During the Counter Reformation, the Catholic Church produced the Index of Prohibited Books, a list of all the books Catholics were forbidden to read on pain of Inquisition. It included obvious targets from the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but also more distant threats to dogma like Copernicus, Galileo and Erasmus.
Eventually, the Index itself was put on the Index. It seems some enterprising Florentines were using it as a guide to interesting reading.
The sort of activism at the University of the Arts described in this Atlantic article, disturbingly more and more common on the left, is the sort of thing that gives liberalism a bad image, despite the fact that this is not liberalism at all. It is completely indistinguishable from the extreme right's insistence on neutering speech that they disagree with, like, for instance, when Donald Trump advocates violence against journalists to suppress unfavorable articles about him.
If you feel threatened, or even suicidal, because of an IDEA, that's a problem with you and you need to seek out therapy. The correct way to deal with speech you disagree with is speech you agree with. State your own ideas and defend them in a give and take with your opposition.
As this country sorts itself into tribes that owe allegiance to the tribe first and the country second, the urge to destroy other tribes is irresistible. No one promised you a world that will never offend you. If elimination of uncomfortable voices is how you approach the world, you'll never be satisfied until you are the only one left. Stop acting like children and grow up.
On the other hand, the magic of tenure that this article explores is bullshit. It doesn't protect you from anything. Tenure is a 100% political process whose success depends on who you are and the extent to which you kiss the right asses for six years. If they take it into their heads that you have not been properly obedient, college administrators have no compunction about violating your contract to get rid of you and then daring you to sue them. In this country, you can have all the rights you can afford to sue over, and for most of us that is none at all. The rights you have are the ones that others are willing to respect. Both the left and the right are increasingly unwilling to respect any at all, except for themselves.
So I have a question for these students: How is suppressing and even firing Camille Paglia for deviationist points of view any different from Donald Trump telling his followers to beat up protesters and journalists, and tagging journalism as the enemy of the people? I don't see one. Freedom of speech does NOT mean freedom of speech only for people who agree with me.
Tenure is a bad idea. I don't know what would be a good idea. One of my colleagues here wants to form a faculty union, something that has happened at a handful of other schools. That's not ideal but it is better than tenure since a union has the ability to negotiate fair processes to hear grievances and appeal administrative decisions.
Disturbingly, this attitude is prevalent among gay, lesbian and transgendered, who want an eternally safe environment wrapped around them. I get where that comes from. But it is the same place that the impulse of Christian conservatives to suppress secular humanism, evolutionary biology, liberalism generally comes from. If that makes them intolerant, it also makes you intolerant.
This country, despite the propaganda you hear from the right, was not founded on God. It was founded on the secular idea of a social contract, a product of 18th century Enlightenment philosophy: I agree to respect your rights if you agree to respect mine.
For some people, especially minority populations, this is harder than it is for other people. Yes, that's unfair. But fairness is not a physical or psychological law, and has nothing to do with the world we live in. It is something each individual chooses to do or to not do. African Americans and Asian Americans have spent a century or more learning how to live in an unfair world while trying to make it more fair. LGBTQ Americans seem, by and large, to not be interested in that (though it is notable that the person these students are targeting, Camille Paglia, identifies as transgender). In so doing, they are rejecting and excluding potential liberal allies who support greater justice and fairness for their community.
"t is rare for student activists to argue that a tenured faculty member at their own institution should be denied a platform. Otherwise, the protest tactics on display at UArts fit with standard practice: activists begin with social media callouts; they urge authority figures to impose outcomes that they favor, without regard for overall student opinion; they try to marshal anti-discrimination law to limit freedom of expression. David Bernstein described this process in his 2004 book You Can’t Say That.
". . . That argument—a speaker is responsible for harms that are theoretical, indirect, and so diffuse as to encompass actions of strangers who put themselves on the same side of a controversy —is untenable. Suppressing speech because it might indirectly cause danger depending on how people other than the speaker may react is an authoritarian move. And this approach to speech, applied consistently, would of course impede the actions of the anti-Paglia protesters as well.
". . . the student activists wield a double-edged sword. If Paglia’s comments qualify as “insulting, demeaning, and derogatory towards people on the basis of gender,” so does lots of speech that is very common on the academic left. For example, locutions like “mansplaining,” “man-spreading,” “white male rage,” “male privilege,” “toxic masculinity,” “male gaze,” “manterrupting,” and “bropropriating” would all be subject to challenge under similarly broad readings of the very same passages in the faculty handbook.
" . . . Would progressive student activists at UArts favor the expansive interpretation of anti-discrimination language that they are urging if they understood that it would likely result in the suppression of many voices on the identitarian left? Perhaps they anticipate a different outcome: UArts could employ a double-standard, allowing academics to freely criticize members of some identity groups but not others, because men are historically privileged while women, gays, and people of other gender identities are historically marginalized.
"But adopting different standards for different identity groups—which would of course never fly in a legal context—would ultimately hurt historically marginalized groups.
". . . The identitarian conceit is that trans people and survivors of sexual assault can’t learn from Paglia because she renders them “unsafe.” Meanwhile, cis white males are acculturated to believe they can always learn from anyone, even professors overtly hostile to their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. In this way, left-identitarianism encourages historically marginalized groups to believe they are less resilient and less capable than their white male classmates. They suggest, falsely, that “harm” is the only possible result of listening to controversial (or even offensive) ideas.
"There are, finally, political costs of illiberal activism. By targeting Paglia’s job, student activists may alienate people who are open to substantive critiques of her ideas, yet insistent on the absolute necessity of safeguarding a culture of free speech, regardless of whether the speech in question is “correct” or “incorrect.” They fail to heed Henry Louis Gates’s prescient warning not to divide the liberal civil rights and civil liberties communities.
"The activists also fail to heed a much older lesson that art students ought to know best: Nothing makes an act of free expression more intriguing than an attempt to censor it."
You might even make a list of prohibited ideas. Some sort of index, perhaps.
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