Debate Me Bro

In March 2024, the Middlebury College Republicans (MCR) was revived, with new president Joseph Jacobson ’27 framing the club as a necessary corrective to a stifling campus culture “opposed to free speech.” In another piece written on behalf of MCR, Jacobson reiterated that “advocacy for freedom of expression… [is] the first priority for our club.”   

Maybe this could’ve worked a decade earlier, back when the illiberal strain of social justice politics was at its apogee and MAGA’s revulsion to “wokeness” sometimes appeared as First Amendment absolutism. Today we know better. What animates the conservative movement is not a scrupulous defense of speech, but the reflexive desire to impose a cruder version of anti-wokeness as cultural hegemony. In the words of one MAGA-supportive finance worker, celebrating the day after Trump’s re-election: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without getting cancelled.” 

And it’s true — you really can use those lovely slurs now. Unfortunately, to make room, some other phrases had to go. “Gulf of Mexico” is officially out. If you scribble it down somewhere, your press credentials to cover the White House will be revoked. Meanwhile, students on F-1 visas who utter the words “free Palestine” risk detention and deportation; their university will also be sued. Even seemingly anodyne words —  “disability,” “woman” and “abortion” — are now all viewed with suspicion by the federal government. Today, joining MCR to support free speech would be like joining an O.J. Simpson fan club to end domestic violence. 

But put aside the hypocrisy. The more troubling component of MCR’s evangelism is that they lazily import the rationale for free speech absolutism from political society into the university, without considering that different settings demand different regulatory regimes. “College isn’t a safe space,” Jacobson begins his second piece, blithely parroting the most thought-terminating cliché in the conservative culture-warrior canon. What he means is that Middlebury should abstain from regulating speech because “safety is freedom from physical harm, not from disagreeable ideas.” Even proscribing hate speech is suspect, with Jacobson wondering, “Who gets to decide what is and isn’t hate speech?” Best, in MCR’s view, to do nothing. “All speakers, regardless of how ‘controversial’ they are, should be encouraged to speak at Middlebury,” Jacobson concludes.   

The legal scholar Jamal Greene, in his lucid book “How Rights Went Wrong”, illustrates the folly of MCR’s approach. It’s legal for a man to ogle a woman who walks by and yell, “Nice tits,” he writes. It’s also permissible for a white person to walk up to a non-white one and say, “You don’t belong here.” Obviously, people shouldn’t do those things, but we also understand why they’re allowed: Incivility is the price we pay to live in a democracy. But just because the government shouldn’t prohibit that speech in the public square doesn’t mean it deserves protection in an educational setting. At college, it’s important that students feel free to express themselves, but it’s also important that students feel welcome. Harassment and campus speech disputes generally should be resolved by examining the individual facts of each case and weighing the competing interests involved, rather than — as MCR likes to do — portentously proclaiming an absolute, inviolable right which trumps all other considerations. 

When it comes to campus speakers: why does a toddler whose vocabulary consists only of the words “six” and “seven” deserve to speak? Why does someone who believes that slavery is good merit an invitation? Instead of asserting that everyone is entitled to an audience of college students, Greene recommends asking students to demonstrate how a requested speaker would reasonably advance a school’s mission. 

We could go through more examples, but the logic remains the same: Granting students total freedom is fundamentally incompatible with education because education (what Gayatri Spivak, Indian literary critic, called “the non-coercive rearranging of desire”) necessitates the curation and discrimination of speech. As law professor Paul Horwitz explained in his book “First Amendment Institutions”, colleges “are laboratories for democracy, not laboratories of democracy: they contribute to democratic discourse, but not by following its rules.” 

So far, I’ve mainly quoted from Jacobson’s second op-ed, his free-speech-warrior tract. But he also wrote an earlier piece, one in which he envisions MCR as “an outlet for people to express their repressed conservative views.” He then warns against bullying MCR members, citing Middlebury’s Non-Discrimination Policy to remind students that “it is disrespectful to […] stereotype another student based on what you think you know about them.” The two pieces don’t cohere. Absent in the first one is the contempt for safe spaces; instead, Jacobson is overtly creating one. Gone, too, is the absolutist defense of speech; here, MCR is actually invoking the policy responsible for Middlebury’s horrendous free speech ranking (which, ironically, is the only piece of evidence MCR musters to demonstrate campus censorship). 

The legal theorist Stanley Fish argued that “concepts like free speech do not have ‘natural’ content […] free speech is not an independent value but a political prize.” Regarding MCR: What bothers our campus conservatives isn’t that they can’t speak; it’s that when they do, people find their ideas dumb and boring. The fetishization of free speech is an effort to obscure this inconvenient fact, to will the reality of their audience away. They cling to the belief that if the school just adopted the “right” rules, their classmates might finally grant them the respect they crave. But the function of their club is to support an authoritarian president, ushering in a quasi-fascist regime. I don’t think it’s going to work.