Last November, student protests over
claims of racial discrimination and insensitivity erupted at Yale and across
the country. The protests were sparked by an email sent
by Associate Master of Silliman College, Erika Christakis, which criticized the
university administration for issuing guidelines to regulate students’
Halloween attire. While the ensuing debate revolved primarily around political
correctness, free speech, and institutional racism, most of her supporters and
critics alike missed Christakis’ central intended point. Her email was not, at
its core, about race or speech, but about power, and it raised a simple but
fundamental question: Who gets to define the boundaries between the permissible
and the impermissible?
To Christakis, the answer was clear:
The university, with its massive bureaucratic structure, should not have the
power to set the bounds of what is or is not morally acceptable conduct. Such
judgments ought to be left to the students.
As a result, Christakis and her
husband were relentlessly pilloried, resulting regrettably in their resignations a
few weeks ago. Yet in articulating this critique of university power,
Christakis’s language was actually deeply resonant with the radical spirit of
America’s first wave of 1960s student activism. The Berkeley protests of 1964,
known ironically as the “Free Speech Movement,” were intended not to empower
campus administrators to combat social inequities, but rather to demolish the
invisible instruments through which the university exerted control over
students’ lives and ideas.
This resistance to university power
found intellectual expression perhaps most notably in the writings of Michel
Foucault. Through a series of historical studies, Foucault argued that modern
liberal society had not brought about the emancipation it promised. Operating
through new forms of “pastoral power” and "normalized judgment," mass society
inaugurated a new kind of social control, in many respects even more dangerous
than that of the illiberal past. As the student activists of the ’60s well understood,
the university’s power to regulate behavior often through implicit instruments
was one of the most dangerous forms of this distinctively modern means of
social coercion.
It was for these reasons that the
radical left fifty years ago set out to destroy universities’ power over
students’ lives. And it was for these reasons that in her email, Christakis
warned students of “the consequences of an institutional (which is to say:
bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college
students.”
Traditionally, university policies
regulating student behavior have been closely associated with in loco
parentis, or “in the place of a parent.” The doctrine holds that having
taken students away from the home—the natural locus of moral development—the
university inherits the ethical responsibilities of the parent. To this end,
universities were historically charged with cultivating a certain kind of
character in their students by promoting traditional scripts of life and by
enforcing behavioral codes of conduct (including most notably for recent
post-pubescents stringent standards of sexual morality).
With this historical perspective in
mind, Yale’s campus turmoil reveals two sets of awkward allies across the last
half century of university politics. In articulating a skeptical critique of
university power and in denouncing administrators’ right to uphold norms of
conduct, the radicals of the ’60s (and Associate Master Christakis) find
themselves the intellectual bedfellows of contemporary campus conservatives.
And in demanding that administrators do more to promote a holistic account of
student welfare and in calling for clearer moral guidance from the university
about how students should responsibly interact with their peers and with society
at large, today’s student activists use language that would have been intensely
familiar to mid-twentieth century conservative defenders of in loco
parentis.
Having all but abandoned their
radical skepticism toward the controlling power of mass social judgment and the
implicit power of entrenched hierarchical elites, today’s campus activists are
quite explicit in their appeal not to demolish the power of administrators, but
to expand it. Of course faceless bureaucrats should be allowed
to issue behavioral codes of conduct, of course mandatory
sensitivity training is needed to instruct students and faculty how to act
appropriately, and of course new administrative appendages are
indispensable in the moral guidance of university life. Each of the remedies
called for at Yale and elsewhere is symptomatic of a new-found faith in
university administrators as responsible guardians of social justice and as
legitimate moral authorities.
Nowhere is the call for a
restoration of in loco parentis more clearly seen than in
debates over the proper
purpose of the residential college. Student activists have rejected
the charge that they are hostile to intellectual freedom and free speech by
pointing to the language Yale herself uses in describing the residential
college system—language that is itself a relic of an older campus commitment to
students’ moral development. Silliman College is not the Yale Political Union
and the master is not the facilitator of debate. Instead, the colleges’ central
purpose is to nurture and support students as they grow and develop.
This language of nurture and care
quite plainly flows from the sphere of the household. The college’s role is to
protect students and to aid their growth. These idioms of personal safety and
security are certainly quite different from the language of moral development
and character formation more traditionally associated with in loco
parentis. Yet all this reveals is the limitation of a heavy insistence on
the distinction between negative freedom (the protection from harm) and
positive freedom (the formation into a “free” individual). As we rightly expand
our conception of “harm” beyond brute physical violence to include forms of
emotional and psychological suffering, it becomes clear that proper protection
requires a broader administrative commitment to the promotion of certain
behavioral mores. As has become increasingly clear over the course of the last
year, there is no conceptual distinction between protecting students from harm
in the broad sense and promoting their holistic wellbeing just as advocates of in
loco parentis have always demanded.
Contrast this insistence on the
college as an essentially nurturing space with an alternative conception of the
role of a university education—that expressed by the 1974 Woodward
Report on intellectual freedom at Yale. The report opens by declaring
that “The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate
knowledge by means of research and teaching.” It continues that the university
“is not primarily a fellowship, a club, a circle of friends, a replica of the
civil society outside it. Without sacrificing its central purpose, it cannot
make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity,
harmony, civility, or mutual respect.”
Though now official university
policy, the report quite clearly embodies much of the radical spirit of the
’60s. The university’s primary role is not the formation of a
certain kind of student or the promotion of a particular moral vision of the
good, but rather the relentless pursuit of truth. Though ideally these ends
will not conflict, when they do the university cannot forget its primary
commitment is to scholarship, not parenting.
There of course remain important
differences between traditional advocates for in loco parentis and
today’s student activists that merit lengthy explication. But it remains
striking that the contemporary campus left seeks to enforce its social morality
through the same informal and institutional controls traditional societies have
always used to enforce theirs—and against which liberals have traditionally
chafed.
In making these observations, I have
not intended to pass normative judgment on the character or aims of recent
campus protests—though I have plenty of judgments to pass. Rather, I have
attempted to point out a curious historical transformation in the contours of
campus politics over the last fifty years. This transformation isn’t hypocrisy,
but is merely the natural outcome of the cultural left’s dialectic with social
reality. Accordingly, conservatives must do away with their stale critiques of
a relativistic, nonjudgmental left and should grapple instead with the
substantive conception of the good today’s campus radicals wish to enforce.
Indeed, the explicit revival of in
loco parentis is in some sense a salutary development. For the
last half century, universities have pretended to administer value-neutral,
technocratic education, while in reality they have vigorously embraced a thick
moral vision of the kind of people their students should become. A frank
acknowledgment that Yale does wish to shape (and can't
help but shape) the lives of her students would be an honest improvement
to contemporary campus discourse. We would do well to drop the facade that
Yale is agnostic between competing visions of the good and to debate instead what values Yale ought to impose upon her students.
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