Angela Major/The Janesville Gazette via AP
Kyle Ferrebee, center, of Young Americans for Freedom stands among protesters who prevented an appearance by Blackwater founder Erik Prince at Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, March 2019.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: In the midst of a contentious and sometimes even vitriolic political climate, how do you think how your campus and campuses more broadly are confronting the resurgence of bigotry and the danger of accepting discourse that might be bigoted discourse?
Elizabeth Bradley: I’d step us back a little bit on your question: We have to frame free speech as not an isolated value. It’s absolutely fundamental. You have to have it on college campuses. There’s no way around it. But if you think free speech alone is going to confer the kind of social equity we look at, we’re mistaken. Instead, we really need to look at both pursuing the ends of free speech and the ends of social inclusion at the same time.
When you do that, it’s a really interesting campus because suddenly you are saying everybody has a voice. The whole goal of the campus is to bring different voices together that are really different and that’s edge that brings edges to the place. What happens at an edge, an edge can be all kinds of things: It can be sharp and very difficult and full of tension. It can be thrilling and sort of you see both sides at once cause you right on the edge. What we’re really working on is creating an environment where you allow edges to meet like that, the sparks will fly, but hopefully they get channeled into all kinds of new friendships, new ways to look at the world, creativity, innovations.
Heffner: You’re practicing something you call engaged pluralism in the way that you participate in the democratic governance of your own institution.
Bradley: When we say engaged pluralism, it’s really a value system or a framework for dealing with a wildly diverse set of people. America hasn’t always dealt well with diversity. When you think about it, there’s segregation, that’s one way in which people deal with diversity. They separate people into their groups, put big boundaries between them and they don’t learn from each other. We’ve had a huge history on that. There’s assimilation, which we’ve also had a huge history on where people just, who are diverse come in and you just need to act like the majority and you’ll get along.
We reject both of these and say they are polar ways to look at it. An engaged pluralistic approach is, well let’s hear what you have to say and engage long enough that you really hear what the other side is. It doesn’t mean you’re going to change someone’s mind, doesn’t mean you’re going to go away with a changed mind, but you will go away having learned something, you’ll understand more. That’s what we’re trying to do throughout the campus.
Heffner: As you speak to your fellow presidents at universities around the country, what are they saying about these kinds of subjective tests?
Bradley: Most college presidents and universities are thinking all the time about how to allow both freedom and safety to be on the campus. This is a really important thing as we talk about campuses, we have to remember that these students, as they start as first years, they’re 18 years old, then they’re sophomores—and sophomoric is a word for a reason. Because often in sophomore year, you know, people grab on an ideology and they’re putting on that ideology for three weeks and then they’re going to put on another. That’s how we grow up.
But by the time that student’s a senior, if they’ve gone through several of these events and there’ve been boundaries and there’s been good leadership, you know, they’re going to laugh at themselves back when they’re sophomores, too.
We all did that stuff like that. What’s dangerous in our own world, and in terms of how we get media, is in today’s world those silly mistakes that get made in one lecture hall at the end of a building suddenly can be live-streamed. And what used to be words can’t hurt you, it’s just words, today words carry a lot more power than they used to ‘cause a trillion people can see them quickly.
Heffner: Right.
Bradley: And your future employers can see them quickly. As a result, the stakes are just so high now and that we really do try to educate everyone from administrators to staff, to faculty, to students to watch your words ’cause they aren’t weapons per se, but boy, they can be weaponized. We work pretty hard on that as part of the education.
Heffner: To put your political scientist hat on right now, how effective are these presidential candidates going to be in not just wanting to bring back normalcy in our rhetoric to reverse course from what the Trump administration, but specifically Trump has meant to our discourse?
Bradley: Let’s start with income inequality. We can go back to ancient Rome to now when countries or nation states get too inequitable, problems happen, that’s not a stable situation. And we can study one revolution after the other: Ultimately, there’s a coup, there’s a change, there’s a new way in which that society will be will be managed.
The question is, where is the United States in this long trajectory of building towards inequality, and where is the tipping point where finally the people of the country, whether they’re wealthy or not, say we can no longer sustain this kind of income inequality.
Heffner: I just came back from Iowa and speaking with an Uber driver who considered himself very conservative. We came to a conclusion that whether you consider yourself pretty conservative or pretty liberal, you are discontented with the economic status quo in this country that President Trump intended to and promised to correct. He said he alone could fix it when it came to economic distress. So you have pretty conservative and pretty liberal people who would probably agree about human dignity and probably agree about an economy that respects human dignity.
Bradley: Well, listen, I think your point that people agree a lot more than you think they agree is true. We’ve seen it in health care, everybody wants everybody to have access to health care. What we don’t face well enough is what sacrifices have to be made to make that happen. What income redistribution, what sense of control, which institutions that are structural in the United States that actually need to change to say, oh yeah, everyone can get health care and, yes, we can have more income equality. We agree, but the devil is in the details.
Heffner: The grand strategy we need right now is grand reconciliation.
Bradley: It really is. And in history, those don’t happen without a lot of pain—when people are ready for that reconciliation because the alternative is so difficult.
