Watching Protests

As much as I appreciate a lot of what American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher writes, sometimes the worldview differences between us just leave me befuddled.

Take his latest post, for example, "Watch the Intellectuals." He discusses a protest last night at UC Berkeley. The UC Berkeley College Republicans had invited Ann Coulter to give a talk called "Adios, America!" (presumably about immigration?). Hundreds of protesters (from a group called Resist Fascism, not representing UC Berkeley officially) showed up, met by UC Berkely police in full riot gear. The protesters attempted a human chain to prevent people going into the event. The police escorted attendees and Coulter. "Six or seven" protesters were arrested. The event happened.

Dreher is apoplectic. "Seriously," he asks, "what if a mob of white people at a major American university banded together to prevent people of color and their allies from going into a hall to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak?" He continues:

What is it going to take to fight this? It’s so exasperating how little people in this country care about the fact that left-wing mobs are taking our liberties from us, and our political leaders — including Donald Trump — are doing nothing about it. Barely even talking about it. I honestly don’t get it. We should not be living in a country where people who want to go hear a speaker have to be protected by police simply to get into the hall. You know what this looks like?

He then compares the protests in Berkeley to the Little Rock Nine, where pro-segregationists blockaded Little Rock Schools to prevent black children from entering an historically all-white school.

That comparison seems . . . stretched.

Dreher links the Berkeley event to a favored bugaboo of his: the liberal intellectual class's prejudice against conservatives:

If you think this is going to stay in Berkeley, you’re mistaken. This mob action might not spread to places outside of the coasts, but here’s what’s going to happen: those young people who join the mobs, they are going to graduate and move into the institutions of American life. They are going to carry their militant illiberalism, including their contempt for free speech and open discourse, into those institutions, and are going to do their damnedest to institutionalize them. One thing I have learned from the past few months spent studying Soviet-bloc communism: watch the intellectual class. It is a very big mistake to think that what they say and do only matters in the shadow of the ivory tower. They are the ones who produce the ideas that are eventually spread through society. If you don’t care about this stuff when it happens now, on campuses, you had better prepare yourself to be made to care later, when graduates of these campuses are setting corporate policy, or serving as gatekeepers to the institutions you want your “deplorable” kids to get into. This is not a joke.

Oy. Sometimes from members of my church or from people who know I'm a professor, I hear something like this, often framed sympathetically: things must be really tough for you right now in Universities with all that political correctness and intolerance. "Not really," I say, shrugging. We're much more stressed about precarious funding structures in this state that make student aid more difficult, teaching resources more expensive, and academic endeavors more generally difficult. I'm concerned about the fact that historical state funding for a state university is dwindling, and that the avenues open to institutions to compensate for that funding loss are unpleasant at best and unethical at worst.

The picture that people, especially conservatives, beyond the university have about what's happening at colleges and universities often surprises me. The image of a liberal-totalitarian enclave laser-focused on policing the thoughts of students just doesn't match the reality most of us who work at universities face. My life at school simply isn't taken up with politics most of the time. The mundane routines of catching up with grading, admin work, class planning, and (in my case) production work takes up the vast majority of my attention. Most of my students are too tired/busy/stressed with class and production work to worry much about who's politically correct or not.

Truth: I'd not heard of these protests outside of Dreher's reporting. I'm rather more focused on the impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States. So is everyone else. There's not much out there on the Berkeley event even on Fox. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed don't mention it.

Dreher sees this as evidence that the media is left-leaning. Maybe? Or maybe it's that there's a whole lot of national-crisis-level stuff happening in DC right now, and the goings-on at a single university may not merit that much attention. Would things be different were Ta-Nehisi Coates were protested? I don't know. I kind of doubt it, though.

Look, I have no interest in defending every action by every university where something like this happens. Inevitably, you're going to find instances where something like a left-wing political correctness leads people to jerkish behavior. (You can also find instances where right-wing political correctness does this.) (Also: what makes the protesters and not the College Republicans "the intellectuals" whose tendencies Dreher warns against? How does a private protest group get to stand in for Bekeley as a whole?) There are 5,000 colleges and universities in the US. For any news about a single university, you have to divide by 5,000. At one university out of 5,000 yesterday, Ann Coulter faced protesters before getting to speak and be heard just as planned.

Forgive me if I fail to see the dire threat here.

That said, and for the record, I don't condone activist tactics that block people from hearing folk they want to listen to. A human chain to prevent people from attending Coulter's event is indeed illiberal. It also seems like a recipe for backlash. I wouldn't like it if someone were to propose blocking me from, say, going to a public library to watch drag queens read a story in public.

There is a big difference, though, between segregationists protesting the Little Rock Nine--or even hypothetical racists protesting Ta-Nehisi Coates--and a coalition of activists protesting Coulter. In the former cases, you have people objecting to people. It didn't matter who the Little Rock Nine were, only that they weren't white. Coulter, by contrast, garners protests not for who she is but for the arguments and rhetorics she makes her living off of spreading. She traffics in provocation fueled by xenophobic nationalism (which, it must be said, often accompanies and bolsters race-based bigotry). This kind of event is exactly the kind of thing that helps her brand (which is another reason, frankly, why super-protests against her have a "feed the troll" kind of counterproductivity).

People shouldn't be blocked from seeing here. But neither should her views go unchallenged.

I wonder, though, if Dreher would be mollified had the protesters simply, well, protested? If they'd shown up in the hundreds with signs and slogans--but allowed attendees in--would that still pose the intellectual threat Dreher detects? Coulter's right to expression does not trump protesters' right to expression, after all. She gets to spew her vile rhetoric to adoring crowds. But other people get to counter that rhetoric through protest. The right to free speech isn't the right to immunity from criticism or response.

Or is the mere existence of disagreement with Coulter evidence of political correctness?