A year after a sorry attack on a conservative speaker, is UMKC all-in on free speech?
Free speech and civil discourse took a step backward here nearly a year ago. Have they made any strides since?
In the 11 months since an attack on a conservative speaker made national news, made lawmakers rampage and made people of all ideological stripes cringe, the University of Missouri-Kansas City has been working hard to promote open dialogue and open minds.
While conservatives all over wanted Chancellor C. Mauli Agrawal’s hide last spring — his initial statement about a protester’s April 11 spraying of an unknown (ultimately harmless) liquid at conservative commentator Michael Knowles could have used a little more outrage at the attack and less angst about the speaker’s political views — a lecture series this school year has tried to open students’ minds to peaceful and even polite disagreement, even when fierce.
Conservatives would have been encouraged by the latest installment in the series, a sweeping address Tuesday on civil discourse and viewpoint diversity by Timothy J. Shaffer, Kansas State University assistant professor and assistant director of the university’s Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy.
Shaffer’s down-the-middle presentation fairly addressed the fact that conservatives on American college campuses are regularly outnumbered and feel substantially less free to speak their minds: 24.1% of liberals, but 67.9% of conservatives, “report engaging in self-censorship,” Shaffer said.
He even showed what feels like a groundbreaking short video from “Heterodox Academy” espousing viewpoint diversity on campuses — rather than an orthodoxy “where everyone’s beliefs line up and dissenters are punished.” Like, with squirt guns, heckling and middle fingers.
“I don’t think it’s hate speech to say that men aren’t women and vice versa,” Shaffer told me, echoing Knowles’ point of view, while allowing that “sex is amazingly more complex than what we talk about …”
In the students’ place last year, Shaffer said,“I would be sitting in the audience with this chart on the enormous complexity of sex determination from Scientific American. I would listen to understand his perspective and argument, inquiring about the sources he’s using, etc.”
Such is the free frontier between stimulus and response: Nobody can “trigger” you to do anything that you choose not to do. You have the freedom to choose how you react to the world around you.
That’s something that seems to be lost on so many of the young, whose claustrophobic bubbles are inordinately shaped by skewed news sources and the carbon-copy thinking of kindred crowds.
“I guess it’s a reflection of our society,” says Dr. Susan Wilson, UMKC’s vice chancellor of the Division of Diversity and Inclusion, which has hosted the ongoing “Agree to Disagree” lecture series. “We have noticed a trend over the past 10 years where (students) come here and they’re less open to new ideas and different ideas and other people’s ideas. We took on the responsibility of, ‘we have to change that.’
“We see it as our job. We’re trying to educate future generations. It’s not always going to be an easy job. University campuses are a microcosm of our society, and all those issues that are in society come here.”
While the lecture series had been long planned, the incident last year gave it heightened urgency, as does this election year sure to be brimming with unprecedented challenges in civil discourse.
“We think everybody has a right to say what they need to say, even if we don’t quite agree with it,” Wilson says of UMKC.
Seth Schibler isn’t sold on that just yet.
“I think there has been a concerted effort to try and bind those wounds of division,” says the president of UMKC’s Young Americans for Freedom, which co-hosted Knowles’ appearance last year with UMKC’s College Republicans. But as for progress, “I haven’t seen it firsthand.” While noting the Agree to Disagree series, “which I think is in good faith,” Schibler is unconvinced of the administration’s commitment to First Amendment protections for all.
“Right now, quite frankly, I think free speech is mostly dead at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. But I don’t want it to be dead,” he says.
Personally, I don’t think Vice Chancellor Wilson does either. I’m hoping diversity and inclusion really does, as she says, include viewpoint diversity.
Meanwhile, making strides toward a more viewpoint-tolerant future might be easier if students left a little of their intellectual and moral certitude behind — and sampled the diversity that campuses should be reveling in.
