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.

Except one side of the coin complains on twitter and maybe gets you fired from your job whereas the other side of that coin systematically removes over a hundred million dollars of research grants based on language and is literally disappearing people for their writing

but yeah, same thing. sorry someone put you through the absolute hell of saying they/them at work

Your attitude and inability to see anything but your own view is exactly the problem we've seen in the new left.

"Maybe gets you fired from your job" is someone's entire livelihood you're trivializing.

Any attempt to control speech and silence opposition is wrong, no matter how you slice it. "Your side" isn't any better than the other's.