I write in to examine the integrity of last week’s article, titled, “Encouraging the Uncomfortable.” The inaccurate premises call in to question the conclusions. While I too would find censorship cause for alarm, the talk to which author Rachel Frank referred was not predicated on censorship, but rather the desire to delve more deeply into the realm of the uncomfortable.
When Ms. Frank wrote that “the word ‘fear’ was thrown around once or twice” at the Chellis House dialogue, she first took the word out of context and then questioned whether words and ideas were capable of arousing any valid emotional response at all. If words have no power, we should wonder why any student would attend a liberal arts college. The word was actually thrown around just once, by a professor who expressed his concern for students who might be afraid of Mansfield due to his radical (or conservative, or perhaps just crass) opinions as exhibited in the mass media pertaining to sexual assault.
When we bring in speakers who hold beliefs different from our own, we must engage more critically with those thoughts. We must examine when and whether an intellectual’s public views, as expressed in the mass media, might cast suspicion on his or her academic work. The fact that the conversation in the Chellis House did not fully address this concern actually suggests something much scarier than Ms. Frank’s alleged fears. It suggests that the departments engaged in the dialogue (GSFS, Classics, and Political Science) might use fragmented and mutually unintelligible methods in their searches for knowledge.
Whether Mr. Mansfield writes irresponsibly in The Weekly Standard or does not take contemporary feminist thought seriously may be beside the point. The greater concern should be regarding the implications of bringing any speaker to campus. This is the valuable conversation. To name the existence of the Chellis House dialogue an attempt at censorship, to discount opinions that are tied to emotion or identity, and to claim that words themselves are incapable of causing discomfort indicates that The Campus suffers an affliction common in collegiate newspapers: its opinion pieces often attack coarsely the passions of the readership, without preparation and without art.
In Mansfield’s translation of Democracy in America, this type of journalism is criticized as a deplorable abuse of thought. We must not set aside principles in order to grab men.
We should encourage the uncomfortable by thoughtfully and honestly furthering conversations like this one.
