Desperately Missing The Point

When first mention of Emma Camp’s NYT op-ed appeared here, it seemed to raise an issue so uncontroversial as to require no defense. After all, would anyone question that the Overton Window on college campuses has narrowed to a slit, where challenges to progressive orthodoxy were treated with good faith disagreement? Well, the answer was apparently, “you bet your ass,” and I failed to see it coming.

The complaint wasn’t that “no one wants to debate me,” which takes extraordinary fortitude to claim with a straight face and no inkling of shame. Nor was it about people shifting in their seats, one example offered to give color to a broader, and obvious, issue.

I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.

Are students in fear of expressing opinions that run counter to the prevailing campus ideological narratives? Do they fear being excoriated by their classmates or professors? Will they be outed on social media as fascists or Nazis if they question whether being anti-racist is just being the other flavor of racist? Does this have a chilling effect on speech, instruction and research? Or is this all some right-wing fantasy about cancellation?

The newest member of this “society of the silenced” to have been granted a platform to complain about her lack of a platform is Emma Camp. Camp is a college senior of the University of Virginia who self-describes as a “​liberal who has attended abortion rights protests and written about standing up to racism”; she has also written for the conservative publication Reason and interned at the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. On Monday, she got an op-ed in The New York Times to complain about [checks notes] having to lower her voice for fear that other students might hear what she thinks.

And because he’s deliberately confusing the libertarian Reason with a conservative rag, and raises FIRE for reasons so awful he can’t even write the words, Elie adds:

I’m not exaggerating.

Perhaps not, at least from his perspective, Rather, he’s being deliberately disingenuous.

Nothing bad has happened to Camp or to the other UVA students she quotes in her article for anecdotal support. Camp complains that her defense in class of the right of white people to criticize other cultures made other students in the same class angry with her. She complains that writing columns in her student newspaper “implor[ing] students to embrace free expression” caused her to “lose friends” and face “a Twitter pile-on.”

The reactions to Camp’s op-ed, included such strokes of briliance as “everybody self-censors and always has, so what’s the big deal?” This is, of course, true and also shockingly shallow. Sure, we don’t run around screaming epithets at minorities, if that’s what you’re inclined to do, because we self-censor. And is that pretty much the same thing as a “non-Indian women” criticizing “suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows,” an example Camp offered in her op-ed?

Her problem, according to her, is the need to “self-censor.” She’s apparently annoyed that she can’t say every single thought in her head without being “shamed” for the quality of those thoughts.

Okay, maybe Elie is exaggerating, because that isn’t remotely her problem, as should be sufficiently obvious that even a double-Harvard can figure it out. Her “problem” is that she, and she speaks on behalf of others including progressive students who make the mistake of straying from the approved narrative, can’t say entirely reasonable, fair and thoughtful things raised by the issues presented in her classes that do not conform to the ideological constraints imposed by social fiat on campus. Her “problem” is that she can’t risk testing whether she can express an idea that might not have the official approval of the NYT big name columnists lest she be wrong and attacked, humiliated and splayed publicly and in perpetuity for her holding a wrong thought.

And why should she be concerned about this?

At this point I have to mention that Camp is white, because her self-reported problems make a lot more sense once you know that. In contrast, “self-censorship” is just part of the normal, everyday experience of non-white students at white American colleges. In fact, one of the reasons historically Black colleges and universities are still a thing is that they are some of the only places in the educational landscape where Black people don’t have to censor their thoughts and beliefs in order to play nice with white folks. Hushed tones? I’m a 43-year-old Black man with my own opinion column, and there are tons of thoughts I don’t give voice to in mixed company.

To be fair, I have serious doubts about whether Elie has tons of thoughts he doesn’t give voice to in mixed company, whatever that means. He’s not very shy about such things, and never has there been a time for Elie to say some rather extreme things that would have been considered outrageously offensive than now. If anything, that’s Elie’s brand, without which he would never get to be on MSNBC.

And that’s really all Camp’s article is about. A publication that cared about her might have given her some writing tips, but the Times let this 22-year-old flag a crisis in university education over some normal instances of self-control that non-white students exhibit every day. They let her claim that the penalties for refusing to self-censor are “steep,” but then let her illustrate these penalties with quotes from a white college Republican. Steve (whose last name I’ll omit because I’m more gentle than The New York Times) is literally a member of the college debate club, but just can’t handle it when politics comes up in the classroom. “It’s very anxiety inducing.”

Rarely does a point get made is flagrantly as this. The “Steve” who shall not be named is Stephen Wiecek, whom Camp met at the UVA debate club, and he’s [trigger warning: traumatic word ahead] a Republican,  a status so horrible that Elie can’t bring himself to mention his last name. But then, that’s exactly the sort of normal self-censoring that the woke believe should happen on campus, so what’s Camp’s problem?