Welcome back to The New Criterion. We hope that our readers enjoyed a pleasant and productive period of aestivation. It was not, we regret to report, a good summer for free speech and one of its key enablers, historical truthfulness.
Let us start with an apparently frivolous example. At Yale, where censorship never sleeps, the Committee of Public Safety—no, wait, that was Robespierre’s plaything. Yale’s new bureaucracy is called the “Committee on Art in Public Spaces.” Its charge? To police works of art on campus, to make sure that images offensive to favored populations are covered over or removed. At the residential college formerly known as Calhoun, for example, the Committee has removed stained glass windows depicting slaves and other historical scenes of Southern life. Statues and other representations of John C. Calhoun—a distinguished statesman but also an apologist for slavery—have likewise been slotted for the oubliette.
But impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply once the itch to stamp out heresy gets going. Yesterday, it was Calhoun and representations of the Antebellum South. Today it is a carving at an entrance to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library depicting an Indian and a Puritan. The Puritan, if you can believe it, was holding a musket—a gun! Quoth Susan Gibbons, one of Yale’s librarian-censors: its “presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.” Why not? Never mind. Solution? Cover over the musket with a cowpat of stone. (But leave the Indian’s bow and arrow alone!)
Impermissible attitudes and images are never in short supply.
Actually, we just learned that the removable cowpat of stone was only a stopgap. The outcry against the decision struck a chord with Peter Salovey, Yale’s President. “Such alteration,” he noted, “represents an erasure of history, which is entirely inappropriate at a university.” He’s right about that. But wait! Instead of merely altering the image, Salovey announced that Yale would go full Taliban, removing the offending stonework altogether. In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior. In these more enlightened times, they collude in its effacement.
You might say, Who cares what violence a super-rich bastion of privilege and unaccountability like Yale perpetrates on its patrimony? Well, you should care. Institutions like Yale (and Harvard, Stanford, and the rest of the elite educational aeries) are the chief petri dishes for the “progressive” hostility to free expression and other politically correct attitudes that have insinuated themselves like a fever-causing virus into the bloodstream of public life.
This summer, Douglas Koziol, an anguished employee at an independent bookstore near Boston, took to the publishing website “The Millions” to exhibit the fine grain of his caring, sharing sensitivity by airing his “moral objection” to J. D. Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegy. What is a right-thinking (i.e., left-leaning) bookseller to do when customers clamor for a book with the poisonous message that hard work and individual initiative are important factors in escaping poverty? The urge to hide the book is strong, strong. But Koziol decided he would merely badger (“start conversations” with) the unenlightened masses who ask for books like Hillbilly Elegy (to say nothing of those wanting Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, anything by William F. Buckley Jr., or the works of the “tech vampire” Peter Thiel; the house of left-wing disapproval is large, and contains many mansions).
Spiriting away stonework in the Ivy League, and the residue of the attitudes that stand behind such iconoclastic activities in the parlors of left-leaning bookshops, may seem mostly comical. (As, we suppose, was the case of poor Robert Lee, the Asian sports announcer who, a week after the deadly melee at Charlottesville, was removed from calling a University of Virginia football game because of “the coincidence” of his unfortunate name.)
But there is a straight line from those nuggets of morally-fired intolerance to other, decidedly less comical examples of puritanical censure. Consider the case of James Damore, the (former) Google engineer who wrote an internal memo outlining the company’s cult-like “echo chamber” of political correctness and ham-handed efforts to nurture “diversity” in hiring and promotion. When the memo was publicized, it first precipitated controversy and then provided Google ceo Sundar Pichai a high horse upon which to perch, declare that Damore’s memo was “offensive and not OK,” and then fire him. For expressing his opinion on a company discussion forum designed to encourage free expression (so long as it toes the politically correct line).
There is a straight line to other, less comical examples of puritanical censure.
