So, the case for protesting commencement speakers is that the protesters aren't silencing debate, but rather sparking one. The article then goes on to argue that the debate the protesting students are sparking is of whether there should be any debate.
If it's no longer a safe assumption that overt assertions of antipluralism are self-discrediting, has the sort of circular reasoning exhibited in this item become worthy of consideration as well now? I understand that liberalism is not the only social philosophy under the sun, but due to its practice-proven superiority over its reactionary and radical challengers, it had always at least been the clothing that these challengers garbed themselves in when asserting themselves. I suppose that's the meaning of this ludicrous conceit that attacking the podium is the same thing as having a debate.
This season's string of incidents have some limiting qualities in common - they are all commencement ceremonies, the speakers are all ranged around the political center, and they each chose to side-step the fracas the protesters promised to greet them with. But the phenomenon of campus activists silencing the dais goes back many years and we can know from previous incidents that these are not essential properties of the phenomenon. Often the occasion has been a standard lecture or panel discussion followed by a Q&A period. Sometimes the invited speakers have been the sort of public figures who invite controversy or are further from the center than the center-left commentariat are inclined to defend. Sometimes the speaker makes his scheduled appearance in spite of the threatened protest.
For instance, when immigration restrictionist, Jim Gilchrist was invited to speak at Columbia University in 2006, he knew his appearance would be protested, but he chose to appear nonetheless. The protesters took this as a call for enhanced measures. In the hours leading up to the event, the protesters assembled a gauntlet along the path to the lecture hall entrance, jabbing accusing fingers and shouting rebukes at unrecognized passers-through. Consequently, when the hour arrived, the seats were mainly filled from the protester's ranks. Gilchrist had barely finished a single sentence over the shouting when the one phalanx of protesters rushed in from backstage and unfurled a banner. Simultaneously, a second phalanx of protesters situated in the front row rushed onstage and attacked the podium, pushing Gilchrist away from the microphone. Ninety seconds later, the curtain came down and celebratory cheers roared through the crowd.
This is what Hirsi Ali, Rice, LaGarde and Birgeneau tastefully and considerately sought to avoid by turning down their invitations to speak. When campus activists announce their disapproval of a scheduled speaker, we needn't question whether their intention is to open a debate or to defeat open discourse. In the moments after the curtain fell on the Columbia event, an adult coordinator of the student protesters announced the event's closure to the protesters assembled outside:
Okay, so we just got word from the inside...we have collectively shut him up like he deserves to be shut up! Because it's not about his free speech. It's about our free speech!
Perhaps the most audacious expression of this new antipluralism is the idea that it is the scheduled speakers themselves, rather than the protesters, who defeat the open expression of ideas by opting to leave the podium. This conceit as expressed above and elsewhere in reference to this season's incidents was also asserted by the Columbia protesters in the public statement released amid their vainglorious braying about shutting a speaker up by force. I'm not a fan of Gilchrist and one needn't be to oppose the bellicose posture of antipluralism that saturates university culture.
All things are not equal, however, and it wouldn't be intellectually honest to pretend they are. A commencement ceremony speech is a monologue, not a debate. If not through protest, it is asked, where is the opportunity to speak truth to power? Well, a lot of things in the campus environment are not forums for debate. A professor's lecture is not a debate. A Q&A session is not a proper debate. Indeed, a protest demonstration is not a debate (in actual fact, an "Occupy"-style protest demonstration is no more participatory with a campus population than is the real thing). Chasing a speaker away from the dais does not effect an exchange of ideas any more than it is the case that the protesters and the scheduled speaker are the only people in the auditorium. When considering this phenomenon, we shouldn't ignore the actual mechanics of what is happening: Adult professors and administrators, who would never allow their own presentations to be disrupted in similar fashion, provide encouragement and support to student protesters, and in concert they enforce the boundaries of allowable discourse they define for the entire campus environment.
Condoleeza Rice indeed loses no part of her say in things by being chased away from the a college campus. The ones who have been robbed are the entire remainder of the campus population whose minds have not yet hardened around a rigid, binary system defining "good" ideas and "evil" ideas that is itself exempt from interrogation. That is the objective, of course, to forestall critical thinking and proscribe all but the "correct" thoughts available for the entire campus population's consideration.
No comments:
Post a Comment