Campus Free Speech and Snowflakes

In his much-discussed Times piece, “What Snowflakes Get Right About Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer cites the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard to bolster his claim that some speech should be banned on college campuses because it has a chilling effect on marginalized groups.

“Lyotard," he writes, "shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good."

Essentially this is an argument about legitimization. Giving Holocaust deniers an equal voice with Holocaust survivors elevates their position while diminishing those of the people bearing witness to personal and collective suffering.

I understand this argument but do not believe it follows that censoring viewpoints from a university campus is necessary to “ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people.”

Baer’s argument that students curious abut the views of Richard Spencer or Ann Coulter can simply can go to the Internet undermines the central logic of campus free speech—that airing ideas in a university setting brings perspective (and tools for refutation) that are not available to someone browsing Reddit.

I would argue that the high profile of figures like Spencer is a result of, rather than threat to, the gains of traditionally disenfranchised groups in recent decades. Unfortunately for bigots, the genie is out of the battle; no amount of rhetoric will prevent members of Hillel at Auburn from participating in debate as fully recognized members of the community.

Maybe We're All 'Snowflakes' Now...

Baer thinks giving the Ann Coulters of the world a platform necessarily forces some groups “to defend their human worth.” But Coulter herself, who like many on the Right suffer from a victimhood complex making them feel as if they are the ones being denied (ethnic or cultural) rights, speaks in these same terms.

So perhaps the paradigm shift effected by identity politics has changed the terms of discourse—even for racists—from notions of inherent superiority to those of ethnic nationalism and cultural integrity. This too is odious, but the politics-based debates of today do not foreclose the possibility of disenfranchised groups maintaining a voice in the same way that pseudo-scientific, mytho-folkloric and religion-based arguments of the past did.