Do the campus protests and debates that roil around speech that has been deemed “offensive” or “racist” signal a threat to free speech or are we simply moving into a more enlightened time when intolerance is no longer quietly accepted? That was the question posed to two teams of debaters and an audience of Yale University students and New Haven, Conn., residents on Tuesday night.
By the end of the debate, the majority of the audience agreed that free speech is under threat.
The debate was hosted by Intelligence Squared US, the U.S. arm of a nonprofit organization that hosts debates across the world on pressing issues facing society. The organizer of Intelligence Squared US, Delphi Financial Group CEO and Yale graduate Robert Rosenkranz, at the start of the debate spoke of his undergraduate experience as one of the few Jewish students on Yale’s campus in the 1960s.
“It was a very sort of tricky place to navigate,” Rosenkranz said. “But I would say that we felt that we were not angry. We felt lucky to be there. The three most generous members of my class at Yale are all Jewish and were all scholarship students at Yale. So we just felt like it was our job to adapt to Yale and not Yale’s job to adapt to us.”
The context today is very different, said John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia, and Wendy Kaminer, a writer and lawyer. The fundamental question is not whether microaggressions toward minorities occur—they do, McWhorter said—or whether racism is still alive and well; but how to respond to instances of both when they occur.
“What we’re dealing with is a general argument that indeed has become higher pitched since Ferguson in favor of a leftist position. And I am glad,” McWhorter said. “However, what we’re too often being told is that the leftist position is truth incarnate and that on that position … there can be no further debate. And that’s problematic. It’s problematic on a campus, for example, because it’s fundamentally anti-intellectual.”
Although event moderator John Donvan cautioned the debaters to steer clear of discussing an event that unfolded on the Yale University campus last fall, that incident is illustrative of a new campus paradigm, where retribution for speech that is deemed to be offensive can be swift and overpowering.
