Dangerous Ideas Needed

Campus dialogues can’t duck the divisive

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More than a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the shock waves are still rolling through higher education. Kirk’s murder, on a college campus, in the act of open debate, was committed by a killer who reportedly believed that “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Although the assassin was a college dropout, his apparent logic was very familiar on campus: some ideas are just “hate,” and the normal rules don’t apply. Hate has no home here, as the saying goes.

In a time when 70% of undergraduate students believe some speech can be as damaging as violence, there’s a certain logic to treating ideas as threats. Just spot the dangerous viewpoint, label it as hateful, and rule it out-of-bounds. But this censorious mindset may stifle discussion — the heart of academic life — just as effectively as physical violence. As Ilana Redstone argues, “If campuses truly believe in intellectual pluralism, Kirk's assassination will prompt them to explicitly defend not just his life, but his views as worthy of engagement and thought rather than demonization as racist, sexist, and transphobic.”

Is there hope for something like that? One might look to the wave of dialogue, bridge-building, and depolarization initiatives on American campuses, including those sponsored by HxA. In a recent survey, a remarkable 35% of chief academic officers say they have established a voluntary initiative for difficult dialogues or constructive conversations in the last 12 months.

But those of us doing campus programming should look in the mirror before we mention dialogue programs in the same breath as Charlie Kirk. As Redstone points out, Kirk “was pro-life, he supported the police, he questioned systemic racism, and he believed there were only two genders.” These are all squarely mainstream, and in some cases majority, viewpoints in the United States, yet scandalous on many campuses. Do students actually encounter such views through college dialogue programs? Or are they smoothed down and filtered out to avoid discomfort and divisiveness?

Cherian George argues that dialogue programs are actually better than Kirk-style free-for-alls, which she dismisses as a “performance designed for the attention economy.” But George favorably cites initiatives such as a Providence College program that boasts “democracy walls”: whiteboards asking open-ended questions such as, “What does American democracy mean to you?”

If you think this is too tame for adult college students, it was almost too spicy for Providence leaders. The organizers explain that administrators were worried about “comments that could not be monitored and might lead to wider divisions.” So there are now guidelines warning students to make their comments “respectful of people’s humanity and dignity” including with regard to gender identity. And there’s a consultative process for removing comments that break that rule. If you doubt the notion of gender identity itself… find another whiteboard, I suppose?

To hold up this sort of thing as training for rough-and-tumble democracy is absurd. Sooner or later, students will encounter people who have very different — and strongly held — views, with no hall monitors around to intervene and avoid divisiveness. If college only prepares them to respond with outraged befuddlement, something is deeply wrong. Campus dialogue programs really can equip students to engage across difference, but not if they train students to duck the sharpest challenges.

What should colleges aim for instead? Redstone wants an American political culture that “can still distinguish between ‘your ideas are wrong’ and ‘your ideas are racist, sexist, bigoted, and harmful.’” I don’t think that’s quite right. Most political ideas worth discussing are in fact harmful, or potentially harmful if we are wrong about them. Kirk believed that abortion takes a human life; that affirmative action harms its beneficiaries; and that telling men they can be women ruins lives. Those are all claims about harm! Progressives, of course, look at the same issues and see harms to mothers, to marginalized students, and to trans people.

College administrators and campus dialoguers might wish they could just ban all that is hateful and harmful, but that’s precisely what we disagree about.

So they would do better to teach their students a different message: Political debate is a high-stakes activity. My ideas are potentially harmful and yours are, too. So in this special institution we call the university, let’s be allies looking for truth. Make your argument. Listen to mine. Maybe our views will come closer together; maybe we’ll only see the differences more clearly. Don’t reach for the bias hotline, the fire alarm, or (heaven forbid) your grandfather’s rifle.

We must keep the campus physically safe and intellectually “dangerous,” not the other way around.