Is making authoritarian ethno-nationalists uncomfortable wrong?

This New York Times op-ed by Emma Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, reads like a parody:

Each week, I seek out the office hours of a philosophy department professor willing to discuss with me complex ethical questions raised by her course on gender and sexuality. We keep our voices lowered, as if someone might overhear us.

Hushed voices and anxious looks dictate so many conversations on campus at the University of Virginia, where I’m finishing up my senior year.

A friend lowers her voice to lament the ostracization of a student who said something well-meaning but mildly offensive during a student club’s diversity training. Another friend shuts his bedroom door when I mention a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism. His roommate might hear us, he explains.

Sure snowflake — I get it, life is hard, but, um, what exactly are we complaining about here? Has somebody been kicked out of school? Suspended? Had a grade lowered? Forced to attend mandatory diversity training? No? Can you point to some specific form of oppression that Even the Liberal Author has suffered, or at least heard about?

When a class discussion goes poorly for me, I can tell. During a feminist theory class in my sophomore year, I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows. This idea seems acceptable for academic discussion, but to many of my classmates, it was objectionable.

The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.

Wow, a UVA classroom sounds very much like being in Ukraine right now.

Let’s return to the battlefield. A metaphorical battlefield to be sure, but there can be no doubt the struggle is real:

The consequences for saying something outside the norm can be steep. I met Stephen Wiecek at our debate club. He’s an outgoing, formidable first-year debater who often stays after meetings to help clean up. He’s also conservative. At U.V.A., where only 9 percent of students surveyed described themselves as a “strong Republican” or “weak Republican,” that puts him in the minority.

He told me that he has often “straight-up lied” about his beliefs to avoid conflict. Sometimes it’s at a party, sometimes it’s at an a cappella rehearsal, sometimes it’s in the classroom. When politics comes up, “I just kind of go into survival mode,” he said. “I tense up a lot more, because I’ve got to think very carefully about how I word things. It’s very anxiety inducing.”

The whole thing is like this.

Some general points:

(1) Right wing ideas about the world generally don’t flourish at universities not set up specifically as safe havens for right wing ideas because these ideas tend to be demonstrably false.

(2) “Self-censorship” in itself is neither good nor bad: sometimes it’s appropriate and sometimes it isn’t. Learning to tell the difference between such cases could be one of the things you learn at a real university.

(3) I would love to ask the author of this emetic whinge — seriously, read this story and then tell me about your oppression — about whether she thinks it’s wrong for, say, authoritarian ethno-nationalists to feel uncomfortable about expressing their ideas in a social setting where the vast majority of people aren’t authoritarian ethno-nationalists. And if it is wrong, what exactly is the solution to this deeply troubling situation? Affirmative action for authoritarian ethno-nationalists? Sensitivity training for people like me, who make authoritarian ethno-nationalists uncomfortable by describing their beliefs accurately?

We’re reading Eichmann in Jerusalem in my seminar on criminal punishment his week, which is about one historical example of authoritarian ethno-nationalism and the consequences it had for the concept of criminal punishment, among other things. Hey Emma, what if a student in that class should express support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which is obviously a view held fervently by tens of millions of authoritarian ethno-nationalists in Russia, and their authoritarian ethno-nationalist supporters in America, Rio de Janeiro, etc? Is it my job to make sure that student feels “comfortable” about expressing that opinion, without having some terrible thing happen to them, like — checks notes on Camp again — having people say mean things about them on Twitter?

(4) Note that the trick here is always to make statements at an extremely high level of generality — everyone should feel welcome to express any idea in a college classroom — without ever discussing specific cases, since discussing specific cases would instantly reveal how inherently idiotic and indeed oxymoronic that statement really is.

A related trick — speaking of censorship — is that authoritarian ethno-nationalism has to be tarted up with respectable sounding words like “conservative” and “Republican,” because surely you’re not saying that conservative and Republican students should be made to feel uncomfortable in a college classroom! What about “intellectual diversity” you hypocritical liberal? Well what about it? Am I supposed to pretend that being a Republican in the USA in 2022 means you’re not a member of an authoritarian ethno-nationalist party? Because that’s apparently what “protecting intellectual diversity in the college classroom” now means.

(5) As always in elite media coverage of the American college classroom, the American college classroom means someplace like UVA.