The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program’s Fifth Annual Conference on “The Future of Free Speech” was the product of months of planning. Organizers couldn’t have imagined that it would coincide with recent events on campus, including Silliman Associate Master Erika Christakis’s email defending potentially offensive Halloween costumes on free speech grounds and the ensuing calls for her and Master Nicholas Christakis’s removal.
But the conference didn’t shy away from the controversy, with speaker Greg Lukianoff from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education joking that based on the reaction to Christakis’s email, “you would have thought someone wiped out an entire Indian village.” Students responded immediately, gathering around LC to protest that remark and the conference in general. Denied entrance to the talk, they nonetheless remained so they could confront attendees as they left.
As I walk toward the Omni on Friday night to cover the conference gala, where U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska will deliver the conference’s keynote address, I wonder how attendees will reflect on the emotional scene at LC.
I arrive at the Omni and ascend the stairs toward the second floor, where conference-goers are enjoying the pre-keynote cheese platters and open bar – all on Buckley’s dime. Manhattan cocktail in hand, I wander around the party to take Buckley’s pulse. Some discussion revolves around reception hors d’oeuvres (the crab cakes are divine!) and 2016 politics – Rand Paul is a good thinker and lousy campaigner, Donald Trump and Ben Carson are probably giving conservatism a bad name, Marco Rubio’s long game is strong – but people cannot stop talking about the LC incident, where a few Buckley Fellows tell me they encountered spitting and name-calling. One attendee, apparently amused, calls protesting a free speech conference ironic and shows me a selfie-style video in which he smiles as the surrounding protesters yell at him to stop.
After an hour or so, we all take our seats for dinner and welcoming remarks from Lauren Noble ’11, the Buckley Program’s founder and executive director. “The Buckley Program not only welcomes the exchange of ideas; we celebrate it,” she begins as I douse the salad before me with buttermilk vinaigrette. With 72% of college students in favor of punishing speech that could be considered offensive, according to a Buckley-commissioned study, she reaffirms the Buckley Program’s commitment to preserving “a cheerful alternative to intellectual stagnation and conformity.”
Noble is followed by Zach Young ’17, the program’s student president, who calls the conference “as timely as ever” in light of the responses to Erika Christakis’s email. While these responses are rightfully protected by free speech, he says, they ultimately undermine it by demonstrating just how risky it is to share unpopular ideas. “We must work vigorously,” he goes on as I hoard the extra dinner rolls from my table’s no-shows, “to defend the university as the cornerstone in our society of free expression and intellectual engagement.”
After a brief intermission for filet mignon and the announcement of essay contest winners, it’s keynote time, and after a brief introduction from Buckley Program Director Michael Franc ’79, who calls the actions of protesters “idiotic” and “nihilistic,” Senator Sasse takes the stage. His remarks are wide-ranging, touching on American foreign policy “in the age of cyber and jihad,” political polarization, and the so-called “American idea” prescribed by the Founders that guided their work at the Constitutional Convention.
As the former president of Midland University and the holder of no fewer than five academic degrees, including a PhD in American history from Yale, Sasse is particularly concerned about the future of American higher education, which he says is becoming increasingly bureaucratized as young people are indiscriminately advised to pursue a college degree. Meanwhile, 18- to 22-year-olds are unprepared to do meaningful work and stay at a single firm for more than a few years.
“I believe that what we’re doing is very accidentally creating and extending adolescence into an age of dependency,” Sasse explains, “that creates a kind of sheltered young adults that don’t understand very much at all about the world and that probably come and protest like you heard today.” The audience nods in agreement as the waitstaff brings out coffee and dessert, a delicious chocolate mousse with raspberry and hazelnut topping. Circling back to the conference theme of free speech, Sasse wraps up his remarks by highlighting Americans’ disconnect with the American idea, a disconnect that contributes to what he perceives as a crisis of “radical civic disengagement” in places where dissenting, potentially offensive views are punished.
The crowd goes wild, and I bounce.