Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously suggested, in defense of free speech, that “every idea is an incitement.” But are words themselves violence? The striking acceptance of the notion that some speech can constitute violence—and therefore has no place on a university campus—has coincided, this year, with the eruption of actual physical violence over speech.
The discussion began last fall, with a rebuke of the idea that words amount to violence. The dean of students at the University of Chicago wrote a welcome letter to incoming freshmen, stating, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” This spring, the University of Chicago released a committee report that recommended disciplining students for “disruptive conduct,” which might include shouting down invited speakers or other “interference with freedom of inquiry or debate.”
Days before, on March 2nd, at Middlebury College, in Vermont, a student protest intended to disrupt a speech turned violent. The invited speaker was the political scientist Charles Murray, whose 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” contained the suggestion that both genetics and environment contributed to racial differences in I.Q. scores. In a student center, hundreds chanted, “Who is the enemy? White supremacy!” When the discussion was moved elsewhere for live-streaming, protesters followed, banged on the windows, and set off fire alarms. Leaving the event, Murray and Allison Stanger, the political-science professor who was moderating the discussion, were shoved and pushed by a mob. Stanger was pulled by her hair and suffered a concussion. Protesters climbed on top of their car, rocking it and hitting the windows.
In February, the University of California, Berkeley, cancelled a lecture by the right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, known for his racist and sexist provocations, when about fifteen hundred people came out to protest and some threw rocks and firebombs, smashed windows, and physically injured several people. (The university blamed the violence on “masked agitators” disrupting peaceful student protests.) Concerned about protests and violence, the university later cancelled another scheduled speech, this time by the provocative conservative commentator Ann Coulter. Conservative groups filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that, in placing limits on some speakers’ appearances for security reasons, Berkeley was restricting conservative speech, resulting in the “marginalization of conservative viewpoints.”
Berkeley’s place in history as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement of the nineteen-sixties gives us a sense of having come full circle—from the protests of that era, in which students fought restrictions on dissenting political speech, to the protests of today, in which students try to shut down political speech they despise, sometimes even by violent means. The easy criticism, both from the right and from liberal academia, has been to mock college students as sensitive “snowflakes” refusing to hear—let alone engage with—differing viewpoints.
But such criticism misses a change, one that has added a combustible element to the long-standing debates over speech on campus: the start of a Presidency that, for many people, stands for bigotry and hate expressed in casual violence. During his Presidential campaign, Donald Trump helped to normalize hateful speech by fellow-citizens. In the first months of his Presidency, there has been a rise in hate crimes, numerous threats of violence against synagogues and mosques, and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries. The connection between the expression of bigoted opinion and taking harmful actions is more salient than ever. The federal district and appellate judges who refused to let Trump’s revised travel ban stand recognized this when they, rather unusually, pointed to his own campaign statements about Muslims to reason that the executive order, which does not mention Muslims, nevertheless constituted religious discrimination.
Recently, on a train in Portland, Oregon, a man’s anti-Muslim tirade against two teen-age girls ended when he stabbed three men, killing two, who tried to defend them—a stark instance of violence directly following hateful words. On campus, some students have come to view certain controversial speakers as proxies for the idea of speech blurring into action. One opinion piece published in the Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, defended the violent protest on the university’s campus, saying that “asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.” In this transitivity of speech and violence, physical violence becomes a legitimate means of combatting violent speech.
Violence over speech is now a part of life off campus, too. We have seen violence at multiple rallies, as anti-Trump demonstrators have clashed with their pro-Trump counterparts, resulting in injuries and arrests. We’ve seen a candidate for Congress—now a member of Congress—physically assault a journalist who was asking a question about health care. We’ve seen Texas representatives accuse each other of threats and tussle on the floor of the state capitol.
The rise of political violence in our country only underscores the desperate importance, at this moment, of cultivating citizens who face political conflict through open discourse rather than repression or aggression. This is one essential job of universities, but they face a crisis. How do they teach the reasoned discussion that is crucial to the health of democracy, while students—and the public at large—contest the very idea, and even see dialogue as “violence”? This crisis is not likely to abate for at least the next four years, and how universities navigate it will have important consequences for education and citizenship.
Across the country, state lawmakers are proposing bills that provide for public universities to suspend or expel students who engage in disruptive conduct that interferes with others’ free expression. Though some versions of these bills are too vague to pass constitutional muster, they reflect the fact that, in service of their pedagogical mission, universities are dusting off their disciplinary authority against student protesters. This time around, it is supposed to enable, rather than squelch, unpopular speech. But universities face a thorny situation in which they must threaten discipline for disruptive conduct, including speech that forecloses other speech, while also protecting student speech that protests other speech. Middlebury College ended the school year announcing that it had disciplined scores of students for their conduct during the Murray event, even though the student government had resolved that those students should not be disciplined.
One recommendation of the University of Chicago committee is to “create free-speech deans-on-call with special training to deal with disruptive conduct,” and to add educational programming that would train students on “the rights and responsibilities of participation in the free speech commons.” These proposals are bureaucratic responses that mirror what many universities have done in recent years to address bias and discrimination: appoint deans and administrative staff to run new offices for training and discipline related to diversity and inclusion.
Not much clairvoyance is needed to see what is coming. Many versions of diversity and inclusion put forth by campus administrations today do entail protecting students from speech that is considered offensive to marginalized individuals. A clash is imminent—not just between ideas and students but also between the campus structures embodied in deans for diversity and inclusion and deans for free speech. The training and orientation programs run by these dedicated offices will have to negotiate a tense balance to avoid coming to blows. Building the conflict over speech into the organizational structure of the university is perhaps fitting, as it may replicate within the institution’s bureaucracy the fight in the so-called marketplace of ideas. But the rhetorical swelling of the concept of violence, at the same time as the rise of political violence we now live with, is symptomatic of the peculiar ill health of our political life, whether as students or as citizens.