A lot has happened since the Ol
Bloviator was called away from these cyber-pages to attend to numerous loose
ends, attending both to his research, and the rules and regs pertaining both to
his imminent retirement from his longsuffering employer and alma mater (3x) and
to the utterly chaotic foreplay leading up to getting laid low by the USG's
default on its health care promises to its employees. (More to follow on this
soon.) Among the things that have been crying out for his unsolicited
commentary is the raging controversy within the academic realm over whether
freedom of expression in practically any form must be restricted to avoid
giving offense various racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual orientation
groupings within the student population.
The following is the O.B's take on this matter as it might be viewed
through the eyes of one on the nation's leading champions of free speech in the
twentieth century, the late historian C. Vann Woodward. It is a slightly up
dated version of a piece posted on The History
News Network.
When it appeared in 1975, Yale's
Free Speech Policy made such a forceful case for the absolute necessity of
protecting free expression on campus that it was quickly adopted as a model for
a number of other universities. Forty years later, however, events at Yale and
elsewhere demonstrate that many of the old certainties about the nature and primary
importance free speech in the academic arena are anything but certain. Yale's
policy was once better known as "The Woodward Report," in reference to C. Vann
Woodward, the distinguished historian and public intellectual who chaired the
committee charged with drafting the report. The association was indisputably
fitting, for in addition to his role as an early and ardent crusader against
racial injustice and exclusion, Woodward had been a champion of free speech and
dissent since his young adulthood. In 1930, at age 21, fresh out of Emory
University and teaching English at Georgia Tech, he became one of 62 signatories
to a petition
protesting arbitrary arrests and police harassment of communist spokespersons
in Atlanta and demanding they "should be protected in their constitutional
rights of free speech and assemblage." Two years later, he had helped to mount
a defense effort for Angelo Herndon, a young black communist organizer who was
arrested and imprisoned on charges of "inciting insurrection" under an obscure
Georgia law dredged up from the Reconstruction era. Woodward would again risk
his job and reputation by stoutly affirming the loyalty of embattled
German-born faculty at Scripps College, where he was teaching at the beginning
of World War II.
These and other such activities presaged
Woodward's prominent role in supporting his Johns Hopkins colleague,
international affairs expert Owen
Lattimore, whose tolerant views on the Soviet Union led Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy to condemn him as "the top Soviet espionage agent in the United
States" in 1950. Though McCarthy and countless others urged Johns Hopkins
administrators to fire Lattimore, Woodward was in the front ranks of a faculty
cohort who succeeded in persuading the Hopkins higher-ups to retain him even
after he was indicted by the Justice Department in 1952 and up until he was
finally cleared of all charges in 1955.
Like many others born of the Cold
War anxieties of the 1950s, Lattimore's case fell into a general pattern
stretching back to the Early National Era in which individuals or groups who challenged
the prevailing verities or the practices of the reigning political majority, provoked
determined efforts to silence them either through the resources of government or
by any other coercive means available. The next decade, however, would bring a
striking new twist to free-speech debates and conflicts, in the academic realm
especially, where it would frequently be those bent on fundamental alteration
of the system who sought to silence its increasingly outmanned defenders.
Even as a champion of free speech
and dissent, Woodward drew the line at what he saw as the unreasonable demands
and bullying tactics of militant black students and anti-Vietnam war activists
who succeeded in shutting down some universities for days at a time in the
1960s and early 1970s. On the other hand, rather than damaging, he thought
periodic disagreements, even potentially volatile ones, sparked by the
expression of controversial or unpopular views were vital to maintaining a
vibrant, energized campus intellectual environment. He was more than a little
dismayed, then, in September 1963, when then-provost and acting president
Kingman Brewster persuaded a student organization to rescind its invitation to
Alabama Governor George Wallace to speak at Yale. Brewster would later be named
president in his own right, but he was clearly chastened by the backlash
against his use of his office to restrict free speech on a campus where it was
supposed to have been such a hallowed tradition. Though Woodward had been at
Yale barely a year at that point, he had not hesitated to let Brewster know of
his disapproval. Nearly a decade later, he would be, if anything, even more
upset when student protestors were allowed to physically prevent General
William Westmoreland from taking the podium in 1972 and two years later when
they succeeded in shouting down a debate featuring physicist and
black-inferiority theorist William A. Shockley. In the wake of the Shockley
debacle, Brewster asked Woodward to chair a committee to draft a policy that
would reaffirm "the
principles of free speech" at Yale.
Unlike many documents constructed
by committee, the Woodward Report would have both an immediate and a lasting
impact, owing in no small measure to its eloquent and compelling argument for
free speech as the absolute and inviolable principle by which all universities
worthy of the name must abide: "The history of intellectual growth and
discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to
think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the
unchallengeable. . . . We value freedom of expression precisely because it
provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox."
Such assertions seemed very much in tune with the spirit
of an era of zealously composed and just as zealously ripped down
bulletin-board treatises and competing bullhorns echoing across college
campuses. Although the report's authors conceded that "if a university is a
place for knowledge, it is also a special kind of small society," they ultimately
concluded that "it cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of
friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect" and remain true
to 'its central purpose." Indeed, they added for good measure, "It may
sometimes be necessary in a university for civility and mutual respect to be
superseded by the need to guarantee free expression."
Woodward remained true to this principle in 1986, when he
took up the cause of Wayne Dick, a student who had been placed on probation for
posting flyers that mocked "Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days" by announcing
"Bestiality Awareness Days." Dick had cited the Woodward Report in his defense,
and his new champion explained that "certainly
I don't agree with his ideas, but they all come under the protection of free
speech." Yale's executive committee agreed to a re-hearing of his
case and cleared Dick after Woodward recruited several influential witnesses to
testify in his behalf, including Yale's
Law School dean, who conceded that Dick's actions were "tasteless, even
disgusting" but allowed "that's beside the point. Free expression is more
important than civility in a university."
This point of view did not go unchallenged at Yale or
elsewhere, even in 1986, and, needless to say, it can hardly be said to hold
sway today, when protestors at Amherst
are demanding "extensive training
for racial and cultural competency" and possible disciplinary action against
fellow students who had posted placards upholding "Free Speech" and declaring
"All Lives Matter." Likewise,
it is difficult to imagine anything farther from the ideals expressed in the
Woodward Report, than the recent viral
video from Yale itself, in which a student berates Professor Nicholas Kristakis,
master of Silliman residential college--and implicitly, his wife, the associate
master--for failing to endorse the campus intercultural affairs committee's
call for students to avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes. Their job,
she insists is not to create "intellectual space" but "a place of comfort and
home." Student demands for the couple's ouster at Silliman have yet to bear
fruit, but it seems a fair bet that Dr.
Christakis's decision to take a sabbatical next term and Ms. Kristakis's plan
to step away from her role as a lecturer at Yale represent something more than
your old everyday, garden-variety coincidence.
Woodward himself seemed to anticipate some of the current
conflicts as early as 1989,
when he observed that, while it was "majority opinion" that had been offended
by Shockley's appearance at Yale in 1974, fifteen years later it was "mainly
minority groups that fe[lt] offended by unrestricted free speech." In
condemning "opinions and speech held repugnant or offensive" as "harassment,"
Woodward thought, minority spokesmen were resorting to "much the same rhetoric
of shock and anger" once leveled at "the public sentiments of Professor Shockley
and General Westmoreland."
The problem with Woodward's ironic
observation was that he was comparing the feelings of an undifferentiated
campus majority in the Westmoreland-Shockley cases of the early 1970s to the
feelings of a sharply defined racial minority at the end of the 1980s. This
discrepancy reveals much about the aims and expectations of the dedicated liberal
crusaders of Woodward's generation. Speaking out forcefully against racial
injustice at a time when it really meant something to do so, their goal was
integration rather than racial or cultural diversity, which, rather than an end
in itself, was for them, more of a stage in a larger process of assimilation.
Intellectual diversity was another matter entirely, however, for they had
dedicated much of their lives to toppling the tyranny of majority opinion and
defending its victims. It was hardly surprising, then, that their ideal campus
was one where the free expression of ideas mattered above all and racial or
cultural distinctions and the attendant sensitivities mattered progressively
less.
To say the least, Woodward and
others of his cohort failed to account for such possibilities as racial,
ethnic, cultural, and sexual-preference minorities actually embracing and
demanding respect for identities that they had been expected to lose to the
swift currents of the social mainstream. At any rate, the Woodward Report's
insistence that freedom of speech on college campuses is not a debatable
proposition rings true these days only because, as Professor Shockley learned
at Yale, it is impossible to debate anything in the midst of a shouting match,
in this case, between those seeking to bolster old protections for free expression,
and those (currently enjoying the decibel advantage) demanding new protections
from it.
