Further Thoughts on the NYU Graduation Address

I posted an essay on the Academe Blog (cross posted on The Faculty Lounge) about issues of academic freedom raised by Steven Thrasher’s recent speech at the NYU commencement ceremony. Here are some additional points that I did not address due to space limitations.

• There was nothing anti-Semitic about Thrasher’s speech, and charges of that sort are both unfair and counter-productive. I think that academic boycotts are wrong, and that Thrasher’s politicization was out of place at commencement, but the personal attacks against him were bullying and uncalled for.
• Thrasher is about to join the Northwestern faculty, but Northwestern’s President Schapiro and Provost Holloway should not have weighed in on his speech at NYU. It was unseemly, to say the least, for top administrators to criticize an incoming, untenured professor for comments that had nothing to do with Northwestern. To their credit, Schapiro and Holloway affirmed Thrasher’s academic freedom, but it would have been far better for them to say nothing.
• The movement to boycott Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic, but it is discriminatory. Although boycott supporters often claim that they are only targeting institutions, the impact is necessarily felt by individual students and scholars who have been, as we have seen, deprived of opportunities to study abroad, to publish in certain journals, to join certain departments, to attend conferences, and to coauthor with others.

• John K. Wilson wrote that Thrasher's critics infantalized the audience "by claiming that mentally incapable of listening to an idea they disagree with." But Thrasher didn't actually express any ideas beyond one-phrase condemnations of Trump and Israel.
• A thoughtful speech about the principles behind academic boycotts would have been more responsible than Thrasher’s political cheerleading, in which shouted his pride in the Israel boycott without explaining his reasoning. His anti-Israel exclamation gave the audience nothing to think about or debate. It was a harangue, not an argument or discussion. Claims of academic freedom are weaker when there is nothing intellectual about the presentation.
• Wilson’s original post quotes this statement by NYU’s Dean Philip Harper, criticizing several of Thrasher’s tweets as “breathtakingly wrongheaded,” and adding, “Had we known of these posts earlier, Steven Thrasher would not have been a speaker at our Convocation ceremony.” To Wilson, “this is a shocking betrayal of academic freedom. To declare that someone’s tweets would ban them from being a speaker at Convocation ceremony is a direct violation of the basic principles of a university.” This view cannot be taken seriously. A speaker’s previous pronouncements – via tweets or other media – are a good indication of what he or she will say at commencement and must obviously be taken into account when issuing invitations.
• This is not to say that Thrasher’s tweets should have been disqualifying, but only that Wilson’s proposed principle is absurd. A university has a responsibility, in its hosting function, to review the positions of invited speakers. Few would want to hear Stephen Miller inveigh against immigrants.
• It is even more absurd for Wilson to assert that vetting graduation speakers “sends a chilling message” of repression. I have been in academics for over forty years, and I have never once heard a scholar state an interest in giving a future commencement address, or worry that he or she might not get such an invitation. Sure, it is an honor when it happens, but nobody is going to refrain from expression based on the likelihood, or not, of someday speaking at graduation. Wilson sees chills everywhere.
• This is an example of Wilson’s untenable all-or-nothing approach to academic freedom. To him, every scholar must have absolute license to say anything, at any time, in any place, before any audience, without fear of later criticism, or else the entire academic structure may collapse into repression. “If commencement speakers with controversial ideas are to be no-platformed at these events,” he writes, “what’s to stop the administration from applying the same standards to allowing speakers on campus, or hiring faculty, or admitting students?” Again, Big Bird is more insightful than Wilson. One of these things is not like the other things.
• A thought experiment shows that Wilson’s parade of horribles is just silly. Consider: If Steven Thrasher can call President Trump a fascist at graduation, without criticism, what’s to stop another speaker from calling President Obama a Kenyan, or calling Nancy Pelosi a drunk, or calling London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan a “stone-cold loser," or calling Hillary Clinton a crook? Calls for simple courtesy do not inevitably lead to “repression” in faculty hiring and student admissions.
• Consider: If the university can prohibit food and drink in the library, what's to stop the administration from prohibiting it in the dining halls and on the quad? If the university can prohibit loud noises in the dormitories, what's to stop the administration from prohibiting cheering at basketball games? 
• If the government can make people buy health insurance, what's to stop them from making everyone eat broccoli? (Note: this argument was really raised in the Obamacare litigation.)
• See how that works? It's easy to make up a slippery slope about almost anything. 
• As my friend and colleague Andrew Koppelman once said (paraphrasing), slippery slope arguments are empirical, not theoretical. The connection has to be real and predictable, not just imaginary.
• There is a reason that Dr. Seuss's Oh the Places You'll Go is the top selling graduation gift book, instead of, say, Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny. The latter is a far more provocative, important, and meaningful, but it's not what people are looking for at commencement time.