Credit Where Credit Is Due

 For years now, Jon Chait has been a lonely voice extolling the merits of liberalism. In his telling, the sort of leftist campus politics that seek to minimize emotional "trauma" by sanitizing "safe spaces" and policing what can and cannot be said is antithetical to liberal arts education. While I've largely agreed with him - education should be somewhat discomfiting - it seemed a silly thing to focus on during the Era of Trump.

Recently though, he has been vindicated by the plight of three university presidents. Paul Campos thinks this is just theatricality aimed at both three powerful women and elite universities by the objectively awful Elise Stefanik. This all falls, however, under the umbrella of policing speech. When the college presidents sought to contextualize the hypothetical, they were accused of anti-Semitism. How can there be context for genocide? Except Stefanik loaded the hypothetical in such a way that calling for a Palestinian state could conceivably be seen as a call for genocide.

Threats and actions should be grounds for disciplinary actions. However, we have so degraded the language that anything can now be a threat. This is why I get incensed at people calling what Israel is doing "genocide." It's often times a war crime, but that is not necessarily genocide. Once you start calling any civilian casualties "genocide" then any rhetoric in support of the IDF or Palestinian nationhood becomes a threat. "From the river to the sea" can be seen a number of different ways, only a few of them could entail the slaughter of the Jewish people. If everything is genocide, then everything is a threat and there is no education, there is no challenging prior convictions. 

Chait's long running defense of liberalism is a defense of free speech. Not Elon Musk's coddling of Nazis, but rather the idea that complicated and challenging ideas should be discussed openly. Once you start policing what can and cannot be said, then it matters a great deal who is doing the policing. When the Campus Left says you can't say Hispanic, you have to say Latinx, what happens when it's Elise Stefanik expanding on that precedent? You can't fly a Palestinian flag because that's a threat. (Campos elsewhere goes part of the way down that road.)

Students are young people. They are not adults, but rather larval adults. They make mistakes. Mistakes are how you learn. In any number of ways, we are failing students when we don't prepare them to lose and make mistakes productively. We watched The Holdovers last night, and it's a great movie. Paul Giamatti's character is what happens when you take even that idea too far. Still, the purpose of schooling should be to teach students to fail, to learn from those failures and then grapple with that means for the rest of their lives.

The problem with odious gargoyles like Elise Stefanik is that she never learned to learn anything except how to toady up to the most proximate power figure. Devoid of principles, she is only capable of shit like this. However, he very cynicism does allow us to see where these sort of illiberal trends in education can wind up. We can see it in Florida, too.

We have, I suppose to conclude, lost our ability to argue productively. And that has chilling consequences for education and civic life in general.