No Platform

Fareed Zakaria is an intellectual I frequently admire.  He's an old school liberal with all of the faults and strengths that come with that.

His recent piece suggests that democracy is under assault from the Left - a position fellow liberal Jon Chait has engaged in frequently.  This assault comes from the idea of "no platform," whereby colleges refuse to allow certain speakers on campus.   Zakaria's point is that the free exchange of ideas is important both to education and democracy.  Once you start limiting the opinions that people are exposed to, you erode democracy. 

So, let's look at the sort of people who Zakaria says have been silenced.  Let's take three as a group: Steve Bannon, Milo Yannopolous and Charles Murray.  First, Zakaria artfully leaves off Milo, because he's simply a troll.  His entire schtick is to say inflammatory things so that people react and then he can point and laugh at them.  He is not engaged in a debate about ideas, but rather he is simply trying to outrage people.  Of course, wouldn't that be covered in an absolute commitment to free exchange?  Murray and Bannon are racists.  Murray's work on IQ and other issues (The Bell Curve is the most obvious example) suggests that African Americans are inferior to whites.  Steve Bannon is trying to create a political movement around this idea.

Most schools - and I swear, I just left a faculty meeting where we discussed this - have explicit statements whereby they commit to diverse communities.  As our statement says, this is a moral and pragmatic commitment.  There is no place in our community for those who would try and do exactly what Steve Bannon hopes to do: divide people on the basis of race in order to gain power.  Why - if we won't accept that sort of behavior from students - should we pay a hefty fee to bring Steve Bannon on campus to promulgate exactly the sort of ideas that we are trying to weed out of our students? Educational pluralism does require that we grapple with different opinions, but does that include white supremacy?

There was another example that Zakaria cites, and I will admit it's more troubling: Condoleeza Rice.  Rice is problematic for her role in starting a war that destabilized the Middle East and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.  Condoleeza Rice could plausibly be accused of being a war criminal.  However, her ideas are not entirely toxic to educational values.  Rice's problem was incompetence and ideological blindness.  The idea of overthrowing a tyrant and implanting democracy in Iraq isn't an evil idea - naive, half-baked and dangerous when done wrong - but it isn't white supremacy.

Classrooms should be places where students grapple with difficult and challenging ideas.  But do we really need to "grapple" with racism?  Is that a value system we need to assess for merit?  Do science classes need to wrestle with the creation myth in Genesis?