While national attention has been riveted to the racial controversies on the campus of the University of Missouri, a campus controversy at Vanderbilt University has all the makings of a redux of the Ward Churchill imbroglio, in which a Native American professor was ousted from the University of Colorado for his controversial speech concerning the 9/11 attacks. This time, Carol Swain, an African-American professor of law and political science, is the fulcrum of the contretemps. Students at Vanderbilt have circulated a petition that has gained in excess of 1500 signatures calling for the suspension of Swain, a conservative who has expressed jaw-dropping intolerance for Islam, among other specimens of bigotry.
The basis for the students' call for Swain's suspension is that "Although Ms. Swain is free to speak openly and have her own views, no matter how disagreeable they may be, it is generally unprofessional to attach your job title to a channel promoting your personally held beliefs. Keeping personal beliefs and University-endorsed statements separate is crucial to maintaining the integrity of Vanderbilt's values."
I am not certain where Vanderbilt students have obtained the code of professionalism on which they purport to rely; I often attach my job title to the expression of my views, including those contained in this column. But it is the students' proposed speech code and its striking resemblance to conservatives' efforts to chill progressive viewpoints in the classroom that are most concerning.
I am a progressive. I have written extensively about the ways in which our judiciary has made norm-violational speech increasingly difficult to protect. I am familiar with Professor Swain's scholarship, and setting aside ideology, the work I have read fails elemental logic. If students are upset about her online comments, they should read her work on white nationalism in which she blames blacks for making too many demands and thus inciting white backlash. (It's the demands of the Civil Rights Movement that have allowed Professor Swain and millions of other professional blacks to sit where they are today.)
Professor Swain has even said that blacks should be thankful for the Atlantic slave trade that coerced them to America because modern Africa consists of so many failed states. As Swain puts it, "Given conditions in most African countries, the sale and transport of black slaves to America has all the hallmarks of what an older interpretive tradition called providence." (Does the raping and pillaging of the African continent by European slave traders and colonizers have nothing to do with the condition of modern Africa?) This is lunacy, or put in more erudite jargon, it's fallacious reasoning. We must not suppress it, however.
Vanderbilt students would do well to remember Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, a foul segregationist whose rhetoric against blacks makes Islamophobia seem tame in comparison. When the mayor of New York City sought to prevent Wallace from holding a rally at Shea Stadium, it was, ironically, a black woman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who sued New York City on behalf of Wallace and his First Amendment rights. Norton also defended the First Amendment right of a white supremacist group to hold a public rally in Maryland.
Did Norton, who would later go on to become chairperson of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a congresswoman, agree with the repugnant speech of her clients? Of course not. But as Norton explained:
I defended the First Amendment, and you seldom get to defend the First Amendment by defending people you like because they let them talk. You don't know whether the First Amendment is alive and well until it is tested by people with despicable ideas. And I loved the idea of looking a racist in the face--remember this was a time when racism was much more alive and well than it is today--and saying, 'I am your lawyer, sir, what are you going to do about that?'
Free speech is messy, often ineloquent, and in the case of Professor Swain, sometimes not terribly persuasive. But suppressing it is even messier, especially on a college campus where, sadly, the skill of marshalling a sound argument with facts and precedent is a dying art form. But there is no better way to revive it and teach it than by using unsound arguments like Swain's to practice with.
This is a point often missed by conservatives, who now would rather whine about being questioned on their ideology than defend their ideology. The traditional refrain of conservatives about academia is that the professoriate has a liberal bias. Left unstated is that if such a bias exists, it may well be because it coincides with enlightenment and reason.
Even conservatives believe that today's conservativism doesn't make sense. As Michael Lind recently wrote in Politico.com, "A Republican Party that reflected the actual interests and values of both its popular and elite constituencies would probably have nothing to do with quixotic libertarian crusades against the Ex-Im Bank and middle-class entitlements of the kinds promoted by the Koch brothers and the Club for Growth."
The economist Paul Krugman has recently noted that conservatives live in a world of "epistemic closure" in which they ignore inconvenient facts, attack the sources that raise them, and cling to stale arguments notwithstanding countervailing evidence. When students advocate for the punishment of an instructor's speech by "suspending" her, they in essence seek to create an epistemic echo chamber to coexist with the one that has become the hallmark of modern conservatism.
More importantly, the Vanderbilt petition signatories are ignoring the lessons of recent history regarding campus free speech. The right salivated at the University of Colorado's dismissal of Professor Ward Churchill and the University of Illinois's withdrawal of an offer of a tenured position to Steven Salaita. While universities often pretextualize their suppression of speech under the guise of "civility codes," what's really happening is that university administrators are taking their marching orders from increasingly corporatized boards whose members hail from a world of at-will employment in which open dissent is not only not tolerated, it's crushed. Just ask the unions.
Liberals may have won the professoriate, but conservative doctrine, if not the conservative movement, has found powerful allies among university administrators, board members, donors, and not least of all, the courts. What Vanderbilt students must ask themselves is whether they, too, are now being unwittingly coopted by ideas and a movement that are actually antithetical to the values they are seeking to promote by having Professor Swain suspended.