Back in the Firing Line

Campus speech, then and now

Nothing comes from nowhere. Today’s woke politics have their antecedent in debates about speech and censorship that have been raging in this country for some time. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, I was a vocal opponent of political correctness on college campuses. Student activists, often supported by select faculty members, tried to purge the classroom of language and ideas they deemed unacceptable. Classic texts and harmless figures of speech came under assault in the one place where free inquiry was most vital.

Yesterday’s political correctness is today’s wokeness. The continuities are impossible to ignore. And while, with the benefit of hindsight, I might revise some of what I said about political correctness in the past, it’s more imperative now than ever to push back against censoriousness, nonsensical speech codes, and the erosion of standards. In order to highlight the similarities, I present excerpts from two of my appearances on PBS’s Firing Line. The first aired earlier this month, and it consists of an interview with the current host, Margaret Hoover. The second aired in 1991, and it’s a recording of a live debate at the University of South Carolina featuring me, William F. Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, and Former Boston University President John Silber on one side and Catharine Stimpson, Stanley Fish, Ronald Waters, and Leon Botstein on the other, with the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley moderating.

As you can see, the issues at play in 1991 are still very much with us in 2023. I fear they may be for some time, but I also know there are plenty of us willing to call out the absurdities of the woke for what they are.

(You can watch the full 1991 episode of Firing Line here, and my latest appearance here.)

---

This post is free and available to the public. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

MARGARET HOOVER: You appeared on the original Firing Line hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In 1991, you participated in a Firing Line debate on the question “Is Freedom of Thought in Danger on American Campuses?” You were on the side arguing that it was, and I want to play a section of the back and forth between you and Catharine Stimpson, who was then a dean at Rutgers, who was on the other side of the question.

The cult of sensitivity has evolved in such a way that particular substantive issues of vital importance to be discussed cannot be discussed because particular insular minorities are exercising power, real power, to curtail the discussion that their feelings not be hurt. I don't think that helps anybody. 

CATHARINE STIMPSON: Now my question. Question one: What has happened to courage? I am so tired of these stories of tenured professors with reasonable salaries who meet a group of students who say, "Please don't do that." And then they go home and whine and cry and say, "I am being harassed." that is nonsense. Absolute nonsense. So what has happened to courage, sir? What has happened to courage? 

Oh, I think courage is in good stead. I don't doubt that many of us have exhibited it by making the arguments that we've made. But there's something about this charge of racism or sexism. There's something insidious about it that undermines the legitimacy of the person against whom it's level that is taken up by people in such a way as to cast people out of the community.

MARGARET HOOVER: Professor, it's been 30 years. Would you answer that question the same way today? 

Yeah, probably. But I wouldn't be being completely honest when I did, because she does have a point, actually. That if you think you have an insight that goes outside of the bounds, integrity and dedication to your craft, to your trade as an intellectual, I think, compels you to stick your head up out of the foxhole and to say what truth you think you've been given to know. And there is something I think in the complaint about political correctness that avoids that act of integrity by making oneself into a victim. Woe is me. They won't let me speak. So I think I have to say, thirty years hindsight, that Catharine Stimpson has a point. 

MARGARET HOOVER: Was political correctness in that argument the antecedent to wokeness?

Yes. Today's wokeness is a direct descendant from the PC about which people were complaining thirty years ago. I think that's correct. 

MARGARET HOOVER: At MIT, where you obtained your PhD, a survey from last summer found that 40% of the faculty are more likely to self-censor now than in 2020. So how do you think universities, how can they stop this self-censorship?

Well, I think we need commitment from the top, from the provost and the president and the administrative leadership of the university to the principles of the university, which is a special kind of institution. And I don't think we're getting it very often at all from the leadership of our universities.

---

---

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Professor Loury, it's your turn. You have a minute and a half to summarize your philosophy of life and then subject yourself to questions . 

Well, in ninety seconds, let me get right down to it. A professor of economics lecturing with inputs on the axes says “man hours,” and a committee of women visit him after the class and instruct him that, no, “man hours” is not acceptable language to quantify the amount of labor that's being used. A class about civics that uses the movie It's a Wonderful Life to illustrate the principles being taught. The film has to be withdrawn because a committee of students visit the professor and instruct him that the black woman in that movie is portrayed in a degrading way. Students are reprimanded or criticized publicly by university administrator because they organize a theme party organized around the 1950s, and they're told that, well, the '50s was a time of racism, and such a party by students is offensive to others. Professor of law refers to one of his colleagues as, “Well, he may be black he may look black, but he thinks white.” These examples could be multiplied.

The point here is not, of course, that the forces of restriction of thought and expression are carrying people off to dungeon somewhere. The point is that the social pressures and the consequences of engaging in certain kinds of discourse are very severe. Things that can't be talked about on campus today: [Are] homosexual acts immoral? Can we talk about the extent of differences, overt differences in academic performance between racial groups? Can we discuss whether or not certain affirmative action practices are effective policy for the university? In other words, there are real restrictions on the scope of debate that can take place.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: And I just had to restrict you. Does anyone have a question for Professor Loury? 

STANLEY FISH: How do you think those restrictions come about? 

Well, I think often they're informal. And the examples that I just cited, many of them my own personal experience or people that I know directly, they come about because the academic institutions are influenced by the complaints of students in a way that create cost for people. As I say, no one's dragged away to a dungeon, but one's life is made very much unpleasant. If committees of students visits, if deans are called upon, if demonstrations occur outside your office, and so forth, as a consequence, it's simply not worth the candor.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Go ahead. 

STANLEY FISH: A lot of people— 

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Go Fish! I've always wanted to say that on television. 

STANLEY FISH: I still have my question. A lot of people have been made to feel uncomfortable and reported. And I too have been made to feel uncomfortable, but I'll keep it quiet. But the people who report it report it as a wonder. That is, “My God, students are talking back to me. That's not the way it's supposed to be. My God, we have these informal pressures.” Which means that you must remember a time when there were no pressures at all, when there was no sense of what could not be said.

Isn't it the case that there's always a sense of what can and cannot be said with impunity and that what a lot of people are worrying about now is that the game has changed and what they used to be able to say with impunity, they can't say, and what they never expected to hear anybody [say] is now greeted with cheers and applause?

No, I don't think that's the case. Indeed it is of course the case that there have always been constraints. I'm certainly not one standing here to say I want to be free to make racist remarks in my classes. What I think is the case though is that the cult of sensitivity has evolved in such a way that particular substantive issues of vital importance to be discussed cannot be discussed because particular insular minorities are exercising power, real power, to curtail the discussion that their feelings not be hurt. I don't think that helps anybody.

I think we have to talk about whether or not a certain kind of affirmative action in a certain place is good or bad for the institution and for the people who are affected by it. I think we do indeed have to talk about the morality of homosexual practices, to the extent that that's a legitimate subject in a course on ethics or whatever it might be, and those things, as a matter of fact, cannot be freely debated in the climate that I've been describing.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Professor Stimpson. 

CATHARINE STIMPSON: Well, I have one comment and two questions. First, the comment. There are 3,500 institutions of higher education in the United States, as I said. And my hunch is at 3,500 of them, there is a group of people saying homosexuality is a bad thing, including institutions in this state. 

And they're catching hell.

CATHARINE STIMPSON: Now, my question. Question one: What has happened to courage? I am so tired of these stories of tenured professors with reasonable salaries who meet a group of students who say, “Please don't do that.” And then they go home and whine and cry and say, “I am being harassed.” That is nonsense. Absolute nonsense. 

STANLEY FISH: Some of them even say, “I feel I've been raped.” 

CATHARINE STIMPSON: Yes. And then they're held up as these martyrs because a group of students come up and engage them in discourse. And if a professor can't engage in discourse, what is he or she there for? Which leads me [to ask], so what has happened to courage, sir? What has happened to courage? 

Oh, I think courage is in good stead. I don't doubt that many of us have exhibited it by making the arguments that we've made. But there's something about this charge of racism or sexism. There's something insidious about it that undermines the legitimacy of the person against whom it's leveled that is taken up by people in such a way as to cast people out of the community. Indeed, the sensitivity mongers ought to understand that the ostracism that attends being cast out of the community because one has been willing to countenance or raise certain questions is a very serious cost to impose on people.

No, I'm not saying that we express our views or that we shouldn't be willing to enforce them by associating with those whom we like or not associating with those whom we don't. But I am saying that the tolerance that seems to be the mainstay of many of the arguments on the left is not exhibited when people run afoul of certain sacred cows.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Professor Walters. 

RONALD WALTERS: Let me start this question by making a concession, and that is for the sake of argument. Let's say 75% of the students' complaints are wrong and only 25% of them are right. Given the fact that they are right, who is responsible, then, for holding professors accountable? Doesn't it seem strange to you that if 25% of these charges are right, students have a right to raise these charges? And the fact that they're raising them now in this particular atmosphere, doesn't that signal to you that there was really a very minor system of accountability for professionals in the classroom?

Well, the colleagues of professors hold them accountable for what they say in the classroom, by the way in which their work is judged, for what they write in their research, and so on. 

RONALD WALTERS: But they're not the consumers in the classroom. 

No. And I will concede that there's nothing wrong with students raising complaints. What I'm saying, though, is that the quality of argument is undermined. This is the proposition that I maintain. Maybe you can rebut it. The quality of argument is undermined. The range of considerations that are brought into debate are limited by the self-censorship that attends the strenuous and sometimes irrational response to certain kinds of positions.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Thank you, Professor Loury.

---

Ron, let me ask you very quickly about the effect of affirmative action on black students and on black colleges. You're a professor at a historically black college. We know that the number of black students who were scoring on the SATs in the range that would get them into places like Berkeley and Stanford on the merits are relatively small. At the same time, we know that the attrition rate of blacks at some of these elite campuses where affirmative action is practiced is very high. More than half of blacks at Berkeley don't graduate within five years, for example. Don't you think that the net effect of affirmative action on historically black colleges and on black students in the way that I've described has been negative?

RONALD WALTERS: No. 

Why not? 

RONALD WALTERS: The reason [is] because of historical experience. At the university to which you now have come and of which Dr. Silber is the president, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were taking literally thousands of students from around the country and putting them into special programs. They were doing the same at Brandeis, where I was. And many of these students today are practicing professionals with no post-affirmative action regret syndrome. 

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Thank you, Professor Walters. 

---

---

Professor Fish, I'd like to give you the opportunity to either disassociate yourself from or offer a better defense of the assertion of your colleague that blacks cannot be racist, women cannot be sexist, et cetera.

STANLEY FISH: I understand the assertion because I've heard it before. 

Can you defend it? 

STANLEY FISH: As a teacher and a pedagogue, I neither have to defend it. I think my obligation and the obligation I fulfill to this audience, both here and in the television audience, is to explain it. The position is one that asserts a distinction between prejudice as an attitude which persons can have—and, of course, an attitude which will always, I think, be reprehensible—and racism, which depends on the addition to prejudice of the power to effect true actions of a harmful kind on persons.

Now, that's a thesis. It's a thesis that deserves consideration. Perhaps it can be empirically investigated. It is not, on its face, absurd. And indeed, the whole air with which at least Mr. D'Souza and others present views that are complicated in what have been called here cartoon versions is the entire stock and trade of a certain kind of rhetoric in which absurdities are produced by either under-reporting or under-describing cases or linking them in a series of examples. I fear for Mr. D'Souza's health, because his mind can only be filled right now with 4,000 half-detailed anecdotes. 

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Thank you, Professor Fish, 

---

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Professor Loury and Dean Stimpson, please ascend the podium. And, well, why doesn't Professor Loury start by asking some questions? 

Okay. In the collection of victims, some presumably are more victimized than others. Would you agree, Dean Stimpson, that the disabilities of history dealt out to blacks have been more severe than those dealt to women? And if so, would you tell me how that distinction of victimization ought play itself out in the politics of university administration? And if not, would you defend your assertion of equal victimization? 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: I'm not sure it's my assertion, but I found one thing intriguing about your question, where you separated out blacks and women as if there were no black women, a stance I doubt very much that you want to take.

Will you answer the question? I'll take that stipulation. We can create more categories than two. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: Of course I'll answer your question. And I'm glad you brought it up, because this question of “victim studies” is another cartoon. Yes, women have been victims. But women have also victimized others. And the history of America shows that that the black slave of either sex had a white mistress. And by mistress, I mean owner. One of the most moving parts of Frederick Douglass's autobiography is where he talks, as you know, about being a little boy, and his mistress owner first teaches him to read and then stops. But the question is, why does she stop? She stops because her husband told her to, and she, the white woman, was under the authority of her husband. No, victimization is not monolithic. And what we have to do is to look carefully at history to see who has suffered and who has not and to rectify the sufferings according to their source. 

Just to make sure I understand. Whites were all guilty, but women are exempt because they were dominated by men. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: No, that's not what I'm saying. 

Lemme move on to another question. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: That's not what I'm saying. And you know I didn't say that. 

Is there a woman's way of thinking?

CATHERINE STIMPSON: I don't think so, no. 

Good. One of your colleagues asserted that consensus—

CATHERINE STIMPSON: But may I make an addendum to that? 

Oh, I'm so disappointed. I thought I had the opportunity to move on. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: No. There's another book on the bestseller list by a woman named Deborah Tannen, and she doesn't say there is a woman's way of thinking and a man's way of thinking that is wired into the brain. When I sat down and took my college boards years ago, because I was a woman didn't mean I checked off the boxes in one way or another. But what Tannen shows us is that men and women do have different ways of talking. In many cases, different conversational styles. Now, this doesn't mean it's genetic, but I think we'd be foolish if we denied the existence of some differences between the sexes. Especially in pay. 

Let me ask you this. Much of this talk has been about groups, and the natural categories come to mind. Gender, race, sexual preference. How did we get it narrowed down to so narrow a conception of how people are different from each other? For example, would you grant that fundamentalist Christians are a minority worthy of consideration and support, whose feelings ought to be protected from the abusive language that is often tossed about about their beliefs on our campuses today?

CATHERINE STIMPSON: Well, you've raised several questions at once. Let me answer them. First natural categories. We've had a very good discussion earlier on about how the ways we think. Our categories are often constructed socially. Secondly, there are lots of categories besides race, gender, and sexual preference on our campus and in our society. I think for example, the handicapped or the developmentally different, as they often like to be called, that's a group. That's a group that demands and has received legislation to remove the discrimination against them. Now are you asking me about fundamentalist Christians? 

Yes.

CATHERINE STIMPSON: There are many different groups. And I think whenever a group is unjustly parodied, whenever its opinions are satirized ... I like satire. But whenever they're satirized to the point of trying to destroy the group, then something's gone wrong. I think you should speak honestly and civilly of all groups, unless they are absolutely evil, as some groups are.

There's a concern about the morality of public expression, about the wrongness of saying certain hurtful things about people. Why is it that this concern only extends to the morality of ethnic or gender expression and doesn't consent extend into the sphere of personal morality? Why is it that we are not concerned with the larger sphere of morality of our students than just how they treat each other?

MICHAEL KINSLEY: You can answer that question, and then you can go on the offensive. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: Well, I think we are. In a recent survey of student [and] college life administrators, deans and what have you, do you know what the problem was they were most worried about? Their students' drunkenness, and the fact that their students were getting blotto or, as I understand the term is now, getting “ripped.” And that's an ethical question. And I think there are larger moral issues that are alive and well. 

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Okay, go ahead. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: Would you mind if I posed you a hypothetical situation? 

It depends. 

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Pose away. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: You are the president of a college. You have just been appointed, and now you must sit down to plan your inauguration speech. It's a wonderful college and everybody's very happy for you. And you want your inauguration speech to outline your vision of the college or university of the twenty-first century, only nine years away. What are you going to say? 

Well, I haven't got any idea, is the honest answer. But some of the things that I would stress would be the common intellectual heritage that we all have that I think should override our parochial interest and tribal instincts that are tending to tear us apart. And of course I would be concerned about civility. But I would also be concerned about the vigor of argument. I would want my listeners to understand that sensitivity is not the highest value in an intellectual community, but truth is. And sometimes it can only be gotten to by saying things that some people don't want to hear.

CATHERINE STIMPSON: I hope you would hire me. But the university of the twenty-first century will also in America be a university in a world that is different in several ways from the world of the twentieth century. It will be racially different. It will also be a university in which women will be 50% or more of the undergraduates, master’s students, maybe even the doctoral students. Can you think of anything that your university should do to remedy historic injustices, always assuming that injustice has played itself out differently for different groups and individuals? 

I think there's very little that a university can do to remedy profound social-historic injustices. Indeed, I think it's a profound truth of our time that there's very little that can be done to remedy some injustices, and that one has to recognize that. That's not to say that one shouldn't be concerned about justice. It's to say that one should be have one's eyes fixed on what it is that one can best do.

Now, I'm concerned, for example, about the consequences of historic injustice against blacks so reducing the numbers of young people who have had the opportunity to get the education that would allow them to perform in our universities. And my answer to that is not to lower the standards of our universities, but it's rather to address myself to the impediments of family, community, primary education, et cetera that make it so difficult for those young people to put themselves in a position where they can take advantage of these things.

I think that to a certain degree there is a profound condescension afoot in this movement of diversity that starts at the end of the process, where we look at PhDs, and says, “Let us now redress the historic injustices that kept people from learning their ABCs.” It's not that simple. I take our people more seriously than that.

CATHERINE STIMPSON: Well, I'm trying to figure out where we disagree. But wouldn't you agree, they're different points in a pipeline, and so that a graduate school does have a responsibility to make sure that all people of talent are represented in the graduate school and will go into a faculty? 

No, I think we do disagree. I think that there are objective standards of performance. Not that they're not arguable, but that basically we in our various disciplines understand what they are. And I think that there are very significant differences in the extent to which different groups of people in our society, for reasons not having to do with their genes, meet those standards. And I think that it's folly to simply try to rig the numbers as if those objective differences in the meeting of those standards didn't exist.

I take the people more seriously than that. I believe they can meet the standards if they're giving the opportunity early enough on. But I don't want to turn my face away from the fact that, as it is today, we talk about physics or economics or even English, even literature. I mean, we're all elitists here. All of us at these universities are elitists. We're drawing lines in the sand all the time and marking people on various sides of them. Except that for some groups, we wanna pretend that the actual disposition of them with respect to those lines isn't the fact. And I think that's a mistake.

MICHAEL KINSLEY: Thank you. 

CATHERINE STIMPSON: I wish we had more time!

---