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The Rise of Victimhood Culture pp 213–248Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Victimhood, Academic Freedom, and Free Speech

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Abstract

There is an inherent tension between the ideals of victimhood culture and the ideals of free speech and academic freedom. Campbell and Manning discuss legal norms for regulating speech. They describe how campus activists commonly reject legal and folk norms regarding free speech and push for greater restrictions, often justifying these with an expansive conception of harm. Despite widespread belief in the value of academic freedom, colleges and universities have already introduced many speech restrictions. Indeed, rather than having more free speech than the larger society, campuses have far less. On campus, the most strenuous censorship occurs at the behest of leftist activists and their sympathizers and targets those who question victimhood culture. But the campus also faces censorship from the right, in the form of outsiders who are outraged over the speech of campus activists. As campus culture continues to depart from mainstream morality, such problems will increase.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In defense of dueling , eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson similarly compared honor offenses to physical invasion: “A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house” (quoted in Pinker 2011:22).

  2. 2.

    This is due to what is known as the incorporation doctrine, which means that much of the Bill of Rights (the Constitution’s first 10 amendments) now applies to the states based on the general guarantee of due process found in the 14th Amendment.

  3. 3.

    One user of the term explains that “the social justice community” uses this as “a punny homophonic description” of a kind of “whiny, entitled behavior” (Lee 2013).

  4. 4.

    Though the students who opposed Murray’s presence at Middlebury did so mainly on the basis of The Bell Curve, or what they had heard about it, some even condemned Coming Apart, the book he was there to talk about. A group called White Students for Racial Justice, for example, called Murray “classist” and said the book “uses largely anecdotal evidence to blame poor people in America for being poor, attempting to explain economic inequality through a perceived gap in virtue” (quoted in Beinart 2017). Beinart is right when he says that what is “considered morally legitimate at Middlebury differs dramatically from what’s considered morally legitimate in large swaths of America” (2017). But Williams and Ceci (2017) show that what Middlebury activists consider morally legitimate differs even from what is considered morally legitimate in large swaths of the university.

  5. 5.

    While the charge of racism is connected to perceptions of The Bell Curve, it is not clear that the accusations of being sexist and anti-gay have any connection to Murray’s work at all.

  6. 6.

    As with the allegations of bigotry against Charles Murray, most of these labels applied to Mac Donald have no obvious connection to her work. The logic of campus activists seems to be that if a person is guilty of one kind of bigotry, they must be guilty of all kinds, and perhaps of other bad things as well. A similar logic might lie behind the accusations that presidential candidate Donald Trump employed homophobic rhetoric on the campaign trail (discussed in the Prologue).

  7. 7.

    Bridges eventually reversed his position and said he was “immensely disappointed” in the students he had previously called courageous. Writing at the libertarian magazine Reason, Ben Haller says Bridges’s reversal “almost certainly stems from the massive backlash the school received over its handling of the protests.” The Board of Trustees condemned the protests, a state lawmaker proposed defunding the college, enrollment is down by 35 percent, and Weinstein is suing the college for $3.8 million (Haller 2017).

  8. 8.

    She had asked for a one-year extension for her three-year review, given that she had been on suspension for a substantial part of the time, and though her department and tenure review committee recommended that she get the extension, the dean denied the request (Flaherty 2016; Gockowski 2016).

  9. 9.

    Faculty might also be subject to these kinds of investigations. Sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah, faced a Title IX investigation over an off-campus conversation more than 10 years earlier in which he told female colleagues about his marriage proposal in a strip club. The university eventually dropped the case, but only after Wolfinger had spent $14,000 in attorney fees to defend himself (Wolfinger 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California State University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Bradley Campbell

  2. Sociology and Anthropology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Jason Manning

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  1. Bradley Campbell
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  2. Jason Manning
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Campbell, B., Manning, J. (2018). Victimhood, Academic Freedom, and Free Speech. In: The Rise of Victimhood Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_7

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70328-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70329-9

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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