Last month, I was supposed to give a speech at Emory University about diversity and knowledge. But the campus Left couldn’t let someone question its dogma without putting up a fight.
A member of the student government tried to prevent my arrival altogether by initiating a discrimination complaint against the group that hosted me. The student official charged that the Emory College Republicans should be investigated for discriminating against other Emory students — merely by inviting me to campus.
The student government dismissed this complaint on jurisdictional grounds, since my appearance was not funded by student activity fees. Nevertheless, the College Republicans and any other student group that might contemplate hosting a controversial speaker were put on notice: All possible means to thwart your efforts to question academic orthodoxies will be used against you. This is, sadly, par for the course. Long after a controversial invitee leaves campus, conservative student groups often face harassment and abuse for having invited a dissenter.
To its credit, the Emory administration did not block my appearance nor editorialize about it, and I did speak as planned. The deplatforming efforts continued during my talk, however.
Students in the lecture hall shouted in unison in an attempt to drown me out, and cries of “you racist bitch” emanated from the audience. Emory’s NAACP chapter and other self-described “black and Latinx groups on campus” created a “safe space” for students to watch the speech via live-streaming rather than attend in person, and additional counterprotests occurred simultaneously during my event.
The day after my talk, the Center for Women, the Office of LGBT Life, and the Office for Racial and Cultural Engagement hosted an event to allow students to “air their grievances,” in the words of a student reporter. The Young Democrats of Emory held a “teach-in” about affirmative action and diversity. Emory Sexual Assault Peer Advocates and The Survivor Anthology released a joint letter directing those traumatized by my talk to Emory’s Office of Respect, the Title IX office, and Counseling and Psychological Services, among other campus resources.
The Emory Wheel, the student newspaper, organized a symposium for students to vent their anger and pain. One of the contributors reports that numerous faculty members will be releasing their own “statements and complaints to the public and Emory administration.” The undergraduate and graduate student governments are contemplating a measure to give students more time to organize protests against heterodox speakers, in the absence of formal mechanisms to block their appearance.
So, what was I trying to say that was so threatening?
Merely that Emory students, like undergraduates across the country, are among the most privileged individuals in history by virtue of their unfettered access to learning. That students should emulate the Renaissance humanists, whose passion for the lost Classical tradition triggered a centurieslong explosion of knowledge. That Emory’s costly diversity bureaucracy, premised on the alleged oppression of “marginalized” student groups, is unneeded. That Emory is filled not with bigots, but with well-meaning faculty and administrators who want all their students to succeed.
Student responses to these propositions may have been uninformed and reflexive, dealing in name-calling rather than facts, but they were certainly within the bounds of free speech. Whether they were within the bounds of rationality is another question.
The collective hysteria that routinely greets my campus appearances (and those of other conservative lecturers) grows out of a problem more serious than the beleaguered state of open discourse. A growing cadre of administrators and politicized faculty relentlessly cultivates in students a victim identity, and anyone who challenges that identity will be labeled with the usual “racist-sexist-homophobic” epithets, if not blocked from speaking entirely.
Victim ideology has now seeped into the world at large — just consider the Democratic 2020 presidential candidates’ fierce competition to level the most sweeping accusations of white supremacy and racism against their fellow Americans. Even were viewpoints that challenge campus orthodoxies less stigmatized, the idea that America endemically oppresses certain favored victim groups would continue wreaking havoc on public policy and civil peace.
Though there are multiple causes of campus victim ideology, one of the most powerful is racial admissions preferences.
I did not come to Emory to speak about these preferences; I mentioned them only in passing, in the most general terms, in order to buttress my point that colleges are not discriminating against minorities. But the overwhelming driver of student rage at Emory and other colleges has been my reporting on the mismatch effect: the empirically demonstrable fact that admitting students who are not competitively qualified with their peers puts them at an academic disadvantage. Those alleged preference “beneficiaries” are then encouraged to interpret their academic difficulties as proof of their college’s institutional racism, and the victim cycle picks up steam.
Expanding free speech is indeed an important goal for campus reformers. But unless more people directly challenge the oppression narrative, and its anchor in racial admission preferences, the pressure to restrain discourse in the name of student “safety” will continue in its destruction of social harmony and the truth.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Examiner
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner