What an NYU Administrator Got Wrong About Campus Speech
Earlier this week, Ulrich Baer, a vice provost at New York University, published an op-ed in The New York Times defending student-activist efforts to shut down speakers at institutions of higher education like Auburn, UC Berkeley, and Middlebury. He urged readers inclined to defend liberal norms on matters of speech to adopt “a more sophisticated understanding” and argued that “the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.”
Were there “parameters of speech” at Berkeley 10 or 15 years ago that denied standing to students who have it today? What were the parameters? Who are the students?
The op-ed is elusive throughout in a manner typical of university administrators with censorious instincts. Many words are lavished on a questionably relevant anecdote about the Holocaust and the obligatory theory of a postmodern French philosopher. Very few words clarify what speech is to be suppressed by what standards, or who is to decide if they are met, as if we needn’t worry overmuch about limiting principles or the abuses that invariably follow when they are absent—even though marginalized groups typically bear the attendant burdens most heavily.
The op-ed comes closest to clarifying what speech is to be suppressed after casting ostensibly unworthy speech as that which marshals abstract argument against personal experience. The dice are quickly loaded with Baer’s
