A university president makes a case against cowardice

Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.

In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.

I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.

But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.

People are being abducted off the street for writing tame op-eds and we're still complaining about the left chilling speech post-2020? What are we doing here?

The left banning the use of certain words and the right banning the use of certain words are flip sides of the same coin.

Of course, if you point that out, you get yelled at by both sides.

> That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?

You are correct - one is objectively worse than the other.

The unfortunate truth is that, also, one is a consequence of the other.

Trump is simply doing what his voters wanted[1]. And they voted for him precisely because `of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture"`.

Had the first thing not happened, then the consequence would have been a fictional story in an alternate timeline.

But here we are, and we don't get to say "Sure, we were assholes to 50% of the population, but your response is worse".

[1] Spoiler - they may not even want it anymore!

Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.

For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.

Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.

If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.