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Piercing the veil at Yale

If you are a user of any kind of social media right now, debate over the protests at Yale is probably impossible to avoid. It has even made the front page of Reddit, crowding out the usual stream of cat photos and memes. For those who may not follow the news as closely, Yale has been the site of protests about racial intolerance in campus life. Much of the news coverage has situated around the protests in the debate over free speech on college campuses. Yet, we need to step back for a second and view these protests in isolation. What has happened at Yale does not fit cleanly into the narrative about free speech that has been put forward by national news media.

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One of the most linked-to articles floating around on Facebook about the protests is one published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as a primer on the protests and the illiberal threat they pose to individual free speech rights. It’s a highly problematic piece, given that FIRE is not a news outlet, but rather a nonprofit with the mission to “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities,” according to its mission statement. Here is an organization with a clear partisan goal that seized this story to fit its narrative and immediately attempted to discredit the voices of the protestors. We need to avoid that kind of knee-jerk reaction at all costs; nevertheless, the debate over free speech has become the dominant narrative.

Daniel Drezner, a politics professor at Tufts University, wrote about the need to view this debate in light of “local knowledge.” If one were to simply view the video of Silliman College Master Nicholas Christakis arguing with students at the college, without any knowledge of the overall story at Yale, then the clip fits very nicely into a story being told about the “coddling” of college students, as columnists wrote in the Atlantic a few weeks ago. Drezner, unfortunately, still falls into the same trap as many of the other columnists who have written about this debate. He argues that “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are,” which labels the arguments of the students as “stupid” and ignores their merits.

I am not saying that arguments advanced by those like Drezner and FIRE have no merit at all. There is a real debate to be had over free speech in the context of liberal arts education. Fellow columnist Beni Snow wrote in defense of the Christakises about the debate over free speech, and to a certain degree, I agree with him. Often, the debate over free speech is carried out to a logical extreme. I recently attended a Model United Nations conference that simulated crises in the Middle East, and many of the updates about the crises actually carried trigger warnings as a way of protecting delegates who would otherwise have been made uncomfortable by the updates. That practice is utterly absurd; a Model United Nations conference aims to closely model real world events and to give warnings about the events and allowing delegates to exclude themselves from proceedings if they feel threatened defeats the purpose of the simulation. Alas, columnists such as Drezner and Snow are falling victim to one of the major pitfalls of opinion journalism by attacking straw men, a logical fallacy that involves debating with a conception of an argument rather than an argument specifically expressed by a person.

This debate at Yale is not about free speech. It is about the legitimate grievances of many of the protestors, and those need to be addressed in isolation from the debate over free speech. The complaints about Halloween costumes are merely proxies for deeper issues of racism on campus. There are incidents of illiberal intolerance, but those should not detract from the overall narrative. The minute the free speech debate is brought up, it instantly casts the students’ arguments in a way that is not conducive to rational debate.

We need to recognize the legacies of institutionalized racism that many schools in the Ivy League carry and work to take the steps necessary to rectify the evils of the past. There is some very real pain behind the protests at Yale. The Black Student Alliance at Yale, among other groups, published a list of demands for the Yale Administration, and those demands have received precious little media attention. Are some of the demands extreme? Certainly. But rather than further vilifying the protestors as “stupid college students” or “social justice warriors,” let’s work towards a more constructive reconciliation process, and that starts with a reframing of the debate in the context of local issues at hand rather than the national narrative of illiberal liberalism.

Nicholas Wu is a sophomore from Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. He can be reached at nmwu@princeton.edu.

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