When first mention of Emma Camp’s NYT op-ed appeared here, it seemed to raise an issue so uncontroversial as to require no defense. After all, would anyone question that the Overton Window on college campuses has narrowed to a slit, where challenges to progressive orthodoxy were treated with good faith disagreement? Well, the answer was apparently, “you bet your ass,” and I failed to see it coming.
The complaint wasn’t that “no one wants to debate me,” which takes extraordinary fortitude to claim with a straight face and no inkling of shame. Nor was it about people shifting in their seats, one example offered to give color to a broader, and obvious, issue.
I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.
Are students in fear of expressing opinions that run counter to the prevailing campus ideological narratives? Do they fear being excoriated by their classmates or professors? Will they be outed on social media as fascists or Nazis if they question whether being anti-racist is just being the other flavor of racist? Does this have a chilling effect on speech, instruction and research? Or is this all some right-wing fantasy about cancellation?
The newest member of this “society of the silenced” to have been granted a platform to complain about her lack of a platform is Emma Camp. Camp is a college senior of the University of Virginia who self-describes as a “liberal who has attended abortion rights protests and written about standing up to racism”; she has also written for the conservative publication Reason and interned at the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On Monday, she got an op-ed in The New York Times to complain about [checks notes] having to lower her voice for fear that other students might hear what she thinks.
And because he’s deliberately confusing the libertarian Reason with a conservative rag, and raises FIRE for reasons so awful he can’t even write the words, Elie adds:
I’m not exaggerating.
Perhaps not, at least from his perspective, Rather, he’s being deliberately disingenuous.
Nothing bad has happened to Camp or to the other UVA students she quotes in her article for anecdotal support. Camp complains that her defense in class of the right of white people to criticize other cultures made other students in the same class angry with her. She complains that writing columns in her student newspaper “implor[ing] students to embrace free expression” caused her to “lose friends” and face “a Twitter pile-on.”
The reactions to Camp’s op-ed included such strokes of briliance as “everybody self-censors and always has, so what’s the big deal?” This is, of course, true and also shockingly shallow. Sure, we don’t run around screaming epithets at minorities, if that’s what you’re inclined to do, because we self-censor. And is that pretty much the same thing as a “non-Indian women” criticizing “suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows,” an example Camp offered in her op-ed?
Her problem, according to her, is the need to “self-censor.” She’s apparently annoyed that she can’t say every single thought in her head without being “shamed” for the quality of those thoughts.
Okay, maybe Elie is exaggerating, because that isn’t remotely her problem, as should be sufficiently obvious that even a double-Harvard can figure it out. Her “problem” is that she, and she speaks on behalf of others including progressive students who make the mistake of straying from the approved narrative, can’t say entirely reasonable, fair and thoughtful things raised by the issues presented in her classes that do not conform to the ideological constraints imposed by social fiat on campus. Her “problem” is that she can’t risk testing whether she can express an idea that might not have the official approval of the NYT big name columnists lest she be wrong and attacked, humiliated and splayed publicly and in perpetuity for her holding a wrong thought.
And why should she be concerned about this?
At this point I have to mention that Camp is white, because her self-reported problems make a lot more sense once you know that. In contrast, “self-censorship” is just part of the normal, everyday experience of non-white students at white American colleges. In fact, one of the reasons historically Black colleges and universities are still a thing is that they are some of the only places in the educational landscape where Black people don’t have to censor their thoughts and beliefs in order to play nice with white folks. Hushed tones? I’m a 43-year-old Black man with my own opinion column, and there are tons of thoughts I don’t give voice to in mixed company.
To be fair, I have serious doubts about whether Elie has tons of thoughts he doesn’t give voice to in mixed company, whatever that means. He’s not very shy about such things, and never has there been a time for Elie to say some rather extreme things that would have been considered outrageously offensive than now. If anything, that’s Elie’s brand, without which he would never get to be on MSNBC.
And that’s really all Camp’s article is about. A publication that cared about her might have given her some writing tips, but the Times let this 22-year-old flag a crisis in university education over some normal instances of self-control that non-white students exhibit every day. They let her claim that the penalties for refusing to self-censor are “steep,” but then let her illustrate these penalties with quotes from a white college Republican. Steve (whose last name I’ll omit because I’m more gentle than The New York Times) is literally a member of the college debate club, but just can’t handle it when politics comes up in the classroom. “It’s very anxiety inducing.”
Rarely does a point get made as flagrantly as this. The “Steve” who shall not be named is Stephen Wiecek, whom Camp met at the UVA debate club, and he’s [trigger warning: traumatic word ahead] a Republican, a status so horrible that Elie can’t bring himself to mention his last name. But then, that’s exactly the sort of normal self-censoring that the woke believe should happen on campus, so what’s Camp’s problem?
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Other peoples feelings of discomfort and fear don’t have to be taken seriously? The lack of introspection is amazing.
These bozo’s ain’t just ‘ desperately missing the point’…
You can’t just go around trying to give color to a broader and obvious issue. If it doesn’t have color already, that’s because it’s “privileged,” and if it has the poor judgment to accept any color, it will then be guilty of “cultural appropriation.”
I continue to question whether “the Overton Window on college campuses has narrowed to a slit.”
I don’t doubt that at some colleges and universities there is a problem, and good for organizations like FIRE that draw attention to these schools. There are, however, around 3,000 colleges and universities in the US, and the handful of elite schools and Ivies that get reported on aren’t at all representative of the experience of the vast majority of American students and faculty who study and teach at commuter schools and community colleges. I teach at a community college, and my wife teaches at the nearby state university. None of this is happening here.
Maybe this really is a problem that strikes at the core of higher education, but the evidence people cite just doesn’t support that conclusion. Even the FIRE survey that Camp cites only looked at 159 institutions. How many were community colleges? How many were directional or otherwise non-flagship state schools.
I don’t believe that we can draw such sweeping conclusions from such a limited and non-representative dataset.
You and your wife are academics and don’t see it? That’s not really as persuasive a counterargument as you believe.
My point is that generally the burden of proof is on the one making an assertion, such as the assertion that “cancel culture” is widespread and destroying free speech in higher education. A few incidents at non-representative elite schools doesn’t really tell us anything about the thousands of commuter and community colleges that make up the college experience for the vast majority of college students in the US.
If this really is such a problem (and it might be!), shouldn’t there be evidence from places beyond UVA, Oberlin, etc.? I suspect what I see at a community college is more representative that what happens at Mr. Jefferson’s university. But in the end all I have is anecdotes, just like Ms. Camp. We don’t seem to have enough evidence to draw a conclusion one way or the other.
Camp refers to a survey by FIRE, which is one of a numerous such surveys over the past few years, together with hundreds of anecdotes. Your personal unfamiliarity neither shifts the burden nor makes it other people’s duty to educate you. Your choice not to believe it is fine. Nobody will lose sleep over your lack of belief.
My daughter sees it at her Jr. high. She was very upset the other day because there was a student planned BLM walkout she preferred not to join, but she knew kids would call her racist if she didn’t.
I’ve seen it from the parents as well (Facebook school parents pages are a nightmare).
I can believe that at a rural red state CC it might not be much of a thing, but if you don’t think it’s a common and prevalent thing at a large number of schools of all types and grades, you have to have your head stuck in the sand.
ANECDOTE ALERT: I saw it today on a foray into my alma mater. On at least three occasions, I witnessed a boisterous young woman express a reasonable and otherwise uncontroversial opinion about current events to her peers and then immediately retreat in horror behind “sorry to get political.” As an “old” with a libertarian bent, I largely keep my mouth shut when on campus, but to see her self censoring was frankly astonishing. With all due respect, if you aren’t seeing it personally, you might well be part of the problem.
When I read Ms. Camp’s article what really resonated with me was her quoting Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, “Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education”. While I know one such claim doesn’t make this true, there’s a lot of anecdotal support for this claim. I find this alarming and saddening.
I’ve been told that Jefferson, who as Elie notes founded UVA, said something like “Sometimes the most important voice in the room is the one disagreeing with you”. Though, I couldn’t find this quote when I searched for it, I think the sentiment it expresses is especially apt.
In recent years, I’ve felt compelled to confront, question, and change some long held beliefs. I feel like I’m a better person for this, but the real point here is that it would not/ could not have happened without the frank and open discussion in forums, including SJ, where one isn’t pilloried or ostracized for voicing a dissenting or unpopular opinion. I think that creating/ protecting such spaces should be a priority for colleges.
Those who trumpet “diversity is strength” need to recognize that this holds true, and most especially so, to diversity in thought and opinion.
Finally, at the risk of being a little snarky, Mssr. Mystal implied that La Camp’s thinking/ writing is “unrefined”, but between the two pieces I found hers to be the more cogent and coherent.
There are arguments that are beyond the pale, and arguments that are within the rationale course of discussion. These are guided by social norms, which is why this presents a problems. The norms of some are limited to discussions they find ideologically acceptable rather than reasonable, even if they disagree. They assume their norms are societal norms, and are intolerant of any discussion outside what they have decided are the acceptable norms. Camp’s “problem” is with their intolerance, as she (and, I would argue) society has yet to adopt the norms of discourse as determined by the woke.
Scott,
At the risk of overly simplifying your argument, I think Nat Hentoff said it more succinctly, “Free speech for me, but not for thee”.
“Diversity is Strength” seems to apply mostly to certain Asian foods on college campuses.
Here’s a Jefferson quote that covers much of the same ground: “ [T]his institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
A far cry from modern academia which lives in terror of following lines of inquiry if the results may offend the most sensitive members of a marginalized group and in which reason is shackled in favor of subjective feelings.
I can’t help but notice that the three “critics” of the oped, beyond being dishonest about its point, share one common feature upon which their prominence relies. If there was room for discussion, as so many pretend they want rather than a lecture where they get to do all the talking and white people can shut the fuck up and do as they’re told, they might not hold the power they possess only by dint of their race, and certainly not their intellect or the content of their character.
But for race, would they hold positions of prominence? That’s a very troubling question for all of us.
Elie’s issue really isn’t about Emma’s words. It’s that the NYT gave her a platform.
It’s a roundabout way of saying that the NYT shouldn’t have published her column.
That aspect of his argument was that if she can publish a column in the NYT, then how can she complain about being canceled. It misses the point. More importantly, it his (as well as Buie and NHJ, way of saying only perspectives that voice their views ought to be published, which is one of the many reactions that prove Camp’s point.
Pardon both my cynicism and my tinfoil hat, but this aspect makes it feel like a setup by the Times: “let’s publish this white college girl, who has collaborated with libertarian-ish organizations (boo-hiss), and claims she’s being silenced on campus. Then we know that our very-active-on-social-media prominent black writers will respond on Twitter, and other black writers will chime in at The Nation and elsewhere to point out how ridiculous it is that this white girl says she’s silenced when she got an op-ed in the Times, and then chalk it up to privilege and bad-faith right-wing activism.” Like Carrie where they vote her prom queen just to dump the pig blood on her.