Last weekend, a group of high school girls from out of town entered a campus diner at Howard University, a historically black college, wearing pro-Trump apparel.
Almost immediately, controversy followed. The girls were allegedly greeted with profanity-laced interjections and demands they remove or conceal their clothing. One Howard student allegedly snatched the Trump campaign’s signature red hat off one of the girls and threw it. Another person reportedly urged other Howard students to threaten to beat the girls.
Responding to the incident via Twitter, Howard University described the school as “an institution where freedom of thought, choice, and expression are ever-present.”
“Our campus is a space for educational engagement to occur between both those who do and do not share our values,” said the school. “Thankfully, when visitors set foot on our campus they are met with some of the brightest and best students in our nation. Howard students are not simply academically advanced, political activists, leaders, and mentors—Howard students represent all that is right about America.”
Advertisement
Howard University administrators deserve praise for their bold stance in defense of freedom of expression and call for respectful engagement. I wish I could say the same for its students.
Some commentators on the right have framed the incident at Howard University as one evidencing the decline of free speech. I disagree: With one minor (and virtually unpreventable) exception, the free speech rights of the high school girls were not violated. The school took a neutral but firm position encouraging productive discourse, no violence or threat of violence compelled the girls leave or remove their pro-Trump clothing, and the girls voluntarily left the campus completely unharmed. Their views were merely unpopular, and as much as I wish conservative opinions were held in universally high regard, the First Amendment does not compel them to be so held.
Still, the incident gives rise to what should be a troubling revelation for Howard University: Does the school in fact afford its students meaningful exposure to different and challenging viewpoints? Or does the school prioritize a cultural status quo that makes the university more of groupthink enclave than an institution of higher learning?
Advertisement
Administrators should hesitate before answering affirmatively to the former, given all it took for the school to make national headlines was for someone to wear a “Make America Great Again” hat on its campus.
Yet even conceding the school’s ideological lopsidedness would be uncontroversial for Howard’s staunchest defenders. Intellectual incest, they contend, is a small price to pay to guarantee freedom from “emotional discomfort.” “Howard students did not simply disagree with the teens who appeared on their campus,” wrote Molly Roberts on The Post’s PostPartisan blog. “The those-were-the-days Trumpian worldview the girls were advertising was anathema to everything Howard has always stood for. And the white supremacists Trump continues to court are exactly the people Howard was designed to protect its students from and equip them to counter.”
Such paternalism reeks of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and, ironically, only serves to engender greater fear. To paraphrase Batman mob boss Carmine Falcone (but also as a general truth), people tend to fear what they do not understand. While there is certainly something to be said for engaging in a dialogue mindful of systemic inequality, it is precisely this sort of overwrought obsession with safe spaces that causes “some of the brightest and best students in our nation” to emotionally confuse neo-Nazis with a group of teenage girls wearing Trump hats. On that note, it is also unclear how Howard’s graduates can be “academically advanced, political activists, leaders, and mentors” if a red baseball cap provokes them to such enraged panic.
Advertisement
It would be nice if, instead of yet another group of students following a laughably predictable pattern of ethnocentric chauvinism, Howard students could have a conversation about how it’s possible to be both a Republican and sympathetic to — indeed, knowledgeable about — the plight of black Americans. Or how a person can be both a feminist and unapologetically pro-life. Or how a staunch defender of the right to bear arms and a zealous border security advocate can also be an ally in the fight against mass incarceration and police brutality.
In other words, it would be nice if Howard students actually experienced what is advertised on Howard’s website: a genuine appreciation of diversity.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Btu8asZpqknGK8sbXNoqanq12Wv6Z5y6iamqRfrL1wfo9qbmhoaGR%2FdXvHqK6aqpRiwq%2B11Z6prKGkrsBusMivnKurmanGbrzRqJmlnZ1k