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January/February 2007 -- Rigidity is the besetting sin of old age, as zealotry is of youth and cynicism of maturity. That is why, having embarked on my sixtieth year to heaven, I accepted Robert Bidinotto’s offer to write a regular commentary column for The New Individualist. It gives me a motive to survey the passing scene, not just to proclaim what is good and true and beautiful (everyone in the Information Age does that), but to reflect critically on the lifelong beliefs and attitudes by which I have typically formed such judgments.
To that end, I shall most often be examining subjects about which individualists disagree. These internecine disputes, based on competing loyalties, force us most powerfully to question our longstanding convictions. At other times, however, I shall take up issues where there is no disagreement among individualists, save only for myself. Robert’s name for this column is a charter for an individualist perspective on our world (the “I” of the title), but it is also (the “Private” of the title) a charter that permits me to test the individualist perspective against the touchstone of my own identity.
And that I intend to do. If my too many years have taught me anything, it is the profound truth of Polonius’s bromide: that each of us must strive to make his creed true, but it shall profit us nothing unless each of us remains true to his own self. In A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains his obstinacy by saying: “What matters is not that I believe it, but that I believe it.” The point has also been stated: For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. — Roger Donway
Last Halloween, at campus parties across the country, college students dressed up in costumes that, predictably for adolescents and post-adolescents, went way beyond the bounds of good taste. Simultaneously, students primed for postmodern outrage readied themselves to be offended by anything hinting at stereotypes. A savvy reporter assigned to cover the scene might have written a dummy story well before the night began and plugged in his details later.
The first incident came from Johns Hopkins University. A fraternity, Sigma Chi, had sent out invitations for a “Halloween in the Hood,” which asked students to wear such items as “bling bling” and “grills.” (Author’s confession: I had to Google those terms to find out what they mean.) As a result, the fraternity was suspended and the university’s president declared that the school would not tolerate such behavior. A second incident occurred at Dartmouth, where the crew team held a formal dance with an optional “cowboys and Indians” theme, and three rowers dressed up as Indians. A group out celebrating Latin American culture spotted the offending costumes and called an associate dean. He in turn called security, and those who were dressed as Indians left or changed. The captain of the team later wrote a cringing letter of apology, pledging to attend a sensitivity meeting about the history of Dartmouth’s Indian mascot.
The suicide bomber costume is an offense against all civilized norms.
Ordinarily, the final paragraphs of this story would have had right-wing commentators deploring the politically correct harassment to which the JHU and Dartmouth students were subjected. But the narrative quickly became more complicated when word spread of a third and far bigger flap. At the University of Pennsylvania, senior Saad Saadi had dressed up as a Palestinian suicide bomber and attended the Halloween party of university president Amy Gutmann. There, posing with a keffiyeh scarf around his head, a toy automatic rifle in his hand, and fake bombs strapped to his chest, Saadi had his picture taken standing next to the broadly smiling president, who was dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. That picture, along with others showing Saadi acting out his role, were later posted on the Web.
Oh dear. During an academic career of forty years, Amy Gutmann has assembled a résumé that is formally impressive, although I cannot attest to its intellectual rigor. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard and proceeded immediately to a professorship at Princeton. Ten years after arriving, she was director of graduate studies. Ten years after that, dean of the faculty. Ten years later, president of UPenn. Rumor said that she wished to be the first female president of Harvard. But that dream, it now appears, has been, well, exploded. It’s not fair, of course, but suicide bombers never are.
My concern here, however, is not with the disastrous misstep of an academic superstar, or the adequacy of the two apologies she issued. (Gutmann later protested that she had not fully grasped the student’s costume.) My concern, rather, is with the right’s discussion of the incident and the clash of principles it reveals. The most interesting debate took place between commentators at National Review Online’s group blog Phi Beta Cons (PBC) and members of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Although FIRE is libertarian in its principles, it has earned much goodwill among conservatives, because (given our postmodern academy) much of its work has involved defending students from politically correct harassment.
On November 2, FIRE launched a preemptive strike by publishing an article called “Un-PC Halloween Costumes Cut Both Ways.” In it, Tara Sweeney wrote: “I think that other university presidents could learn a lot from Gutmann’s nonchalance about this photo (she seems so happy!). . . . Lest Halloween parties become the next frontier for the campus sensitivity police, people need to recognize that Halloween is a good time for satire, and that sometimes a costume is just a costume.”
Over at PBC, commentator Anthony Dick (who had previously written a post about the Johns Hopkins incident, insisting that nothing offensive had taken place) merely noted that the offending students in the two cases were not treated equally: “It seems that Halloween has become the latest occasion for exposing the academy’s baffling double standards: Some topics are met with hyper-sensitivity, while others are dismissed with cold numbness.”
But PBC’s Candace de Russy (who also sits on FIRE’s board of advisors) did not let Gutmann off so lightly. She urged the University of Pennsylvania board to direct Gutmann to apologize unequivocally and “make it clear that she abhors the moral equivalency of so many campus denizens, who too often have represented the bombers and their victims as moral equals.”
On November 3, Gutmann issued her first comments on the incident, and Carol Iannone attacked them at PBC several days later. “University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann not only misses the point but shows insensibility to civilized norms when she says in her statement regarding the student who came to her Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber that he ‘had a right to wear the costume.’ Leave it to Left-liberals to put everything in terms of rights. This is not a question of civil rights but of civilized behavior in a private, or at least non-political setting. The suicide bomber costume is an offense against all civilized norms. She not only had the ‘right,’ she had the obligation to disallow it, especially as a person in a position of authority.” In a later post, she added: “Civilization requires that people uphold the rules of civilization, especially people in authority.”
The public square and the college square are different institutions.
PBC commentator David French, previously FIRE’s president, came to the defense of his former organization: “On the free speech side of things, I tend to side with FIRE. I just don’t see much of a role for administrators in regulating ‘offensive’ Halloween costumes.” The real problem, he said, was that “a student at an elite college deliberately planned and chose to dress as a suicide bomber. . . . I choose to view the faux suicide bomber as he no doubt wishes to be viewed in virtually every other area of his life—as an adult. And that means not putting the primary responsibility on Amy Gutmann.”
Anthony Dick then returned to mediate: “I think David is right that, in deference to free expression, the student who dressed as a suicide bomber for Halloween shouldn’t have been punished by the college. . . . But with the legal right to free expression comes the corollary moral obligation to speak out in condemnation of that which we find morally repulsive. So not only should Gutmann not have posed for a smiling picture with the toy-dynamite-toting student: She should have berated him in person and let him know just how disgusting his costume was.”
At this point, FIRE’s vice president of operations, Robert Shibley, challenged Carol Iannone by name: “Iannone states that people in authority should be ‘asked to stand for civil behavior.’ What she does not seem to realize is that the average college administrator’s version of ‘civil behavior’ is likely to be radically different from her own views.” He then added a second argument: “To be clear, FIRE supports rights on campus for all students, because we believe that values like free speech . . . are vital for the functioning of a free society. . . . FIRE always says that ‘you don’t have the right not to be offended,’ and that adage applies when the ‘offensive’ material is anti-American just as much as it applies when the ‘offensive’ material is considered racist or sexist.”
What shall we make of this debate? At one time, I would have said flatly: “FIRE is being consistent on free speech. Postmodern academics and conservatives are contradicting themselves.” Now, I think the answer is not so obvious.
Shibley notes that postmodernist rules of “civility” are used to suppress right-wing ideas, and he is surely correct. But FIRE has won support from many on the right because they believe that the postmodernist rules of “civility” are, philosophically, the wrong rules of civility. Is Shibley saying we should abandon the fight for valid norms of campus civility simply because academics have twisted the idea into a means of suppressing opponents? That is short-range thinking. We do not give up the concept of “rights” just because leftists have twisted it into the basis for “a right to health care.” We invent new clarifications—such as “negative rights versus positive rights”—with which to carry on the battle.
Or is Shibley saying that he himself believes any attempt to establish substantive norms of civility is a zero-sum game? Does he think that Iannone’s or de Russy’s rules for civil behavior would be equally oppressive and would prevent postmodernists from having a chance to make their arguments? If that is his line of reasoning, he would seem to have bought into the subjectivist view that—beyond constitutional free-speech law—there are no objective norms for what types of social behavior allow civil discourse.
As may be evident, I now find myself siding with the proponents of civility. FIRE and other opponents of postmodern campus codes have done superb work against the academy’s radical oppressors, and for that they deserve high honors. But I believe that the incident at UPenn reveals a flaw in their fundamental premises. They have taken twentieth-century constitutional doctrines regarding public free speech, with all of their Progressivist distortions (including “symbolic behavior”), and tried to turn them into the prevailing campus code for speech and action.
And that, I think, is a mistake. In the first place, the public square and the college square are different institutions. In the second place, true freedom of speech can be based only on the rights of private property, or, when dealing with public venues, the adoption of quasi-rights modeling those derived from private property. Thus, Shibley’s statement of FIRE’s creed—“you don’t have the right not to be offended”—seems to me irrelevant in a college setting. A student has no right to control others’ speech for the simple reason that he does not own the campus. Offensiveness has nothing to do with it.
True freedom of speech can be based only on the rights of private property.In the case of colleges and universities, I believe, freedom of speech based on property rights or quasi−property rights would mean that a campus ought to be considered, functionally, as the college president’s living room. At a well-run school, we might say, the president has invited a group of youths, plus some educated adults, to join him in an extended session of ardent learning and fearless discussion. Under the circumstances, he has both the right and the obligation to insist that the students (and also his fellow adults) adopt the decent and mannerly speech, behavior, and appearance most conducive to maintaining the serious and open intellectual atmosphere required by their joint project.
To be sure, the vast majority of college students are not mature people, and therefore a wise administrator will treat their leisure-time immaturities—whether minor cruelties or hypersensitivities—with no more disapproval than is needed to correct and guide a young person. It is not a matter susceptible to formulated codes—of any kind—and a range of valid strictness certainly exists. A college president must employ such wisdom and prudence as he possesses to preside over his campus with a reasonable mixture of severity and sang-froid. If he cannot or will not, then it is the job of the institution’s board to replace him.
This debate over campus civility would seem to have far wider implications. Libertarians often plead with people to understand that one can oppose the illegality of behavior without condoning it morally. And they are right to do so. But libertarians should in turn understand that people expect a decent society will have effective mechanisms for sustaining social morality. If libertarians instead attack efforts to uphold social morality, and try to replace them with nothing but legal rules, they not unnaturally create the suspicion that, after all, they do believe that only the illegal is profoundly and horrifically wrong. And sometimes, frankly, I wonder if the suspicion is inaccurate.
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