OPINION

Bangert: Of snowflakes and Purdue protests

Critics say students speaking out about racial climate on campus need to just toughen up. But are free speech arguments a dodge of the real issue here?

Dave Bangert
Journal & Courier
Purdue President Mitch Daniels, center, meets Nov. 17 in Hovde Hall with students who led a Nov. 13 rally about the racial climate on campus.
(Photo: Dave Bangert/Journal & Courier)

The students challenging Purdue University over whether it has a welcoming and inclusive environment get no favors from a handful of similar campus protests across the country.

Case in point, and currently at the center, is Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

There, students attempted to solicit (read: demand) support from a complicit press by barring any reporters unwilling to join in the end goals of the protest. In other words, reporters either were with the protesters and provided sympathetic coverage … or they weren’t welcome at all. File that under: Not clear on the concept.

That follows viral footage earlier this month from the University of Missouri, where a faculty member and staffer joined students in harassing a reporter and photographer in a makeshift media-free zone set up in the middle of that state university.

Those subplots have given traction to a default diversion for those watching as events unfold at Purdue and beyond: This trend of protests is less about questions of bias simmering just below the surface as it is about trampling free speech with talk of safe zones and compulsory political correctness.

The upshot in the recoil: Why so offended?

Mitch Daniels responds to Purdue protesters' demands

Let George Will, a Washington Post columnist who offers no quarter for student demands and the universities that give in on the diversity front, frame it.

This is from a Nov. 13 piece that centered on Yale students shouting down faculty members over comments made about potentially offensive Halloween costumes (not the single highest moment in civil rights history, to be sure). But his words were writ large across academia:

“On campuses so saturated with progressivism that they celebrate diversity in everything but thought, every day is a snow day: There are perishable snowflakes everywhere,” Will wrote. “The institutions have brought this on themselves. So, regarding the campuses' current agonies, schadenfreude is not a guilty pleasure, it is obligatory.”

(That said, Will’s column also included this line: “Normal Americans might wonder: Doesn't the wearing of Halloween costumes end at about the time puberty begins? Not on campuses, where young adults old enough to vote live in a bubble of perpetual childhood.” All of which proves that Will hasn’t been in Party City or cruised past any of the strip mall Halloween stores that pop up in October. A day on a large Midwestern campus might be just what Mr. Will needs. A breakfast club stop might be even better.)

Taking in the scene at the Nov. 13 rally at Purdue — a come-one, come-all affair in support of protests at the University of Missouri — Will’s take seems disconnected with the root questions on display that day. That’s true whether or not you particularly agree with the students.

But leaders of that rally will have their chance to take it up with Will on Dec. 7. At 6:30 that night, the columnist will join Purdue President Mitch Daniels in Stewart Center’s Fowler Hall for an hourlong chat. If form holds with past Purdue Presidential Lecture Series talks, Daniels — a self-proclaimed fan of sprawling free speech and free inquiry on campus — will leave more than half the time for audience questions.

For his part, Daniels met a few days after the Nov. 13 rally with a dozen or so students to go over 13 demands about bias, policing and racial climate on campus.

Daniels meets race protesters, makes no promises

On Tuesday, Daniels followed up with a letter to the students, saying that “it is clear that while there are items on which we will not agree,” they were on the same page on many of the points. That included “ongoing, aggressive efforts to recruit underrepresented minority faculty and students.”

He didn’t agree, though, with the students’ top demand — that he take back a statement he made shortly after University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe resigned amid the protests and a student’s hunger strike in Columbia. In a statement sent to the Purdue community Nov. 11, Daniels reaffirmed Purdue’s commitment to the "We Are Purdue Statement of Values" and the university’s new free speech policy.

While Daniels was defending two pillars on campus, he left things dangling with the following kicker: “What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale.”

Students who rallied at Purdue — and eventually demanded that Daniels add provisions for hate speech on campus to the speech policy — took it to mean that the president thought things were fine in West Lafayette. Daniels, in a monthly interview that aired Tuesday on WBAA, said he told students that they “misread, innocently I’m sure, what that statement said.” He said he had no intention to apologize.

“That statement doesn’t say Purdue’s perfect,” Daniels told WBAA. “Not at all. It says that, led by students, we have a very clear statement of principles on both these fronts and that we’re going to continue enunciating them and living up to them.”

Daniels, who was the default focal point of the rally, is walking a tricky line here. And that’s before his words are picked up and interpreted — innocently, maybe — as lines in the sand on protests about bias and whether students were trying to tamp down speech through politically correct guilt.

Bangert: Purdue faculty called out on race issue

As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker a few days before Purdue students rallied: “The fault line here is between those who find intolerance objectionable and those who oppose intolerance of the intolerant.”

No one is saying students who gathered outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall and their demands should go unchallenged. Are such claims as, “Purdue University accepts diverse students formally, but the environment is hostile,” enough to rest an institutionally racist label on campus or conclude that Purdue has done nothing on that account? Probably not — at least not with such broad strokes.

Mike Young, Purdue Student Government president, said as much earlier this week when he vetoed a Purdue Senate resolution that included that statement. "Vetoing this resolution does not mean I disagree with the goal of a more inclusive and diverse campus. I actually feel quite the opposite,” Young said. “However, I believe that signing this resolution would be counterproductive to achieving its goal.”

But to dismiss what’s happening at Purdue as a mere attempt to make people watch their mouths underestimates what’s really being said here.

The students at Purdue presented Daniels with a 105-page collection of personal stories and social media accounts of the “micro-aggressions” they said they encountered on and around campus. If each one was, in Will’s terms, a snowflake, the accumulation was significant, even if it wasn’t an avalanche.

Somewhere between the diversions, intractable sides and compulsory gravitation of confirmation bias, there’s room for self-reflection: Is that really what Purdue is all about? Is this really what Greater Lafayette is all about?

Feel free to discuss, per Purdue policy.

Purdue Social Justice Coalition Demands

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him atdbangert@jconline.com.

If you go

• The Purdue Graduate Student Government will host a public forum, “What is Free Speech?” at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 1 in Matthews Hall, Room 210. The forum will feature opening remarks by Purdue President Mitch Daniels and will focus on what are known as the “Chicago principles” on academic freedom and freedom of expression. Free.

• Washington Post columnist George Will joins Daniels for a talk at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 7 at Stewart Center’s Fowler Hall. The conversation is part of the Purdue Presidential Lecture Series. Free.