Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy opines that all voices should be heard – no matter how repugnant they may be. The scenario? A presentation at Cal State Northridge (CSUN) on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and its interruption – and termination – by a collection of Armenian students. The latter’s statement:
Our presence at these events will send a clear message to the Turkish community that college and university campuses are not incubators for denialists. Treating college campuses as breeding grounds for Turkish nationalist ideology is offensive for the number of Armenian students who attend these colleges.
A more detailed defense of their activities is also mentioned. Eugene’s opinion?
Prof. George Gawrych’s book, “The Young Ataturk: From Ottoman Soldier to Statesman of Turkey,” won one of the Society for Military History 2014 Distinguished Book Awards. And yet it turns out that even a faculty-invited scholar with impressive credentials isn’t allowed to speak at CSUN. Naturally, no speaker should be shouted down this way, whether he wrote an award-winning book or not — but the stature of Gawrych’s work is just a reminder of how deeply the movement to suppress speech has spread at American universities. (Something similar, by the way, seems to have happened the next day at Chapman University.)
Defenders of free speech often warn of the slippery slope: Once we allow suppression even of foolish, lightweight, uneducated speakers, this will lead to suppression of serious scholars as well. Such slippery slope concerns are often pooh-poohed as a paranoid “parade of horribles.” Well, here’s the latest float in that parade, come to a university near me. And you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you. …
So let’s see: The university is supposed to exclude historians who want to speak positively about important historical leaders, based on students’ ideas about which views are not “acceptable or appropriate.” Indeed, the university is not supposed to “allow[]” such a talk “to take place on campus.” That’s not just true of talks that themselves disagree with the position that the Ottoman Empire engaged in genocide; as best I can tell, there was no indication that this was the purpose of Gawrych’s talk. It’s also true of a talk that praises a leader who disagreed with that position (and who did other bad things).
Moreover, the theory goes, the university’s policy of “zero tolerance … regarding hatred” means that scholars who want to express favorable views about such leaders must be excluded. That’s the new suppression ideology in a nutshell.
As Eugene is a member of the intellectual community, I can see and understand his viewpoint, his context. However, there are other contexts, and in this case, the context of the Armenian students, coming from a community which was existentially threatened, is quite understandable and even appealing, because their actions are not only a protest, but could be extended to be a warning and a protection for other groups.
I think the key point, often glossed over, is the autonomy and disconnect of the action. First, it’s an action independent of the greater community that the Armenian students are embedded within; the greater number of students were there for the presentation, not to protest.
By disconnect, I mean the action is disconnected from the rightness or wrongness of the cause. This is often true, but it’s worth clarifying – any group can execute this relatively peaceful action, no matter whether the cause is this Armenian protest, or a protest over, say, the termination of slavery in the United States.
I think it’s clear this is a recipe for potential chaos in an intellectual community absolutely dependent on free expression in order to continue to thrive; they may survive with a degraded form, but are not so likely to thrive.
So in the end, while I may have a certain sympathy with the Armenian students, I do agree with Eugene – and I understand why.
