Silence after attack on the soul of universities puts too much at risk
If we’re to go on having universities that are worth the name, Wisconsin needs to start teaching the difference between words and bullets, says a professor in River Falls.
That distinction should go without saying, though a survey of 68,000 college students by the free-speech group FIRE just found one-third agreeing it’s at least sometimes acceptable to use violence to shut up an opinion they disagree with.
Those results came out the day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated by someone who disagreed with his opinions, the day before Trevor Tomesh found himself horrified by what he described as “a ghoulish response” from too many people in higher education, a wave of social-media celebration over the killing — “the celebration of, literally, the death of the principle of universities.”
Tomesh, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, responded by teaching: He gave an impromptu 50-minute lesson to his cyber-ethics class, which was on the cusp of discussing the First Amendment anyhow, about the darkness of the moment, about “how we must pull back from this and encourage dialogue or the American project is dead.”
He then described it in those words in an essay-length post to the Facebook page of the news site Wisconsin Right Now, one where he noted a terrible contrast.
As he put it to me later, he asked his students, “’How many of you, in all your other classes, have had a single professor explain to you the gravity of this situation?’ Not a single one of them raised their hands. And then I said to them, ‘How many of you saw Charlie Kirk take a .30-06 round to the throat and bleed out graphically in front of you?’ And almost every single one of them raised their hands, and that’s what made me angry.”
The scant recognition of that traumatic event from adults in charge differed markedly, Tomesh notes, from UWRF’s 2023 offer of a “safe and brave space” for any students who might be upset that a blunt, elderly sidewalk preacher, Sister Cindy, was expected to briefly inveigh, uninvited, against immorality on campus the next day. Administrators saw fit to send a campus-wide email offering solace. The “Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Office” posted on Facebook — an offer still visible — that its staff would “be an open ear” for students needing to “work through feelings” set off by knowing that others could be hearing Sister Cindy.
Tomesh credits UWRF administrators’ later response to the Kirk horror — “they’ve actually been rather supportive” after his Facebook post caught national attention — and he adds the disclaimer that nothing he’s said on the matter reflects the university’s views, only his own.
Campus authorities told him they issued no statement about Kirk’s assassination because of a new UW system policy of neutrality.
“Personally, I’m a fan” of universities staying neutral on political matters, he said.
But the Kirk assassination wasn’t a matter for political dispute: The man was killed at Utah Valley University while civilly discussing ideas in the sort of place society dedicates to discussing ideas freely.
“Violence against free expression is a core issue that has nothing to do with politics,” Tomesh said. “Even if they don’t use Charlie’s name, they need to address the increase in the acceptability of violence on campuses.”
Where do people get these ideas about using violence? Whence the permission structure that led 71 percent of students in that survey to say it’s at least sometimes acceptable to silence speakers by shouting them down?
“We have an entire generation, or maybe two or three generations now,” said Tomesh, “who have been told since they were young that speech is something that is tangible, that speech is violence, and that the proper response to speech that makes you feel uncomfortable is violence.”
If, he said, “you can say that speech is harmful, then you can justify translating that into physical harm.” If you raise a generation or two to think words are violence, you get fewer words and more violence.
And if you’ve been taught that your every feeling is valid, then ideas that make you feel bad are a personal attack. If your ideas, instead of being separate from your identity, being open to examination, being improvable — if instead they constitute your identity if “they replace where God put our soul,” Tomesh said — then to debate them is to assault your being.
“That’s just not the way the West works,” he said. “That’s not the way that our university systems work.”
Or shouldn’t be. Tomesh recalls how when he was a UWRF undergrad, a “College Democrat-slash-socialist,” his side “would have these wonderful debates” with College Republicans, “and then at the very end of it, we would go bowling.” That’s an ethic the university’s adults should clearly preach, he says.
Wisconsinites can help, Tomesh proposes, by writing — to lawmakers overseeing the university, to the people running their alma mater. They can listen to their kids: “Ask them what they’re learning.” It matters immensely whether they’re learning that ideas are meant to be sifted and winnowed.
And maybe, said Tomesh, it would be helpful if universities committed openly, at this crisis moment, to nonviolent discussion — because “if supporting nonviolent discussion is political, then you might want to re-evaluate your politics.”
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.
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