The College Fix

Adults sometimes have to deal with opinions they don’t like

At his blog this week, University of Chicago law professor Brian Leiter claims that there is currently underway a “well-organized campaign to bait, discredit, and take over universities,” one that is allegedly “exploiting students and manipulating the public.”

“Many lectures about ‘free speech’ are not really about ‘free speech,'” the blog post reads, “but rather are intended to provoke a reaction that will discredit universities.” Leiter cites, by way of example, the recent case of Josh Blackman, the scholar whose talk at a New York university was overrun by a student mob who were extremely angry at him because he holds some conservative political opinions.

“When students are goaded into tactical mistakes,” Leiter writes, “journalists should ask themselves whether mean-spirited provocations by seasoned political operatives preying on vulnerable teenagers and inexperienced young adults genuinely deserve news coverage.”

We have heard this argument before, and it never fails to be a fascinating one. In effect Leiter is saying that the behavior of campus mobs is more or less involuntary: The students who attempt to shut down speech with which they disagree are not actually responsible for their behavior, they’ve simply been “provoked,” “baited,” “exploited,” “manipulated;” they are “vulnerable” and “inexperienced” and thus utterly susceptible to fits of incoherent rage whenever a conservative steps on their campus. We are meant to see these young adults not as fully responsible moral agents but as helpless idiots, controlled and directed by a sinister “well-organized campaign.” Student-activists, we’re led to believe, are simply incapable of responding to conservative speech with anything other than mass psychosis.

Let us call this argument for what it is: A silly, exculpatory dodge, a way to excuse students for their inexcusable behavior. In reality, college students are adults, both legally and, at least by the dictates of modern society, morally as well. They are not children; they are not infants or  bratty toddlers or sulking, confused thirteen-year-olds. They are perfectly capable of using logic and reason. If a conservative speaker comes to campus, liberal students are absolutely able to say: “I don’t like what that person says or believes, but I don’t have to turn into a hysterical lunatic as a result. I prefer that the speaker were not on my campus, but I’m also not going to try and shut down his speech because he said something with which I strongly disagree.”

This isn’t hard. It’s what grown-ups do every day all over the world. College students deserve better than the kind of coddling rationalization that Leiter offers. They deserve to be told: “You’re adults. For goodness’s sake, start acting like adults.”

MORE: Emotionally frail students are draining counseling centers, scaring faculty into easier grading

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