Dialogue as Alibi: Beyond the Marketplace of Ideas

As calls for student dialogue proliferate across American college campuses, the student struggles to be considered an equal in the very discourses they are subjected to. Last year, one quintessential article in the Stanford Review contributed to this paradoxical condition by decrying “millennial” political thought. It continued by claiming that “[t]he political involvement of our generation is becoming increasingly devoid of substance” and that “social justice warriors are the ultimate armchair activists…they engage in the worst forms of political activism.” From these sweeping generalizations, the article then leapt to the conclusion that “[d]ialogue becomes obsolete, preventing us from appreciating the complexity of today’s thorniest issues and from being able to generate solutions to society’s most pressing problems.”

This call for an obscurely proposed “dialogue” depends on an unfounded abstraction of students as a whole that allows the author and The Review to establish a rule to which they are the proud exception. This gesture claims rationality, along with a privileged but undefined understanding of what makes “dialogue,” while denying it to the misleading portrait of the student body. In The Review’s case, this distortion of the student body and student thought are generally tools of dishonest provocation, but the Stanford administration and certain faculty inadvertently perpetuate the same misconceived framework from above, as well.

This misconstrual forms the basis of our concern with the institutionalization of the call for more open “dialogue” and “free exchange of ideas.” Though superficially innocuous, it in fact reveals an alarming shortcoming in how campus political discourse and its travails are collectively thought and contested. The mobilization of “dialogue” and the invocation of “freedom of speech” by The Review, and more recently Hoover Fellow Niall Ferguson of Cardinal Conversations, mark the administration’s steady surrender to a regressive, false reduction of the complex problems of campus speech to a situation in which the obstacle is merely an intellectually inept and infantilized student body. The tone and presentation of these arguments must be taken seriously as indicators of the latent premises which motivate them. We will begin with The Review, where the hidden premise which structures the current debate over student politics takes its most crude, apparent form, before moving on to its institutionalization in Cardinal Conversations and the administration’s statements more broadly.

Signs and Symptoms

By now, it has all settled into a predictable routine. The Stanford campus gets hit with a manifesto by the likes of the Stanford Review, shaming the rest of us for “acute intellectual decay” while simultaneously posturing as the exclusive custodian of epistemic humility, rationality, and dialogue. This mixture of narcissism and condescension has produced some baffling statements over the years in the time-honored series of “Editor’s Notes” from The Review. For all their complaining that they receive little more than ad hominem attacks that pale in comparison to their purely “rational” speculation, the Notes from this lineage of editors are proof enough of an ideological vindictiveness that habitually discredits its critics as thoughtless “activists.” John Luttig, an editor from late 2015, fashioned himself as a brave defender of “rigor” against the bogeyman of “activists,” promising that “[a]s long as radical activism is still alive at Stanford, the Stanford Review, with its commitment to rigorous thinking and its questioning of dogmas, will continue its mission.” Directly preceding him, former editor Brandon Camhi of 2015 subscribed to this very same scapegoating of “activists” incapable of thought and blindly driven by “sympathy,” proclaiming that the “Stanford Review aims to bring these considerations into discourse and highlight the inconsistencies in a worldview grounded solely in sympathy: a perspective that permeates our campus and creates a herd of people in a race to compassion.” Extending this metaphor of the inferior campus herd, 2016 editor Harry Elliott explained his own benevolence: “We will try to keep you from becoming a silent drone, whose dislike of campus politics never makes it past the stage of mere thought. All we ask in return is that you pay attention.”

The present moment does not fare much better. The departing editor of The Review, Anna Mitchell, implicitly credits herself, supposedly unlike the rest of us, with having read enough “conflicting ideas of political philosophers” to combat “over-confident generalizations based on our own experiences” — though apparently not the generalizations which The Review engages in with incredible regularity and enthusiasm. With this, she has built on the illustrious legacy of tone-deaf name-calling she inherited.

Much more gravely, though, Mitchell has “reported,” cruelly and irresponsibly, that Professor David Palumbo-Liu is somehow a “champion and leader” for “Antifa thugs” and their “vigilante thuggery.” In an act of pure falsehood and opportunism, the hit-piece is so wildly fraudulent that it convicts Palumbo-Liu as a “ring-leader” of “[a]new class of violent thugs [who]prowl our streets…[d]onning black clothes, masks and red bandanas.” When Palumbo-Liu received death threats from The Review’s readers, Mitchell and her Editorial Board shrugged off any responsibility whatsoever, explaining that “we simply cannot control who reads our content…And we cannot set a standard of refusing to publish a piece if it could conceivably result in online harassment.” Though The Review may not control whether its writing is manipulated after the fact, it can control whether that writing is itself manipulative. To feign ignorance as to how their fear-mongering portrait of Palumbo-Liu as a leader of terrorists could possibly have instigated such an attack demonstrates a perverse unwillingness to grasp how rhetorical excess degrades our politics. This reveals the deeper problem with The Review: Its writing reflects — and contributes to — the already-deteriorating standards and rising violence of student discourse. When its ideological myopia lets hatred in through the back door, The Review imperils that discourse’s very legitimacy.

Mitchell then laid her piece’s original bad faith bare by participating in its manipulation by the partisan media. Transforming a fabricated campus spat into an interview on Fox News, Mitchell proceeded to use the responses to her own unprovoked hatchet job to misrepresent Stanford in front of a national audience. This egregious behavior exemplifies The Review’s methods of manipulation, by which they convert their own fabricated image of campus politics into products for a partisan national audience. There are some exceptions to The Review’s characteristic lack of basic honesty and decency, but they are not the rule. There ought to be a clear distinction between thoughtless provocation and being thought provoking.

A Critique of False Remedies

Though less immediately apparent, the same premise which underlies The Review’s damaging ethos has ensnared the university administration. The administration’s outsized and misguided focus on cultivating a simultaneously narrow and vaguely defined “dialogue,” or the more recent “free exchange of ideas,” is a failure of vision and responsibility. President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell have returned over and over again to what by now feels like a well-rehearsed safety measure passed down from administration to administration. Former Provost John Etchemendy’s ominous warning of the “threat from within” has translated into Tessier-Lavigne and Drell’s modest plea: “We are only successful as an intellectual community when our discussion benefits from the entire range of perspective present on our campus.” But the problem in this response is precisely that it blindly seeks to increase the range of student perspectives without first questioning the restricted range of problems and ideas under scrutiny in the first place. On a deeper level, for an administration that seeks purportedly to champion a general sense of academic intelligence regardless of ideological differences, neither the Provost nor the President have anything to say about the sheer lack of political — let alone moral — content in attacks on faculty who oppose the politics for which The Review stands.

The administration’s overriding fear of imposing restrictions on “free expression” leads to equally idealistic and unhelpful promises: “free expression and an inclusive culture are essential parts of the same whole. In a truly inclusive culture, everyone in our diverse community, from all backgrounds and perspectives, has a voice and feels empowered to participate in active debate.” In other words, rather than take seriously the substantive problem of how free expression of certain ideas can oppose the cultivation of an inclusive culture, as has been and will continue to be the case, the administration has chosen instead to bypass the issue, instead offering resources to those who are “deeply wounded or even frightened” by free-wheeling exchange within the so-called marketplace of ideas. The administration’s acknowledgement of the harmful consequences of granting someone as vile as Robert Spencer a platform in a university like Stanford is valuable, but minimalist damage control is an inadequate solution.

The administration’s legalistic adherence to a market conception of intellectual exchange encourages reckless and extreme voices while undervaluing the many healthy, unsanctioned forums of campus political conversations which do exist at Stanford. No one disagrees when the President and Provost insist that “[d]isagreement should not threaten an academic community, it should enhance it” — but the superficial neutrality of their actions have thus far confirmed this ideal as a mere truism. We all hope to foster productive disagreement; but how ideas circulate is as important to this project as what those ideas are. Those who seek to misappropriate Stanford’s academic credentials for partisan purposes, whether they be off-campus pseudo-scholars like Spencer or members of the Stanford community such as the editors of The Review, consciously manipulate the administration’s unwillingness to think systemically about the implications and consequences of employing free-market metaphors to referee political exchange. Professor Palumbo-Liu describes the pseudo-intellectual debate this encourages as: “not subtle, nuanced, open to adjustment, correction, engagement — it is brittle, bombastic, demagogic. It speaks in absolutes and tricks one into thinking that the only way to win the argument is to be equally crude, simplistic and dogmatic. This is a pernicious cycle that is costly to universities in material and spiritual ways.”

Nevertheless, this has paved the way for the launch of Cardinal Conversations, a well-funded, “bipartisan” project christened by the President and Provost to “address some of society’s most complex issues and expose the campus to a wide range of perspectives and views.” Its goals are indistinguishable from a proliferating set of groups, publications, and initiatives, such as the recently-founded Stanford Sphere that promises to “cut across the groupthink lines of consensus to challenge prevailing attitudes and we will refuse to be trapped by the claustrophobia of modern identity politics.” Despite the bold promises, though, its speakers’ views have thus far comprised not a wide range of perspectives, but rather a limited and predictable set of planks. Most recently, the administration has engendered frustration by inviting Charles Murray, known as a racist and social scientist. The administration’s failures of imagination when selecting speakers to create “a culture of open exchange” have been well-discussed. More fundamentally, though, the topics of debate which Cardinal Conversations has selected reinforce the creeping suspicion that this model of “respectful expression” is more about the staging of ideas rather than the ideas themselves.

For issues that deserve such patient and thorough engagement with the founding assumptions of American intellectual and political history, a strange air of performance and hastiness hangs over Cardinal Conversations. The distracting performativity of Cardinal Conversations is not helped by the show’s host and architect, Hoover Institution historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s public statements cast universities like Stanford as hopeless academic wastelands populated by emotionally fragile and intellectually impotent leftists sorely in need of enlightened role models — role models, conveniently, much like Ferguson himself. The students who disrupted a Charles Murray event at Middlebury College were indicted by Ferguson in the New York Times as “contemptible ‘students’”— scare-quotes and all. Ferguson then goes on to bet that “not one of [the students]had ever read a word of [Murray’s],” insinuating simultaneously that student protesters are blindly uninformed and that any criticism of Murray’s intellectual credibility or relevance could only be derived from ignorance. Ferguson’s open contempt is as unprofessional as it is corrosive to the very premise of the President and Provost’s vision for Cardinal Conversations, which they hope “might model the respectful disagreement that is important in a university community.” Standards run both ways.

Outside of Cardinal Conversations, Tessier-Lavigne and Drell have sought in their “Notes from the Quad” series to cultivate “[a]sense of mutual respect” by modelling it, such that “[w]e can bring empathy and deep listening to our interactions out of a desire to learn more from one another.” Keeping this squarely in mind: Ferguson has recently pontificated in a Reddit AMA that he is “depressed by the lunacy of intersectionality and intolerance on campuses, which is now seeping into the workplace. The only consolation is that the Western civilization has come through rougher patches than this.” That Tessier-Lavigne and Drell chose Ferguson — who appears to think that ridiculing students as lunatics is pedagogically sound and appropriate — to spearhead their most high-profile attempt to realize their values of “respectful disagreement” is a point of confounding contradiction. Ferguson has chalked up the low turnout for Cardinal Conversations’ latest debate to the ungratefulness or simple inferiority of Stanford students. With incredible pettiness, Ferguson even used it as a marker to deprecate Stanford undergraduates compared to “Oxford and Harvard” students, as if the attendance for this event were some positive standard of intelligence and political engagement.

Nevertheless, even if Ferguson were right about the special challenge of reforming Stanford students — and it would be shockingly reductive to support him here — then we should expect to see him, Cardinal Conversations, and the ever-concerned administration thinking long and hard about the educational tools at their disposal. For example, we need more substantive support for the arts and humanities; more invitations for underrepresented thinkers and artists from around the world who receive critical acclaim but struggle to reach American audiences; more thoughtful interventions in campus culture; and a less reflexive bureaucratic resistance to student expression in all its forms. That we clearly do not see such changes is telling. These demands are nothing new, yet the administration seems intent on neglecting them in favor of funding distracting diversions like Cardinal Conversations. Just recently, former UN ambassador Samantha Power’s Tanner Lectures were well-attended and received with acclaim, and essayist Louis Menand’s conversation on the demands of humanistic public writing spoke directly to the issues that Cardinal Conversations claims to address.

So rather than support Ferguson’s sulking complaint that the student body has failed to appreciate the value of his speaker series, we need to acknowledge that this speaker series is more of the same, rebranded but transparently familiar, and neither special nor especially enlightening. For all of Ferguson and The Review’s tired veneration of the Western tradition, there is still a gaping absence of any trace of that Socratic resistance to blinding self-assuredness, and what Hannah Arendt upheld as that internal doubling of the self that allows for the “soundless dialogue” characteristic of “thinking experience.”

Even Professor Michael McFaul, the faculty advisor seemingly conscripted to present Cardinal Conversations as more bipartisan, could hardly feign enthusiasm over Murray’s visit. McFaul’s subdued regret over Murray’s invitation feels both empty and familiar — the strongest argument it can muster is that sitting through an evening of Charles Murray builds character. What is more illuminating, however, is his “begrudging” positive defense of the event that misses a fundamental point: “I invited to Stanford Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov, even though I am one of America’s strongest critics of Russian President Putin and his policies…Yet, I brought Antonov to campus as a means to educate our students and myself about Putin’s policies…I do not think that I accorded legitimacy to Putin by having his representative speak on campus. I see Murray’s visit today the same way.” McFaul’s equivalence ignores a crucial difference between the two cases at hand: Antonov was not invited as an emissary of Cardinal Conversations, a platform for “models” of intellect and that “culture of open exchange.” Rather, he was invited in his official capacity as a representative of the Russian government. The elision of this vital distinction invalidates McFaul’s sweeping claim about the nature of institutional legitimization.

We have seen the fight which Murray’s inclusion engendered happen repeatedly on campus, and every stage of the process felt completely predictable — prescribed moves in a sort of ritualized political combat. It is easy to declare in response that the participants are at fault — that Murray seeks to provoke controversy and acts the academic only in bad faith, or that students have forgotten the art of discourse and the value of respect. Both feel immaterial, no matter how endlessly the recriminations churn. What remains absent is the realization that all these responses and counter-responses — the whole dull and vicious performance — are made almost necessary by the administration’s evasive attitude towards political discussion.

The Cult of the Contrarian

It is depressing to think that the administration would choose to re-enact these political brawls as a means of elevating the level of campus discourse. To the contrary, the only reason to reconstruct on campus the same derivative performances which happen every day in the national media is for the performative value. If the administration and its chosen political programs seem time and time again to constrain the realm of “campus political dialogue” to precisely those topics which are least productive to discuss, it is because the administration is caught up too deeply in the fixation on bipartisanship. Cardinal Conversations, like so many of the administration’s efforts, has conflated thoughtful disagreement with the oppositions of doctrinaire liberal-conservative disputes on a limited set of topics. These stilted debates provide the administration with a ready-made tool for signaling concern about the state of campus discourse, while simultaneously avoiding the public-relations risk of appearing to tip the partisan political scales. The galling irony of this risk-management approach is that it not only ignores but actually actively undermines the creation of stronger, more meaningful political discussion.

As an institution, Stanford has learned to legalize its problems, deferring responsibility for hard decisions by casting the state as the unaccountable external arbiter of university policy and campus intellectual life. On the topic of campus political discourse, this abdication manifests itself in the administration’s perpetual return to the First Amendment as a transplanted standard for academic speech. More broadly, the First Amendment has become the pivot around which every argument about political conversation on campus turns. Whenever challenged, The Review and its conservative companions rush to cast themselves as victims of some encroachment upon the First Amendment; the scrum that results produces a variety of indefensible or uncontroversial positions on whether freedom of speech is really worth it. This endless cycle of hand-wringing over censorship reliably produces mind-numbing truisms: The President and Provost have most recently reassured us that they “firmly support the rights of all members of the university community to protest peacefully against opinions with which they disagree.” Yet, as the administration’s botched attempt to censor Junot Díaz’s Presidential Lecture made clear, Stanford’s commitment to freedom of speech, assembly, and petition on campus is inconsistent at best and cynical at worst. Still, even if the administration were reliably dedicated to those values, their treatment of Cardinal Conversations and their non-response response to The Review’s assault on Professor Palumbo-Liu reveal a troubling gulf between principles and actions.

The First Amendment is absolutely necessary as a foundation and an inviolable perimeter in American society; some version of it is likewise necessary in the university. But it is deeply insufficient for the production of healthy, or even decent and worthwhile, political conversation. Freedom of speech is indeed a protector of the possibility of thoughtful conversation, but it is not its guarantor. The latter, more sweeping conception of the First Amendment supports the specious notion of a marketplace of ideas, in which the discerning public sorts faulty and misleading notions from the sound ones. This marketplace model is familiar, appealing, and seriously flawed. In real-world exchange, ideas are not equally powerful, rhetoric is not always transparent, and the discerning public’s access to facts and context is deeply uneven. Under these circumstances, relying on the intellectual equivalent of the invisible hand to preserve sound ideas and deflate flawed ones becomes either bafflingly naive or criminally negligent.

In the marketplace of ideas, special value accrues to the daring “contrarian” and the plucky devil’s advocate, who voice the ideas that other voices are assumed to be too timid or too conventional to suggest. Most familiarly in campus conversation, this has been The Review’s consistent understanding of its own contribution. One of The Review’s 2017 editors, Philip Clark, wrote in his Editor’s Note that The Review would “inject campus with a much needed dose of heterodoxy” to combat a broader “retreat from the free exchange of ideas.” The Review’s valorous self-conception as the intellectual maverick in a slavishly conformist campus culture is specious not only because it is wrong — The Review’s preferred topics and angles are almost unfathomably predictable and familiar — but also because it rests on the flawed notion that unpopular ideas are valuable because they are unpopular.

In the end, what makes Clark’s promise notable is precisely that it is not heterodox. It offers a commonplace diagnosis of student incompetence, one that conveniently justifies The Review’s cynical trolling, but which the administration increasingly shares. At a time when Stanford’s leaders claim to be so deeply concerned about the quality of campus discourse, they have not only remained absolutely silent on The Review’s most despicable acts of character assassination, but are in fact treating The Review as a partner with Cardinal Conversations. Rather than being merely embarrassing, the administration’s decisions here are an indication that something is more deeply wrong with their understanding of the situation. Provost Drell wrote a month ago that “just because a form of expression is constitutionally guaranteed does not mean it is ethical or appropriate.” We should expect to see the administration assume its responsibility by acting on this vital distinction. This would require confronting violations of moral and intellectual integrity, and crafting contributions of their own that are thought-provoking and worth disagreeing with, rather than simple risk-averse responses designed to avoid engendering critique and debate.

The prefiguration of discourse as a marketplace of ideas fails when it reduces the act of thinking to the promotion of predetermined conclusions, ideas, and perspectives. Genuine political discourse is a process of contemplation, discussion, and refinement — it is thought as exercise rather than aptitude. Fostering this activity on a university campus is not a process of demonstrating to students what to think, but rather exploring how to think with lucidity and care in the first place. This formulation should be familiar to the President and Provost — it is this approach to thought as activity rather than outcome, as practice rather than product, that our liberal educations are supposedly aimed at cultivating. Stanford’s leaders seem troublingly disinterested in applying the powerful principles which govern academic life (and which adorn Stanford’s admissions pamphlets) to the genuinely tricky challenges of supporting a political culture on campus which is multipolar, genuine, and robust.

Cardinal Conversations and programs like it are contributing to the problem they nominally hope to fix. The performativity of dialogue has its place, but because it addresses its audience as partisans rather than as equal interlocutors, it does not forward the administration’s goals. Likewise, by treating the First Amendment as a standard rather than as a minimalist limit, the administration contributes to the commodification of thought and insults the depth and complexity of political thinking. These are strange contradictions from an administration which has at least been unambiguous in its vague “commitment to advancing both intellectual debate and a truly inclusive campus culture.”

In reality, beneath the posturing which groups like The Review offer to off-campus audiences, political discourse is alive on this campus, in humanities classrooms, in many of the activist communities which The Review so loathes, and in the everyday interactions which make up campus life. The administration has identified serious problems and significant opportunities, but the actions it has taken are simultaneously timid and imperious. This approach is dismissive of the positive work which happens everyday outside the confines of officially-sanctioned dialogue, and reveals a mindset that remains disappointingly uncritical. It is up to us to dispute these stultifying strictures on student potential. Discourse which belittles its intended audience, trades in distortions, or merely echoes partisan — or bipartisan — platitudes should expect to be challenged within the university. The student body can and must reclaim the discourse proper to the university: one anchored in historical discernment and ethical responsibility.

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