About That Bone, Dr Freddie deBoer

A bone to pick

Not so long ago, Freddie deBoer wrote a piece titled “Please Just Throw Me a Bone with the Wesleyan Argus Controversy”, where he complained about the rigidity of people in the “media class” who dismiss the ongoing moral panic over “open debate”:

Demonstrating themselves to be good and upstanding members of the in-crowd to which they relentlessly aspire forces them to deny the very notion of an exception. But I have to believe there are free speech controversies so bad that even they could be forced to admit an exception. So I’m going to tell you about a little controversy over free expression that was not, in any sense, ambiguous.

He cites a seven-year-old kerfuffle surrounding the Wesleyan Argus as a controversy that wasn’t in any way ambiguous. I read through the rest of his article, and a linked piece in the Columbia Journalism Review and agree that the controversy is not all that ambiguous. It played out just as it should have according to the principles of free speech, even in the broad sense de Boer insists on:

I could go through the usual litany, starting with the fact that free speech and the First Amendment are not coterminous, that democratic society requires not just legal protection of the right to express oneself but a culture of open exchange, a shared social understanding that the only way to solve our myriad problems with their irreducible complexity is through an actually-existing free discursive space.

Student writes bad article, film at 11

The eye of the tempest in this particular teapot was an opinion piece by a then-sophomore named Bryan Stascavage, “Why Black Lives Matter Isn’t What You Think”. DeBoer describes the article as not “disagree[ing] with the ends of the movement, which were praised, but with the tactics used to achieve them”, which isn’t how I would describe it.

I would describe the piece as gargling goat balls. Your mileage may vary. I think equating members of a vaguely organized activist movements with government agents that are empowered to shoot people with little consequence is not the greatest argument in the history of arguments.

So some dude writes a crap editorial. Students react as students often do to crap editorials appearing in their college newspapers, by getting very mad. This has been happening pretty frequently at colleges across the country since I was an undergrad a (gulp) quarter century ago, and while it may not be great, it’s hard to see what makes it an urgent crisis.

Anyway, the anger was expressed in a couple ways, according to deBoer:

They organized a campaign of denunciation that resulted in the author becoming a pariah on campus. OK, sure.

I agree with de Boer here: “OK, sure,” is an appropriate response when angry people react to bad speech with more speech. The next bit seems maybe more concerning, I guess:

That not being enough, they worked to defund the paper, to get the paper shut down. At a liberal arts college – a type of institution that exists literally for no reason before the exchange of ideas, including the angry exchange of controversial ideas – the students tried to kill a beloved campus paper because it published something they didn’t like.

Students write bad petition, more film at 11

This meant circulating a petition, which, again, is more speech, in this case asking the student government, which disburses funds on the behalf of those same students to make the Argus‘ funding conditional on meeting certain demands:

But the mea culpa didn’t work. The school’s aggressive and vocal protest community, including backers of unrelated causes, united against The Argus. A petition began circulating calling for a boycott of the paper and the dumping of copies in recycling bins. The bins quickly filled to overflowing. The petition also called on the student government, which provides most of The Argus’ operating cash, to immediately defund the paper unless a series of demands were met.

The demands do strike me as on the silly side, and a number of the arguments about why the article is so terrible are unpersuasive, so I will grant deBoer that this was bad, inasmuch as it was more bad speech.

Yes, that includes the argument for defunding in the petition, even though it seems to have come fairly close to getting the paper defunded after the Student Assembly President signed the petition. Here’s the thing: the paper is funded by the student government, on behalf of the students, using funds that are partly provided by those very students from activity fees! It’s speech on their behalf, and I have to say, from a legal perspective, from the perspective of the way student government works, and broader notion of open debate all militate in favor of people having a say in what kind of speech they fund. The alternative isn’t free speech, it’s compelled speech.

It’s just that cutting a newspaper’s funding in response to a bad editorial is… a bad choice in how to use that speech. Bad editorials are a part of the natural day-in, day-out routine of papers, and not just college papers, and if you cut funding for them over that they either will cease to exist in short order, or never publish anything remotely interesting.

A happy ending, no film at 11

But yeah, maybe one type of bad speech would have won the day here, but even that didn’t happen. University administrators defended the paper, and the paper defended itself in an editorial and in negotiations with the student government, and… its funding was never cut.

The paper survived, as it should have.

The negative consequences that de Boer cites, though, are that it’s horrible to know that 170 students (out of about 3000 in 2015) had a bad idea about what speech should be funded on their behalf, and that a bunch of people involved in the paper are upset about what happened.

That last consequence, by the way, is the same bad consequence that came about from the article. People were angry. People’s feelings were hurt. People were scared and felt unsafe.

Learning to live with those feelings when they’re inspired by speech you don’t like is a key part of the whole culture of free expression that de Boer is advocating for.

My take is that numerous people low-key screwed up along the way. Stascavage should have written a less shitty article, the other folks at the Argus should have either not run his shitty article or worked with him to make it less shitty, students probably should have been less mad and made some less silly demands, and the student government should have come down against defunding faster and more decisively.

All the people involved here are students, there to learn how to do stuff like handle free and open debate. Anyone who says you can learn without making mistakes has probably never learned shit.

But here’s a bone anyway

Reading through the rest of the article, though, there is an instance that’s actually unambiguously bad. Among the brief litany of students demanding stuff (which is still speech, dammit), there’s a mention of Laura Kipnis. Kipnis wrote a genuinely disgusting essay about how professors fucking their students is Good, Actually, and then instead of facing a ton of richly deserved criticism, faced multiple absolutely bullshit Title IX investigations for creating a “hostile environment”. This was legitimately disgraceful, because the reaction to bad speech went way beyond more speech.

That was not, as the kids, say, cool.

Everything else is conflating advocacy of bad actions with taking those bad actions. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that advocating bad things is bad, but confusing advocacy of bad action with bad action itself is profoundly illiberal. If you take it remotely seriously, it will let you censor almost anything, including bad essays in student newspapers.

So don’t do that, even if it means throwing us a bone and acknowledging that the threat to free speech on campus may not be so dire after all.