Last week, NYU apologized for something a student said. The context was a graduation speech in which a student mentioned “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine”. It’s worth quoting NYU fully, so here it is:
“NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views.
He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The University is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions.
NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”
What an awful thing for a university to say. A graduation speaker isn’t supposed to express their personal political views? Does anyone who has ever attended a graduation ceremony actually believe this? Looking at a list of recent NYU graduation speakers, we see (among others): Bill Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Justin Trudeau. Do we think that they just delivered jokes and Latin oratory for their entire speeches? Moreover, are universities places where people should be afraid to be “subject” to ideas they may find challenging or even upsetting?1[1]
There is little doubt that this double standard on speech comes from the fact that the student’s “one-sided political views” were about Palestine. We can add NYU to the list of universities that, when faced with pressure to restrict speech recognizing the humanity of Palestinians, have forgotten their own policies. In this case, a “bedrock principle” of NYU is that the university “upholds and encourages the freedom of students to express their views.”
I could go on about this, and one should definitely point out this double standard whenever it arises. But I also think there has been enough evidence for a double standard around pro-Palestinian speech that you either believe that exists or you don’t. There is also something, perhaps deeper here, which is the erosion of free speech at universities, while universities are constantly repeating that they are renewing efforts to promote “free speech”, “civil discourse”, and “ideological diversity”.2 How can universities be promoting free speech and ideological diversity while restricting certain speech, curtailing protest, and, in the case of my employer, removing ideologically inconvenient scholars?
Such actions reflect a larger phenomenon in American politics, falling under a class of rhetoric that I have noticed in recent years: the dressing of restrictive actions in universalistic American values: Donald Trump talks constantly about liberty (even naming his cryptocurrency project after the concept) when his administration has done more to curtail liberty than anyone in modern American history. Further, his allies have talked about free speech while attacking the media, the right to protest, and academic freedom.
This habit of saying one thing while doing the opposite goes beyond Trump, though: I wrote about how faculty at Harvard put themselves under the guise of defending free speech while publicly arguing for its restriction. And NIMBYs in liberal places like Cambridge, who argue for, in practice, racially restrictive and environmentally damaging projects, wrap themselves in the logic of promoting racial equality and environmental protection.
I know we don’t love hypocrisy, but, in a certain respect, all of this seeming double-speak is a good thing: it shows the power of liberal (small l) principles: they are so ingrained into the American ethos that we frame all of our actions around them. In a classic work of political science, Herbert McClosky and John Zaller argued that American conflict all happens within the framework of liberty and equality because we all believe in these things. One might even believe that such principles constrain and guide action positively: would the universities restrict speech even further if they didn’t have to keep free speech in mind? I think they probably would.
However, there is also an interesting twist that when such principles are invoked, they seem to provide justification for damaging behavior. As such, we don’t recognize such behavior for what it is because it comes from sources that profess the opposite. It changes our interpretation of what is happening: For those of us on the left, when people on the right try to enact book bans, we recognize them for what they are, and we condemn them. However, when a university, which always professes a belief in free speech, cancels student speech, we struggle to recognize the action for what it is. In fact, the people at the university probably don’t recognize their hypocrisy either because they believe that they believe in free speech and will interpret their own actions within that framework. I’ve had these conversations with administrators who are actively suppressing free speech: they always say they are just trying to protect it. My NIMBY friends surely really believe that they are promoting racial equality. I know this because I have spoken to them and they have cited obscure data to try to validate the claim. People on the right, similarly, probably really believe that Donald Trump is defending liberty.
Further, we see a weaponization of the American abhorrence of racism and its nearly universal embrace of equality in order to restrict free speech in the name of combating “antisemitism”. America doesn’t do equality perfectly, I know this, but equality is certainly part of the American ethos, and America’s self-image is of a place that has overcome its racial demons. This makes any action undertaken in the name of promoting these values difficult to challenge or criticize. So, when people say they are combating antisemitism, it also makes them difficult to challenge.3
The always insightful Michelle Goldberg wrote recently about the consequences of such rhetoric when she talked about right-wing projects, mostly led by Christians, to shut down speech on college campuses and in government, even by Jews, in the name of combating “antisemitism”. She wrote that, “ultra-Zionist gentiles get to lecture Jews about antisemitism even as they lay waste to the liberal culture that has allowed American Jews to thrive.” Here in lies the danger: America’s liberal institutions defend marginalized groups and, yet, are under attack, using their own principles, in the name of supposedly defending marginalized groups. In the long run, such institutions and principles are threatened.
All of this brings to mind the late social psychologist James Sidanius’ concept of “Legitimizing Myths”. Sidanius wrote about this in his magnum opus, Social Dominance.4 According to Sidanius and his coauthor Felicia Pratto, Legitimizing Myths are ideas that maintain the hierarchical status quo in a society and that people will endorse to justify that status quo. They had in mind concepts that were clearly hierarchical, like scientific racism. But I think we can see how putatively anti-hierarchical ideas, like “free speech,” can be used to legitimize certain illiberal actions.
This is a problem without an easy solution. Legitimizing myths don’t die easily. However, I think that, especially for institutions like universities, the solution must be, in part, a commitment to a critical examination of what we actually mean when we state principles and whether our actions actually conform to those principles. When somebody talks about combating antisemitism or promoting free speech, we need to ask them what they mean by those concepts and how what they are doing is actually consistent with the principle. The danger is, of course, that somebody may then cynically accuse one of antisemitism or suppressing speech to shut them up, again weaponizing the American value. But we have to be willing to take this risk in the name of upholding the true value of concepts like equality and free speech. Otherwise, we risk losing these principles—and their blessings—altogether.
See Alex Gourevitch’s excellent take on this in Boston Review.
It pains me to put those in quotation marks because they are all valuable concepts and principles, but I don’t know how else to express the hypocrisy here.
I talked about this on the Open Source Radio Podcast last month.
Perhaps uncoincidentally, I mentioned Social Dominance as one of the books one should read to understand current American politics on a recent Swiss podcast.