As someone involved in public life off and on for 40 years, on hearing about the (winning) Montana congressional candidate who body-slammed a reporter, I could relate.
Anyone of any party who has dealt with reporters on a regular basis has wanted to body-slam one a time or two. Reporters can be rude, especially when on deadline. They appear where unwanted, and often have already written the story before asking for your side. Yet assault helps no one.
I can also understand someone calling a third of Americans "deplorables." We all sometimes stereotype others, condescending to those with less formal education, much like whining about the silly people we have never actually met who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," as a previous presidential candidate put it, apparently clueless as to the irony of his statement. (Might the speaker have antipathy?) Yet again, giving in to condescension helps no one.
Then we have the current commander-in-chief, who on a nearly daily basis says something horrendous, when he is not shoving the prime ministers of small NATO nations. On his words, one could go on for pages.
We're human. All of us have thoughtless, arrogant, even violent impulses. For politicians and entertainers, large sycophantic staffs enable those impulses. But if you are a grown-up, you don't act on your impulses. You don't shove. You don't say (many) outrageous things.
Grown-ups show restraint. As children, they learn restraint from stable families or role models, as attachment theory suggests. People also learn restraint through religion, which teaches that there is a God (or gods), and it is not you. My colleague Danish Shakeel researches Islamic and rightist terrorists, finding that remarkably few had religious training. Religion teaches us to tutor children rather than blow them up. (Osama bin Laden had a notably shallow grasp of Islam.)
My own industry, higher education, also taught restraint. Exposed to ideological diversity and debate, young people learned to disagree without hatred. They learned to value opponents, and even change their views on occasion.
Alas, at the elite universities producing the likes of Trump, Clinton, and Obama, restraint and debate have receded. The threat of conservative speakers produced a minor riot at Middlebury and midsized riots at Berkeley. Research by my collaborator Matthew Woessner finds less ideological diversity at more elite colleges. Similarly, the Brookings Institution reports empirical evidence that the more prestigious the college, the more likely it will adopt restrictive speech codes.
Even my own generally sensible University of Arkansas recently had a free-speech incident. A department invited, and then disinvited, feminist scholar Phyllis Chesler to a forum on honor killings and forced marriage amid charges that her writings offend some Muslims. In reaction, university administration disciplined the department chair.
On this, I have three observations and one proposal.
First, things look different when you are there, rather than relying on social media. I know and like many of the professors and administrators involved. I consider them good people doing their jobs as they saw fit. In their shoes, I might have taken similar actions. Certain professors wanted to avoid offending a minority, a capable department chair wanted to respect the wishes of his faculty, and administrators wanted to make clear that the university values free speech. No one here is evil.
Second, as usual, the person censored was the big winner. I had never heard of Professor Chesler before, but after the dis-invitation read some of her work. While potentially offensive, like much intellectual discourse, Chesler's "How Afghan Captivity Shaped My Feminism" is fascinating, even poignant. I also envied Chesler. Will some university please disinvite me? That would draw attention to my (no doubt undervalued) commentary and scholarship.
Third, if both faculty and students regularly encountered controversial views, ideally from people we know and like, we might censor less and listen more. We should make debates among persons who disagree a regular part of the higher (and lower) education milieu, rather than a thing so shocking as to bring protests and trigger warnings.
To that end, I propose that my university and others start regular debates on contemporary political and social issues, as part of classes so students will attend, but also open to the public.
We Razorbacks can model disagreeing without being disagreeable. Maybe eventually the politicians will follow.
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Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and serves on the Fayetteville School Board. The views here are his alone.
Editorial on 06/01/2017