Trigger warning: This post could potentially be triggering to anti-liberals.

Short version: The solution to the New Infantilism on college campuses is to create distinct colleges that cater to the New Infants.



On Brian Leiter’s blog, I read a remarkable piece today about Title IX and sexual politics on campus. A feminist professor criticized some student behavior on her campus, and was then subject to, as Leiter aptly puts it, a “Kafkaesque ordeal”:

According to our campus newspaper, the mattress-carriers were marching to the university president’s office with a petition demanding “a swift, official condemnation” of my article. One student said she’d had a “very visceral reaction” to the essay; another called it “terrifying.” I’d argued that the new codes infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas, which seemed to prove my point…. [I inserted the bold fonts]

The New Campus Censorship™ seems to be based on a travesty of Mill’s On Liberty. Mill is often read as saying you should be free to do whatever you like so long as you don’t harm others. (FWIW, Dan Jacobson has convinced me this is a misreading, that Mill has a Liberty Principle, not a Harm Principle.) In response, those who want to censor others and shut down debate no longer claim that ideas they dislike are bad or vile or evil. Instead, they claim that being exposed to these ideas threatens them. They are “terrified”. They are excluded and harmed. They happily describe open debate as “violence”, and then are willing to use literal violence to shut down debate. They happily describe opinions they dislike as threats, and then use literal threats to stop those opinions from being expressed. Finally, to top off the Orwellian sundae, as they do everything in their power to make sure only the One Right Point of View™ may be discussed on campus, they claim that anyone who advocates liberal free speech is just trying to exercise privilege or power. Joseph McCarthy claimed to be shutting down a conspiracy, but at least he had the decency not to portray himself as a victim when he went around victimizing others. But in the New Campus Censorship™, the Grand Inquisitors portray themselves as victims as they snap their whips and burn books.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve mostly only witnessed this kind of behavior third-hand. It hasn’t affected me much personally. (Except, I guess, for the recent hullabaloo with the Madjuncts, who used these bullshit tactics against me.) I’ve never had any problems with my own classes, perhaps in part because I put the following free speech zone trigger warning in all my syllabi:

Academic Freedom You have the right to engage in reasoned disagreement with me without any penalty to your grade. I have the right to challenge any belief, ideology, worldview, or attitude you have, including those beliefs you hold sacred. Students likewise have this right against each other and me. Everyone has the right to express his or her views without fear of bullying or reprisal. The classroom and the university is a forum for the pursuit of truth. I intend for this class to aid in the pursuit of responsible ideology. Responsible ideology means putting in the hard work to be justified in one’s political views. It requires a synthesis of humanistic and social scientific methods. It requires that one understand and, in a sense, can “get inside the head” of views entirely foreign to one’s own. Finally, it requires that one experience and overcome, rather than flee from, serious intellectual discomfort.

In my classes, we purposefully read offensive material. For instance, in one class last year, we read the most racist parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Students usually say this is their favorite part of the class, in part because they are shocked to discover how many empirical and normative premises they share with Adolf Hitler.

At any rate, my initial reaction to the New Campus Censorship™ was that professors should push back in favor of free speech and free inquiry, in much the same way the University of Chicago recently did. But then I realized this in unfair to students. Some students very well may be infantile weaklings who lack the maturity or psychological stability to interact with ideas contrary to their own. I don’t have a psychology degree, and so I’m not qualified to just assume that all students are or could be Millian liberal agents, who are able to dispassionately discuss contrary ideas without this in turn crushing their souls. Indeed, Mill himself had a nervous breakdown.

Thus, I now think a better reform would be to institute a two-tier university system. Tier One, also called Real Universities, would follow the traditional college model in which every idea, no matter how repugnant, can be discussed in an intellectual way at any time, and in which everyone would be free to challenge any worldview or ideology others might have. Tier Two, the PseudoUniversities, would feature protective padded walls and pictures of bunnies in every classroom. Students would only be exposed to ideas they already have, and would never have to feel threatened or challenged. No one would ever feel excluded because we would only include people who share all the same world views. When students apply to college, they would then choose whether to attend a Real University or a PseudoUniversity.

To make this work, we’ll need to have both left-wing and right-wring PseudoUniversities. After all, Christian fundamentalists could feel threatened at a place like the New School, while the average hard-left New School student could feel threatened at a place like Liberty University.

The problem with the current system is that we’re trying to mix faculty, administrators, and students who wish to attend PseudoUniversities with those who wish to attend Real Universities. It’s kind of like we’re trying to serve everybody pizza when some people just want hamburgers instead. So, let’s solve the problem with product differentiation and market segmentation.

This way, no one will have a legitimate complaint. If a student at a Real feels threatened by contrary ideas, we can say to him, “Hey, you chose to go to a Real when you could have gone to a Pseudo. You consented to being challenged. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.” If a professor at a Pseudo dares to say something that offends her students, we can say, “Hey, you chose to take a job at a Pseudo instead of a Real, or, of course, you could have taken a job at GEICO, where they don’t try to fire people for their political views.”

In short, some students are terrified or threatened by contrary ideas. The solution, I think, is to create two different university systems, one for adults, and one for children who need to be protected. Problem solved.

UPDATE: I’ve read some responses to the article above claiming that Kipnis has been misrepresenting why she was under investigation. I take no stance on that. The substantive content of this post isn’t a response to her specific circumstances, but rather the clear trend, over the past few years, of students hiding from scary ideas, and certain faculty and administrators helping them do so. By the way, I recommend Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty for a public choice account of why administrators do so.