, Moira, 101 Kimball, Roger, 62–63   Lesbian Sex Mafia, 58 Lewin, Kurt, 100–101, 103 Lilla, Mark, 106–108, 111 Lorde, Audre, 56–58 low-income students and affirmative action, 21–22, 36–38, 47–50 Lukianoff, Greg, 75–79, 84, 100   MacKinnon, Catharine, 90 Maoism and political correctness, 54–55 marychild, 57 Meyerhoff cholars Program, 35 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, 11 Middlebury College, 97 military veterans and retirees, 29, 118–120 Milton, John, 95 mobility and access to higher education, 14–16 Moore, Stephen, 25 moral dependency, 79 movement politics, 108–109 multiculturalism, 63, 64, 85 Murray, Charles, 97 Myth of Political Correctness (Wilson), 65

Index neoliberalism, 81–82 New Left, 55, 57 New Republic, 80 New York Magazine, 66 New York Times, 45, 62   Once and Future Liberal, The (Lilla), 106–108 “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” (Mao), 54–55 oversensitivity, 26, 66–67, 104   parenting styles, xi, 55–56, 77, 79 parochialism, 6, 20, 112 participatory readiness, 110 Peale, Norman Vincent, 55 Perry, Ruth, 54–55, 56, 58 polarization, 45, 69, 78, 123 political bias, professors and, 112–11 3 political correctness: 1960s counterculture and, 55–58; and Bloom’s freedom of mind, 58–62; as coddling, 75–79; in Communist/Marxist theory, 53–54; as conformism, 80–82; current resurgence of, 65–69; and emphasis on systems/group identity, 68–69; and freedom of speech at Wesleyan, 69–75; and inclusion, 25; as intolerance, in the 90s, 62–65; and Maoism in the U.S., 54–55; as term of derision, 52–53; Trump and, 82–85 political equality versus political liberty, 89–90 Posse Foundation, 29, 118–11 9

Index Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion. See Harvard University   quotas, 9–10   racial inequality. See affirmative action radicals/radicalism, 4, 24, 52–53, 55–58, 63, 107–108 Reagan, Ronald, 76 Reed College, 30–33 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 9–10 relativism, 59–62 religious and conservative ideas, under-representation of, 114–118 reverse discrimination, 9–10 Roberts, John (Justice), 18 Rorty, Richard, 6, 85 Rose, Flemming, 97–98 Roszak, Theodore, 55   safe spaces, 99–106; on campuses, 101–102; as coddling, 24; critics of, 102–103; versus discomfort, 102–103; feminism and, 101; gay liberation movement and, 101; versus intellectual freedom, 25–26; safe enough, x–xi, 103–106; use of term, 100–101 “Safetyism,” 77 Salvo, Mario, 98–99 Schapiro, Morton, 26 Schneider, Carol, 12–13 Scholar and the Feminist IX, The, 58 science classes and diversity, 34–35 Seidman, Louis, 90

141 “Self Reliance” (Emerson), 109 Socrates, 46 Sotomayor, Sonia (Justice), 20 speakers, protests against, 25, 69, 70–71, 91, 97–99, 111–112, 113–114 Spock generation, 55–56 Stone, Geoffrey, 92, 94, 96 student debt, 5 Students for Fair Admissions, 43 Supreme Court decisions: Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), 13; Janus v. AFSCME, 88–89; Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 9–10; Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 89   Tea Party movement, 67–68 Tenured Radicals (Kimball), 63 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 17 trigger warnings, 24, 25–26, 104–105 Trump, Donald (Trump administration): and affirmative action, 2, 14, 20; as anti-education, 3, 25, 122–123; and lawsuit against Harvard University, 45–46; liberals and election of, 106–107; and political correctness, 25, 53, 82–85 Twenge, Jean, 78–79   unions and free speech, 88–89 universities. See higher education University of Chicago, 25–27, 92–93 University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 35

142 Valdivia, Lucía Martínez, 31 Vassar College, 29–30, 33–34, 118–11 9 victimhood, 79, 107 vindictive protectionism, 84, 100 Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 89   Waldron, Jeremy, 99 Walker, David, 16 Washington Post, 31 Weigel, Moira, 83

Index Wesleyan Argus, 70–75 Wesleyan University: author at, xi–xii; and diversity, 18–19; and low-income students, 36; and military veterans, 118–11 9; and PC labeling, 69–75; Republican– Democrat lunches, 120 white supremacy and humanities classes, 30–33 Wilson, John, 65 Winnicott, D. W., xi   Yalom, Irvin, 101