The vulnerability comes with an unfortunate asymmetry: the faculty and students at universities have shifted to the left since the 1990s, as we showed in the last chapter, while the “outrage industry” of talk radio, cable news networks, and conspiracy websites is more developed and effective on the right.17 (The mainstream media overall leans left,18 but the left simply never found a format or formula that could match the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.) Right-wing media has long loved to make fun of professors and stir up anger over “politically correct” practices spotted on university campuses. But as campus activism increased in 2015 and offered up an unending stream of dramatic cell phone videos (including students cursing at professors and shouting down speakers), right-wing media outlets began to devote far more attention to campus events, which they portrayed gleefully, usually stripped of any explanatory context. The rising expressions of anger from the left on campus, sometimes directed against conservative speakers, led to rising expressions of anger from the right, off campus, sometimes directed in threatening ways at left-leaning professors and students, which in turn triggered more anger from the left on campus . . . and the cycle repeats.
Outrage From the Off-Campus Right
In the last two chapters, we examined protests, shout-downs, open letters, and witch hunts originating from the left, because the left is the dominant force on most college campuses (leaving aside religious and military academies). But if we step back from campus, we see that some people and groups on the right engage in moralistic, aggressive, and intimidating actions aimed at campus, too.
We told the story of Evergreen State College, but we left some of its aftermath for this chapter. As we noted, three days after the Evergreen implosion began at Professor Weinstein’s door, when no national news outlets were covering the chaos, Weinstein agreed to appear on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. After the show aired, the backlash began. Three days after Weinstein’s appearance, a student protester posted an essay on the website Medium reporting that a spray-painted swastika appeared on the side of a seminar building, and that she and other protesters had been subjected to “doxxing” by the alt-right: “The faces, names and phone numbers of student organizers were published online on subreddits dedicated to harassing leftists and people of color,” she wrote.19 In a New York Times essay published weeks later, the student described protesters being harassed “with hundreds of phone calls, anonymous texts and terrifyingly specific threats of violence that show they know where we live and work.” She also recounted finding rape threats directed at her on online message boards.20 Sandra Kaiser, Evergreen’s vice president for college relations, said the college received “the most stunning wave of social-media harassment you can possibly imagine.”21 But the mob wasn’t just “phoning it in” from far away. Although it was quickly determined that the New Jersey man’s phone threat was not credible, right-wing extremist groups did visit campus. For example, the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division placed posters on campus buildings reading BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER and JOIN YOUR LOCAL NAZIS. Then they posted a video depicting their members, dressed in black, with faces obscured, walking across campus at night, taping up those posters.22
In physics, as Newton’s law tells us, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction. Many critics of campus protesters in 2015 accused them of overreacting to small things (such as Dean Spellman’s email at Claremont McKenna). But beginning in late 2016, we began to see more examples of off-campus overreaction from the right in response to speech by professors on the left.
Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, was hired in the spring of 2017 to teach Mass Communication and Popular Culture, as well as essay writing. Before coming to Essex, Durden was a motivational speaker, hosted her own talk show, appeared on various networks as a pop culture expert, and worked as a TV and movie producer. Then, on June 6, 2017, she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend a Black Lives Matter “all-black” Memorial Day party (at which she was not present) in Brooklyn, New York. At one point, in response to Carlson’s antagonistic questioning, she responded: “Boo-hoo-hoo. You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your ‘white privilege’ card to get invited.”23
Admittedly, what she said was provocative. But the “all-black” event was not at the college, so Durden wasn’t defending the exclusion of white students—in fact, no one has ever alleged that Durden discriminated against students. Nonetheless, Durden’s television appearance was met by wrath from the right; she received hate mail and anonymous threats, which included “I will come to your house and kill you dumb black bitch” and “Talk to me like you did that guy on Fox News, and I would beat you to a broken pulp and kick your throat in you racist devil.” Durden showed us many more, which we will not reprint here, but suffice it to say, they were horrifically racist, sexist, and threatening.
The barrage of vitriol and the threats of violence have had a lasting effect on Durden. “I still get knots in my stomach whenever I think about it or talk about it,” she told us in an email. “People say that things will get better because that’s the politically correct thing to say to someone in my position. But things don’t always get better, they sometimes get worse. And that’s how I am feeling.”24 To make matters worse, the college suspended Durden and launched an investigation, claiming they had been “immediately inundated” with complaints.25 FIRE filed records requests to see those alleged complaints, which Essex County College ignored until FIRE filed a lawsuit. As it turned out, the supposed deluge of complaints before the suspension amounted to a single email.26 Nonetheless, on June 23, the college president announced that Durden had been fired.27 Despite all of this, Durden tells us unequivocally that she doesn’t regret speaking out.
Professor Durden’s story is not unique. On Christmas Eve 2016, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, posted the provocative tweet “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The tweet went viral, amplified by a Russia-linked Twitter account pretending to be based in Tennessee.28 Taken at face value, the tweet sounds horrifying, but its meaning changes once you learn that “white genocide” is a term used by white nationalist groups to express their fear that mass immigration and racial intermarriage will eventually lead to the extinction of white people. As Ciccariello-Maher later explained: “‘White genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies. . . . It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”29 Despite initially promising Ciccariello-Maher that he would not face punishment for the tweet, Drexel quietly initiated an investigation in February 2017 and later barred him from campus, citing “safety concerns.” The investigation ended only because he resigned at the end of December 2017, one year after the initial tweet.30 Ciccariello-Maher said he was subjected to “nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white-supremacist media outlets and internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence” were directed against him and his family.31
On May 20, 2017, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, gave a commencement speech at Hampshire College in which she called President Trump “a racist and sexist megalomaniac” who poses a threat to students’ futures. The next week, Fox News publicized excerpts from her speech, which they called an “anti-POTUS tirade.”32 By May 31, Taylor reported having received “more than fifty hate-filled and threatening emails,” some containing “specific threats of violence, including murder,” as well as “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in [her] head.”33 Out of concern for her safety and that of her family, Taylor canceled her future scheduled speeches.
Conservative readers may dismiss the three cases we just presented on the grounds t
hat the professors said things that were aggressive or deliberately provocative, so what did they expect the reaction to be? Progressives may see the humor in “white genocide,” but if you make genocide jokes on Twitter, you’ve got to expect some people to take you literally. Therefore, one might conclude that if the three professors had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble. But speaking in a scholarly way is not necessarily enough. In June 2017, Sarah Bond, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Iowa, published an article in an online arts magazine, Hyperallergic, titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.”34 The title refers to the little-known fact that ancient Greek and Roman statues were usually painted with skin tones and bright colors, but when these buried and weathered statues were rediscovered during the Renaissance, the paint had worn off. Renaissance artists and their patrons believed that the unadorned white marble was part of the intended aesthetic, and these artists created new statues (such as Michelangelo’s David) using what they mistakenly believed was the Greco-Roman ideal.35 As a result, the white marble statues of the Renaissance have shaped our current image of what the ancient world must have looked like: white marble statues everywhere.
According to Bond, the erroneous idea that the Romans viewed white marble as depicting the idealized human form led to the idea among scholars in the nineteenth century that Romans were “white” (although there was no concept of a “white” race in ancient times). Bond wrote in her essay that the misunderstanding about white statues “provides further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Evropa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”36 This strikes us as a novel and interesting idea, which Bond illustrates with compelling photographs and links to academic articles. Regardless of her thoughtful and academic presentation, the outrage machine went into action.
UNIVERSITY PROF: USING WHITE MARBLE IN SCULPTURES IS RACIST AND CREATES “WHITE SUPREMACY,” read one headline.37 IOWA UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR SAYS “WHITE MARBLE” ACTUALLY INFLUENCES “WHITE SUPREMACIST” IDEAS, read another.38 On Twitter, Bond was called an “SJW moron” and people tweeted that they hoped she would be fired or die.39 She received death threats, calls for her firing, and a deluge of other online abuse.40 One headline captured how the polarization spiral looks from the right: LIBERAL PROFESSORS SAY BIZARRE THINGS—AND THEN BLAME THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA FOR REPORTING ON THEM.41 (The view from the left might very well be LIBERAL PROFESSORS SAY THINGS—AND THEN CONSERVATIVE MEDIA REPORT THEM AS IF PROFESSORS ARE CRAZY.)
The polarization cycle influencing university life since 2017 typically proceeds in this sequence:42
A left-wing professor says or writes something provocative or inflammatory on social media, in mainstream media, in a lecture, or (less often) in an academic publication. The statement is often a reaction to perceived injustices committed by right-wing groups or politicians off campus. A video clip or screen shot is then shared on social media.
Right-wing media outlets pick up the story and then retell it in ways that amplify the outrage, often taking it out of context and sometimes distorting the facts.43
Dozens or even hundreds of people who hear about it write angry posts or comments on social media, or send emails to the professor, often including racist or sexist slurs, sometimes including threats of rape or death. Some people publicly call for the university to fire the professor.
Meanwhile, the college administration fails to defend the professor. Sometimes an investigation follows, and sometimes the professor is put on leave. Professors who are untenured are at high risk of being fired or of not having their contracts renewed.
Most partisans who hear any part of the story find that it confirms their worst beliefs about the other side. The right focuses on what the professor said or wrote. The left focuses on the racist/sexist reaction to it. With their anger fortified, people on both sides are primed to repeat the cycle.
This pattern is different from the pattern when professors arouse the ire of students on campus, and calling someone racist or demanding that they be disinvited is in no way equivalent to making rape threats or death threats. That distinction is recognized in law; the First Amendment does not protect credible rape or death threats. Those are criminal. But whether the reaction comes from the off-campus right or the on-campus left, the response from university leadership is usually weak and often doesn’t support the professor. Things spiral rapidly out of control, and observers on the left and the right draw the same conclusion: the other side is evil.
Many professors say they now teach and speak more cautiously, because one slip or one simple misunderstanding could lead to vilification and even threats from any number of sources.44 Add to that an insidious new problem: professors are being closely watched because of their politics. The conservative campus group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) even created a “Professor Watchlist” in order to “expose and document” faculty members “who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”45 Many free-speech advocates watched the unveiling of TPUSA’s watchlist with concern—after all, the keeping of lists of disfavored ideas and the people who hold them has a distinct and ugly history in the United States.46 These lists are meant as a warning for those on them to watch what they say. Provoking uncomfortable thoughts is an essential part of a professor’s role, but professors now have reason to worry that provocative educational exercises and lines of questioning could spell the end of their reputations and even careers.
Threat Comes to Campus
After declining for twenty-five years, reported incidents of hate crimes increased in 2015.47 In 2016, those numbers, tracked by the FBI, rose a further 5%.48 One study of major U.S. cities from January to August 2017 suggests a 20% rise in reported hate crimes compared to the first eight months of 2016.49 It is extremely difficult to obtain accurate statistics on hate crimes, and some widely publicized events have turned out to be hoaxes.50 Nonetheless, there is a widespread perception on campus that hate crimes are increasing in the Trump era, and as far as we can tell from our review of the available research, there is some truth to that perception.
On campus, threats take concrete and sometimes terrifying forms. In 2015, a white student at Missouri University of Science and Technology was arrested for posting on social media that he was going to the Mizzou campus (the main campus of the University of Missouri), where black students were protesting, and would “shoot every black person” he saw.51 This happened five months after Dylann Roof murdered nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In October 2017, a white University of Maryland student was charged with murder and a hate crime after stabbing to death Richard Collins III, a visiting Bowie State student, who was apparently targeted for being black.52
In the aftermath of the murder of Heather Heyer and the violence at the white supremacists’ march through Charlottesville, the physical threat posed by the alt-right and neo-Nazis became far more real for many observers who might have previously thought the alt-right was limited to internet trolls. In October 2017, only two months after the Charlottesville march, avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke at the University of Florida. An hour and a half after Spencer’s speech ended, three men proclaiming to be white nationalists drove their car over to a group of protesters at a bus stop and began to yell neo-Nazi chants at them. After one of the protesters hit the rear window of the vehicle with a baton, the three men jumped out of the car, reportedly yelling, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and “Shoot them!” One of the white nationalists, Tyler Tenbrink, was carrying a gun. He fired one shot, missing the protesters, and then the men fled. All three were later caught and charged with attempted homicide.53 Months later, at Wayne State University in Michigan, a student pulled a knife during a dispute with a group that was handing out pamphlets in
favor of immigrants’ rights. He said he wanted to “kill all illegals that don’t belong in our country.”54
Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress. In 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, many Americans had the sense that the country had turned a corner in its struggle with racism.55 In late 2016, college students in the United States had spent the previous eight years in a country with a black president, and most experts and pundits were telling them to expect a transition to the country’s first female president. The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.
We close this chapter by repeating Allison Stanger’s assessment: “Political life and discourse in the United States is at a boiling point, and nowhere is the reaction to that more heightened than on college campuses.” This is the context in which today’s college students are trying to make sense of major national events and are reacting to seemingly small local incidents. We have suggested throughout this book that some interpretations of events are more constructive than others, but our point in this chapter is that there are reasons why students are doing what they are doing. There is a backstory. There is a national context. The polarization spiral and the growth of negative partisanship are influencing political activity all across the country, driving many Americans to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them.
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 15