Did the campus free-speech people actually go to college?

It is weird that we have spent this much time talking about campus free speech. The germ of the discourse dates back to the early aftershocks of the Trump ascension, when the first generation of MAGA clout-chasers, (Milo Yiannopoulos, Candance Owens, Jordan Peterson and so on,) were enjoying a miraculous day in the sun. This was 2016 and 2017, when our institutions were simply not capable of diagnosing the freshly disfigured Republican party as a berserking death cult; akin to the tidal wave of blood gushing out of the Overlook Hotel.

We still have that problem, really, but it was truly maddening in those early days. Yiannopoulos has spent the last few years selling Virgin Mary statuettes on a Catholic facsimile of QVC, Peterson started touting an all-beef diet and nearly died, but there was still a time when both of them were able to fool Atlantic liberals and befuddled University provosts into thinking they were hiding wisdom behind the plainly apparent cruelty and vengeance. These interlopers were all invited to speak at campuses across the country, and the respective student bodies — who had sniffed out the cynical game long before their superiors — lustfully protested those appearances. This resistance is completely understandable if you are a normal person, which is to say, you are of the 99 percent of students who went to college to have fun and make friends, rather than participate in the pickled grievances of the worst YouTubers in the world.

Alas, we ceded moral authority to the freaks long ago, and they've made the minor kerfuffles of university life frontpage news. The tweets usually look something like this. A man who works at some sort of flaccid thinktank — coated with an unfathomably treacly aesthetic direction, (like, say, a marble statue with black tape over its mouth) — expresses concern that unchecked, touchy-feely progressive activism is stifling a Culture of Free Inquiry on campus. The finer points are conveniently left unsaid; like, for instance, the views someone like Ben Shapiro holds in the first place, and the communities he has in his crosshairs when he shows up to school. Instead, the argument goes, universities must indulge a deluge of bad-faith podcasters and disgraced academics forever, due to the ascetic function a college serves in society. To be on campus is to be in a wondrous pocket dimension severed from space and time, where bad takes run free of material consequence and everyone is forced to listen to you talk. When kids mobilize to disrupt one of those sickos, they're committing a cardinal sin. Rudeness is always graver than monstrousness, according to the backwards logic of the campus free speech campaign. 

This has become a bafflingly hot issue for some of the leading Concerned Columnists in the country. You can find dozens of distinguished New York Times authors fretting about the sanctity of our schools, same with The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The LA Times; really, consensus is being manufactured wherever graying alumni can be found. You already know where I stand on this topic and I'm not going to belabor the point. My question is far more simple. Did any of these people actually go to college? Did they really spend their time at university locked in frequent elliptical debates about the Articles of Man with their fellow knowledge seekers? Did they truly taste this bizarre School of Athens cosplay that they claim has been lost to cancel culture? Brother, they're either lying, and therefore fabricating some sort of libertarian fantasy-ideal to get their blood up about the snowflakes, or they had one of the grimmest, saddest, and lamest college experiences imaginable. I don't know which is worse!

I engaged in zero debates in college. It never even crossed my mind. I went to a humongous public school in Texas, which is well outside the genteel Ivy League coterie that populates the Times opinions page, so I cannot speak to what happens at Harvard. Maybe it really is as deathly serious and immeasurably dull as the newspapers make it out to be, but I still find it difficult to imagine guys like Colin Jost and Tyler Winklevoss squaring off in chivalrous intellectual warfare as an enraptured lecture hall looks on. I think they were probably doing exactly what I was doing; drinking a lot, going to parties, and trying to soak up the low-stakes splendor of higher education for as long as it could possibly last. If you were to ask me, or any normal person what they remember most about college, they are not going to regale you with their epic big-brain throwdowns they navigated in pursuit of the Golden Truth. In fact, I doubt they will bring up anything involving going to class whatsoever. My University of Texas highlights include a night where I dry-heaved after downing an entire bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey, the five-dollar pies I purchased from the inspection-pending pizzeria down the street, and a South-by-Southwest weekend so debaucherous I am unwilling to disclose the details in this text. I adore these memories with all my heart, and all of them can be recreated, right now, at any campus in North America. Please, for the love of god, do not go to college in the way that Bret Stephens did. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

I say this with pride: There was not a single moment of my higher education that resembled the aureate mystique perpetuated by those most concerned about campus culture. I'll go even further to say that the contingency these columnists seem to be speaking for — the chronic hand-raisers, the Devil's Advocates, whatever the fuck "student government" was — represented the most oppressive and annoying presences in the day-to-day rhythms of the university ecosystem. (I've got a minor in Rhetoric, man. I know them well.) There is no way to sugarcoat this: We must reclaim the campus free speech discourse from the nerds. They have Mandela Effected the general American population into believing that we all spent our early 20s enriching ourselves on the fruits of Respectful Disagreements, when in reality we were taping two Olde Englishes to each of our hands and trying not to pee. I understand why this is happening; the MAGA outrage mafia is frighteningly adept at memeing incoherent non-issues into the public crucible, which is how Glenn Youngkin managed to capture Virginia's governorship by running against Beloved. But it is still wild to see all of our esteemed magazines take the bait and hoodwink themselves. One of the few advantages millennials have over boomers is that we were on Facebook during our teens. With a few clicks, we can instantly drain away any delusions of grandeur of what we were actually up to at school. 

There is a lot of money in characterizing the modern campus as a leftist protectorate. Obviously it gives guys like Jordan Peterson something to complain about, which is the backbone of his entire content apparatus. But more importantly, it allows these men to pin the socialist drift of the youth on something infernal at the heart of the university infrastructure, rather than, you know, the general unspooling of all things on Earth. The feeling of being alive in 2022 is so much more radicalizing than whatever books a professor is assigning; columnists should investigate that reality more often, but I'm sure the idea that kids today are softer and more naïve than them is a much more seductive thesis. They might be correct in thinking that students are growing more militant in their beliefs, but that is most likely due to the fact that they are not coming of age during those winsome Obama years — where politics were most frequently presented through Buzzfeed articles about different Mad Men episodes. Motherfucker, I was seriously considering voting for Gary Johnson in 2012. You know, this guy. And look at me now! My moral development did not end when I was an undergraduate, because I am a citizen of this world just like everyone else. College is not that serious. Thank god!

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