One of the subdomains of covid-policy skepticism that I think had a valid concern embedded inside a lot of garbage and noise was the use of workplace authority to impose regulatory power over individuals where the state was unwilling or incapable of doing so.
That move was just the latest push to take the immense powers already granted to employers to exercise authority over the bodies, minds and social lives of their employees and deploy them for purposes that are only tangentially connected to the specific and constrained interests of that employer. Unwisely, progressives have at times encouraged the use of that authority precisely because it can be used punitively and directly against individuals who have spoken or behaved in reactionary or oppressive fashion within public culture, whether they are employees or consumers who use the services of a particular company, where the government is legally constrained from acting.
There are cases where I think that’s the right thing to do—among them, in building tools for moderating social media platforms that make them feel safe and generative for most users. There are businesses which are entirely built around a particular sort of cultural niche, an emotional modality, where a highly-identifiable employee whose public persona absolutely contradicts the company’s image—if a vice-president at Ben & Jerry’s suddenly started talking on X about how he wants to kick a hippy’s face in and thinks workers in this country have too many rights and their salaries are too high, then by all means fire the guy.
But a lot of the time we should not be encouraging companies and civic institutions to exercise authority over employees and communities, nor should we welcome the extension of the logic of homeowners’ associations, who regulate the individual lives and expressiveness of people through the logic of property valuation. Conformity that was embedded in sociality becomes something quite different when it acquires legalistic power, when it becomes commandment as opposed to norm.
We should be especially discouraging to the arrival of this corporate-private conception of regulatory power over and within community when it gets taken up by university administrations. There’s a fundamental violation of basic values going on when universities like Barnard or American ban all political messages from being visible in the public space of their institution, whether on dorm room doors and windows or on message boards in the halls of buildings. That’s the kind of violation that is not a long slippery slope to some worse attacks on the fundamental mission of higher education, such as intrusive regulation of what gets said in classrooms, but is instead one short step away from that level of failure.
It’s rather notable that many advocates who were crying out for “viewpoint diversity” or defending “free speech” on campus have abruptly switched sides in the present moment towards demanding harsh punitive action even for the mere utterance of forbidden phrases whose meaning is factually polysemous, which tends to confirm the long-held suspicion that they were never making an argument from principle but instead just trying to concern-troll risk-averse administrations into favoring the political convictions of the critics.
But the present moment has managed to confirm that the cautionary message of that advocacy was legitimate and that some campus activists, both faculty and students, have been historically naive about the dangers of empowering university administrations as a proxy weapon in internal ideological struggles over campus culture. More than two decades ago, I sat with a group of student activists on my own campus who were furious about what they believed to be a deliberate attack on an important space for marginalized groups as they demanded that our president ask for the FBI to investigate it as a hate crime and for new mandatory training programs designed to increase awareness and sensitivity for all students. I pointed out that they really wouldn’t want the FBI to be brought in (not that they would have responded in this case anyway) and that any mandatory training would quickly metastasize into forms they wouldn’t like or care for, including forms of comprehensive surveillance. Much of that surveillance infrastructure has since been built on many campuses whether or not anybody called for it, but inviting it in any form, even with the best intentions, has been particularly unwise.
The basic point remains that universities are not the wider society, and the speech protections that should pertain across the whole of a free society are legitimately subject to some forms of constraint to purpose within specific institutions. A university doesn’t have to invite all forms of speech, whether or not they have anything to do with an educational or scholarly mission, and it does have to look to the safety and security of students, faculty and staff within its care. A protest that seizes a building, shouts down a speaker, and physically attacks individuals isn’t acceptable.
But a university is also fundamentally about the study of the world as it is and as it has been, and about the transformation of individuals and communities through education. Transformation and change are by their nature unsettling processes, perhaps even unsafe ones. You cannot learn who you are, what you think, what you know and don’t know, if you are living in a sterile environment that is heavily policed by ideas about risk management and liability reduction, with doors and windows that are all equitably and consistently scrubbed of any trace of disagreement and individuality. A university administration pushed hard by lawyerly encouragement and egged on by wealthy donors to suppress the public manifestation of unwanted thoughts is never going to stop at the boundary of official websites and university property—it is always going to move on from there into classrooms, into curricular design, into tenure and promotion cases, into admissions processes, into scholarly publication, the same way that HOAs never stop with suggesting that a property owner maybe should mow their lawn more than once a year.