Skip to content

Protests Against Commencement Speakers: Hard-won But Hollow

Are we seeing the emergence of a new “anti-liberal” left? That’s what The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg argued recently. She was writing about the #CancelColbert Twitter campaign, but she and others have also called attention to the other manifestations of the phenomenon, such as the recent spate of left-wing protests against commencement speakers such as Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund’s Christine LaGarde.

Anti-liberalism is a dangerous trap for the left, because it tends to encourage navel-gazing ideological rigidity rather than the adaptability and movement-building that wins the day.

Of course, anti-liberalism on the left is hardly new phenomenon. We saw it with the 1960s radicals and with the politically correct left of the 1990s. Is left anti-liberalism truly a growing phenomenon, or is the media is merely deciding to now take note of an aspect of left culture that never really went away? It’s hard to know for sure, because there is not a lot of hard data about this. But according to one source that does keep a tally, the civil liberties organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, between 1987 and 2008, there were forty-eight protests of planned speeches on college campuses, which resulted in twenty-one of those speeches being cancelled. Since 2009, there have been ninety-five protests and thirty-nine cancellations.

If we are to assume that the number of speeches being given on college campuses annually has remained more or less constant (which is unclear), that is a stupendous increase. That statistic, as well as the infantilizing “trigger warnings” that some colleges have adopted to protect students from course materials they may find disturbing or objectionable, suggest that Goldberg is on to something.

It’s also well worth taking a closer look at some of the speakers the students have singled out for protest. Condoleezza Rice, of course, was one of the key architects of a heinous and deceitful war that was one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history, so the reason for students’ objections to her are clear. Robert Birgeneau was formerly the chancellor at University of California at Berkeley; students found him unacceptable because of the way he handled his school’s Occupy protests. While that was certainly a low point of his chancellorship, it hardly rises to the level of a war crime, and Birgeneau has won praise for other aspects his leadership, such as his support of undocumented and LGBT students, and his efforts to increase students’ financial aid.

Then there’s Christine Lagarde. She is president of the IMF, an institution whose draconian lending and development policies have wreaked massive economic devastation—particularly in the developing world. But while the institution’s delightfully rude nickname of “International Motherfuckers” was well-earned, the organization has taken a turn for the better of late (it was the “good guy” in the Greek bailout crisis, for example, but was overruled by the austerity-mad European Commission). It is, however, still far from perfect.

While the IMF is producing some very progressive research these days, the operations side hasn’t quite caught up. For instance, it’s been trying to “decentralize”—in other words, greatly weaken—collective bargaining in Europe. So, while I wouldn’t necessarily believe all the happy talk you hear about the IMF these days, it’s no longer the world’s greatest monster, either. In general, Lagarde is pushing the organization in a more moderate direction; her politics are not any more conservative than Barack Obama’s or Hillary Clinton’s.

The particular personalities of these speakers aside, if the university confers honors upon an individual who is politically or morally objectionable, student protests are justifiable. But if that person just giving a speech, the values of open debate and intellectual inquiry are harmed when speeches are cancelled under duress or speakers are shouted down. A commencement speech is tricky because it’s something of a hybrid. It’s a speech, of course, but it’s also regarded as an honor reserved for distinguished individuals, who are expected to pass their oleaginous banalities on to the graduates before sending them off into their brave new adulthood un- and under-employment and crippling student loans.

For student activists, getting a campus speaker to back down may be a briefly exhilarating victory, but ultimately, it is a hollow one. It is purely symbolic, but it changes nothing structurally. Yet today’s students have an embarrassing glut of far more urgent causes to protest.

Let’s start with the institution of the university itself. The vast majority of colleges in the U.S. receive lavish taxpayer subsidies, because they are not-for-profit. Nonetheless, there is startling economic injustice on campus. Many of the nation’s top private colleges have endowments in the billions, and college presidents and coaches earn eye-popping salaries, with total annual compensation frequently reaching in the millions. Yet over 700,000 employees across American campuses do not earn a living wage, and pay and working conditions for adjunct faculty are often wretched. (See, for example, this recent Salon article about professors living in homeless shelters and subsisting on food stamps.) The American taxpayer is underwriting that system of economic apartheid.

Taxpayers also bankroll our oppressive student loan system, which impose an onerous debt burden on millions of Americans. (The un-dischargeable “loans” are more akin to contracts for indentured servitude). There are many other bizarre features of the modern university, such as the fact that elite private colleges tend to receive more in tax subsidies than public universities. Even for the Rutgers students protesting Condi Rice, a more promising target for long-term reform is the system that enabled outrageously high speaking fee ($35,000!) the school was prepared to pay her. That fee was offered in spite of the painful and well-publicized budget cuts that the school has recently suffered—and also the fact that a massive shortfall in the New Jersey state budget was recently announced.

Getting the university, and our government, to make structural changes in the way it does business is hard work. Victories will not come cheaply or easily; they will be the result of campaigns that take years. What they require, more than anything else, is a left that has confidence in the power its ideas. But today’s campus leftists seem more interested in shutting down their opponents’ free expression of ideas than in advocating for their own.