Snowflake censorious conservative outrage mobs

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Last week, while all eyes were on Bret Stephens and his unsuccessful attempt to intimidate a university professor, a smaller, but more significant campus free speech episode was playing out in Iowa. Jeff Klinzman, an adjunct professor of English at Kirkwood Community College and self-proclaimed member of Antifa, was stripped of his position after controversial comments he made on social media came to light.

According to Kirkwood President Lori Sundberg, her decision to remove Klinzman — she insists he voluntarily resigned; Klinzman disputes this account — came from a “commitment to fostering a safe learning environment for students, faculty, and staff.” When a faculty member’s speech “is perceived as placing public safety in jeopardy, or hampers our ability to deliver on our mission, we will always do what is necessary in service to our students’ pursuit of a higher education.”

What to make of this explanation? Reason’s Robby Soave interpreted it as Safetyism run amok — the misguided notion that students must be protected from controversial or offensive speech. Yascha Mounk of The Atlantic reached a similar conclusion, warning that “the fear that somebody’s views might make people unsafe is a terrible reason to fire an academic — whatever his views.” To them, Klinzman’s termination is yet another case of coddled students and the administrators willing to indulge them.

There’s just one problem. It wasn’t Klinzman’s speech that so alarmed Kirkwood administrators or prompted all those concerns about safety. It was the death threats.

In the 24 hours between when Klinzman’s comments came to light and Sundberg’s decision to remove him, a right-wing Outrage Mob descended on Kirkwood. Conservative media covered the story aggressively, with some presenting Klinzman as a virtual terrorist. Thousands of complaints poured into the school as a result, including from two Republican state legislators and the chair of the Iowa Republican Party.

Some threatened assault. Others vowed to burn the school to the ground. As for Klinzman, he received a barrage of death threats and his wife was forced to flee their home. Police now patrol their neighborhood and will have an increased presence on campus for the start of the school year.

None of this is unique to Kirkwood or the Klinzmans. In fact, it isn’t even an extreme case. Other professors who have found themselves in the right’s cross-hairs have suffered much worse, with some even forced to abandon their jobs and flee their towns.

So much of the campus free speech debate focuses on left-wing students, censorious administrators, and so-called “Social Justice Warriors.” These all generate real threats to speech and merit our attention. But in the meantime, a vicious, persistent, and politically well-connected assault from the right has gone largely unnoticed.

Consider the two Iowa state representatives who contacted Kirkwood administrators. At the moment, we do not know whether they directly asked for Klinzman’s termination. But considering the pattern of Republican officials threatening speech on campus, we should not be surprised if they did.

When a Trinity College professor made controversial comments on Twitter, the Connecticut GOP House minority leader called Trinity’s president demanding that the professor be fired. The same thing happened in California, where seven Republican senators introduced a bill calling for the immediate termination of a UC Davis professor, a move supported by the state Republican Party. And a sitting U.S. congressman demanded the firing of a Duke University professor because he criticized Trump on CNN.

There’s more. After a dean at North Carolina State used his personal Twitter account to mock conservatives, the state Republican Party filed a public records request for his communications, a common strategy conservative activists use to punish faculty they dislike.

And it’s getting worse.

In Massachusetts, the state Republican Party demanded that UMass Amherst cancel a conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile in Nebraska, GOP leadership successfully blocked former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey from delivering the commencement address at Creighton University.

After a conference on Gaza at the University of North Carolina, a pair of GOP congressmen persuaded the federal Department of Education to launch an investigation over what they called, in part, its “anti-Israeli” bias. A GOP congressman threatened something similar over a University of Kansas course entitled “Angry White Male Studies,” which he warned could constitute a Title IX violation.

And when an Arizona State professor was photographed wearing a t-shirt with the hashtag #NotMyPresident written on it, the local Republican representative implied that the state might cut higher education funding as a result.
All of these examples — every single one — are from just the last six months. These sorts of episodes are a dime a dozen. Go back another six months and you’ll find many more attempts by Republican politicians to silence professors and teaching assistants, interfere in the classroom, and cancel campus events. These attacks can be remarkably effective, especially when the target is a public institution that relies on state funding. Republicans know this and have been keen to exploit it.

That’s government power, deployed to stifle speech. Combined with the private power of a right-wing Outrage Mob, it can be overwhelming.

While Democrats have behaved similarly in the past, they do so less frequently and with less intensity. This isn’t a “both sides” story. When it comes to government officials threatening free speech on campus, Republicans are clearly worse.
One major reason is there are significantly more liberals than conservatives in academia. On average, we should expect liberal professors to be the targets of more partisan attacks than conservative ones. This is the same reason why we should expect liberal students to be responsible for more deplatformings than conservatives: they outnumber them.

Another important reason is that the GOP has an incentive to bash academia that Democrats lack. Support for higher education has plummeted among Republican voters in recent years, transforming universities into a handy culture war punching bag. Moreover, by highlighting controversial speech by professors, Republican officials can more easily justify slashing state spending on higher ed, curtailing what they see as a hostile institution.
But there’s something else at play here.

Over the last 10 years, conservatives have developed a vast network of campus watchdogs, media outlets, and databases designed to monitor the academy and publicize speech they find offensive. Prominent examples include The College Fix and Campus Reform, two websites that employ a mix of professional and student journalists from schools across the country. These websites, along with organizations like Turning Point USA, excel at generating outrage over liberal professors. They also play an important role alerting national and mainstream reporters to local campus controversies that might otherwise go unnoticed. Soave, for instance, is a former editor at The College Fix, and frequently cites their coverage in his stories. Liberals have nothing equivalent.

This disparity helps explain why Republican politicians’ attacks on campus free speech usually don’t attract much attention. When a conservative professor says something controversial, outlets like The College Fix focus on the outraged response by liberals. But when a liberal professor says something controversial, they tend to focus on the speech itself, omitting the outrage from conservatives and attacks on free speech that follow. Even when an entire state Republican Party lines up to deplatform a campus speaker (as happened at UMass Amherst), the episode can receive virtually no coverage outside the local press.

For instance, of the 16 examples of Republican attacks on campus free speech cited in this article, only Reason turned in a respectable performance, covering four of them. By comparison, The Atlantic and Quillette, both of which frequently denounce incidents involving left-wing students, covered only one episode apiece. And as for so-called “Free Speech Warriors” like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Dave Rubin, multiple searches of their podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and newspaper interviews failed to yield a single hit.

On the other hand, Oberlin students have been covered exhaustively.

It is important to emphasize that conservative and Republican Party attacks on liberal faculty are not the “real” campus free speech crisis, because there isn’t one. Very few professors, even among those who are outspokenly political, will ever find themselves in left- or right-wing crosshairs, and even fewer will actually be punished by their employer.
After a sharp increase in 2017, when 28 faculty were terminated for political speech, only three faculty (two liberals, one conservative) have been fired so far in 2019. If the current trend continues, this year will feature the fewest number of terminated faculty since 2014.

But even if the numbers are small, the problem is real. Universities can only fulfill their function when professors and students are able to speak freely, something that cannot happen while under siege.

Now, none of this means ignoring out-of-control students or PC run amok. Those stories have their place and I do not begrudge them their fair share of coverage.

But the Republican Party holds power in Washington D.C. and a majority of state governments. Conservative media, as well as the political movement it serves, are dominant in huge swathes of American public life. Their assault on speech they don’t like has already destroyed careers, like Jeff Klinzman’s, with more sure to come as a new semester gets underway.
Right-wing threats to campus speech are at least as concerning as those from the left. It is time that they were treated as such.

Why is academia political in the first place? It should be primarily about job training.

Why is academia political in the first place? It should be primarily about job training.

No. College is about learning and imparting knowledge to future generations. It is not primarily about job training, though of course, it makes you an expert in the field you studied in which helps you get a job.

I never understood why we can't train a human being to work and function in society in the 12 years of high school. Why is college necessary at all?

What I learned in college in six years is irrelevant to me today, and high school consisted of 12 years mostly wasted in review of basics and more irrelevancies.

High school is really babysitting, and college is just one big sex, drugs and alcohol party.

Here's a thought - only use weapons you'd want your political enemies to use. If you don't like doxing, don't like Middlebury style mobs, don't use them because they become free game for the other side.

It's not that this needs to forever escalate, it means that both sides of the moderate-ish left and right who are tacitly winking at this stuff need to stop and reinforce their commitment to civil discourse. Letting these societal weapons keep escalating leads to the para-militarization of the fringes and leads to each side's dogs eating them and it takes an imbecile on the left or right not to see that in the mid-term consequences.

Better yet, quit treating those that disagree with you politically as "enemies."

Here's a thought - only use weapons you'd want your political enemies to use. If you don't like doxing, don't like Middlebury style mobs, don't use them because they become free game for the other side.

It's not that this needs to forever escalate, it means that both sides of the moderate-ish left and right who are tacitly winking at this stuff need to stop and reinforce their commitment to civil discourse. Letting these societal weapons keep escalating leads to the para-militarization of the fringes and leads to each side's dogs eating them and it takes an imbecile on the left or right not to see that in the mid-term consequences.

By following the rules of civil discourse......

There aren't very many people on the "Right" who are Nazis----just like there aren't very many people on the "Left" who are Communists.

How can you reasonably have civil discourse with the other side when you both have such different views?

Better yet, quit treating those that disagree with you politically as "enemies."