Squeezed tightly between my arm and my chest were the last few dozen of the 750 fliers that I distributed that night for the Coalition for Intellectual Liberty (C-FIL). On that frigid night, C-FIL distributed, by my estimate, about 4,000 fliers. It may have been considerably more, and this does not account for the several hundred more released on Monday. It was a mobilization of student activism of a scale, efficiency and speed rarely achieved on this, or any, campus. The credit goes to remarkable organization and, primarily, a core group of dedicated student activists who took to the night to defend their University's intellectual community from political dilution.
"Pity," the reader might say, "that all this effort was for naught. The coalition's referendum failed, you know. It was defeated on the ballot. C-FIL lost." This is true only in the narrowest sense.
To begin, the coalition's referendum was too vague; this was always a problem and eventually led to its electoral defeat. Despite scurrilous accusations by the referendum's opponents, its vagueness was not nefarious, but merely a product of the general principle C-FIL espoused. Unlike its sister referendum, which recommended specific action, the coalition's referendum was a sweeping statement of political and intellectual principle. It could not be both reasonably concise and specific enough to satisfy every voter. C-FIL's language was, I still believe, about as good as possible, but it still left room for interpretation.
Thus, individual voters could have different interpretations of the scope of the referendum and opponents of the coalition could publicly fill the referendum with their own sensationalized meaning. No matter how much we tried to explain our own reasonable understanding of the language, the first impressions of many were impossible to change. No matter how much I protested that it was "a matter of principle, not semantics," semantics eventually carried the day.
But this is not the fundamental lesson to take from this election. True, the specific language of the referendum was voted down, but the foundational principles of the coalition - intellectual liberty and political neutrality - were overwhelmingly endorsed by the defeat of the referendum of the Equality Action Network. C-FIL was not founded on the troublesome language of its referendum, but on those principles which, when the voting was complete, had received the remarkable imprimatur of the student body. And though its referendum lost, the coalition's principles did not. C-FIL won.
Now, there was some controversy during the campaign as to what the Coalition for Intellectual Liberty actually was. We were never dishonest or duplicitous on this point: C-FIL was composed of the Anscombe Society, the College Republicans, the Princeton Tory and individual students. But this superficial definition does not, I think, give a full account of what the Coalition for Intellectual Liberty actually is.
C-FIL represents an idea, currently held disproportionately by conservative students, though I hesitate to call it a conservative principle per se, about what a university is and should be. It is an idea that many students, as was demonstrated on that wintry Saturday night, will defend with vigor and emotion. It is an idea that a majority of Princeton students endorsed during this election.
This idea holds that the University is and should be a center of learning, academic research, and impartial intellectual inquiry. As such, the University ought to remain a place where people of diverse religious, political, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds can, without preconditions imposed by an official body or a political majority, engage in that most exciting adventure of the human intellect: the search for that elusive but fundamental good we call truth.
And so, though the Coalition for Intellectual Liberty, in its current manifestation, has disbanded, it can never actually disappear. For C-FIL is not a conglomeration of student groups, but a concept. And it is a concept that, when the ideal of the university is again threatened, will reemerge in another time, in another place and perhaps under a different name to come to that idea's defense with the same remarkable strength and efficiency demonstrated this past week.
Brandon McGinley is a politics major from Pittsburgh, Pa. He can be reached at bmcginle@princeton.edu.
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