Does academic freedom require being respectful to theocratic fascists?

You couldn’t pay me enough to be the dean of Yale Law School (this is obviously a rhetorical turn of phrase; you could, but it would be a big number), so I have a certain amount of limited sympathy for Heather Gerken.

Dean Gerken has issued a Statement in the wake of the latest right wing freakout, now including a whole bunch of Even the Liberal types, over a student protest at YLS. You can read about the details of what actually happened here.

Gerken’s response to the protest itself seems fine to me: She points out that, per the enforcement of YLS rules, the protestors immediately left the event they were protesting when they were warned to stop disrupting it — these are Yale Law Students, not the first wave at Omaha Beach — but that continuing to cause a ruckus in the hallway outside of it afterward wasn’t OK as a matter of institutional norms, if not the Formal Rules Governing Protests at YLS.

But then she starts getting more abstract about principles and stuff:

Under the University’s free expression policy, student groups have every right to invite speakers to campus, and others have every right to voice opposition. Our commitment to free speech is clear and unwavering. Because unfettered debate is essential to our mission, we allow people to speak even when their speech is flatly inconsistent with our core values. . . .

The deeper issues embedded in this event are not unique to Yale Law School — they plague our democracy and institutions across the country. Nonetheless, we will overcome these challenges because we must. Together, we will figure out how to nurture a thriving intellectual environment while maintaining a community of equality and mutual respect. It is harder than ever to find common ground; the stakes are high, and the rights of cherished members of our own community are under attack. But it is essential that we keep this community together despite the many forces seeking to divide us. I am heartened that as we push forward, we build on an intellectual tradition that stretches back centuries, with a faculty wholly committed to the School’s academic mission and students of every political stripe imbued with idealism and intelligence. 

This is typical liberal incoherence regarding such matters. You can’t “nurture a thriving intellectual environment” if you’re also required to treat people who are implacably opposed to thriving intellectual environments as a matter of their own first principles — such as for example theocratic fascists to take a totally not random example — with “mutual respect.” This is an oxymoron: these people don’t respect you, and indeed want to destroy you.

Yale Law School’s position ought to be that theocratic fascists are not welcome to speak at Yale Law School, because theocratic fascism is fundamentally incompatible with both the intellectual mission of the institution, and its political commitment to the maintenance of some semblance of liberal democracy, now that the latter is under full frontal attack by the theocratic fascists who have gained control of the Republican party, several key members of which who happen to be graduates of Yale Law School — a fact which ought to give the place a little more pause than it apparently does. ETA: You shouldn’t be aiming to imbue your theocratic fascist students with “idealism and intelligence.” Assuming they can’t be converted, it’s obviously better that they should remain stupid and venal, as that will render them less dangerous than the intelligent and idealistic kind.

This, by the way, would be a perfectly legal thing for YLS to do. It’s not a public institution, so it’s not bound by any constitutional obligation to offer fora to religious bigots like the good folks at the Alliance Defending Freedom. Indeed YLS would be free as a legal matter to eject the Federalist Society from campus, and in fact should do so, given that organization’s transformation into what it is now, i.e., a staging ground for the legal attack wing of America’s nascent theocratic fascism.

Of course it won’t do that, because of a combination of deeply misguided liberal commitment to protecting the kind of “free speech rights” that will end up making free speech rights extinct, and an understandable hesitation to further enrage powerful social forces that are bent on destroying anything resembling free intellectual inquiry, among many other things.

But the first requirement of the present moment is for institutions like YLS to recognize that there’s no place for anything like them in the coming New Order, and to start acting accordingly.