At UChicago, Much Ado about ‘Whiteness’

A troubling course is testing the University of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom. Should the institution stand on principle? Yes. But the situation is complicated.

“The Problem of Whiteness” was designed by Professor Rebecca Journey and first offered last winter. When Journey relisted the course for the upcoming academic quarter, a UChicago student denounced her plans, engendering a string of death threats and harassment against her online. Though the university expressed support for Journey in a public statement, the professor voluntarily delayed the seminar, citing the need for “more time to implement appropriate safety measures.” Whether the class will now proceed is an open question, and a victory for the censors may well be at hand.

To be clear, The Problem of Whiteness is a despicable course by all appearances. Offered as part of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program, the class blames “whiteness” not only for “the consolidation of wealth, power and property” but for “environmental health hazards” as well. “Whiteness,” the course’s catalog description assures us, possesses “worldmaking (and razing) effects,” a turn of phrase as radical as anything in the work of Ibram X. Kendi and other contemporary race grifters.

Interviewed by UChicago’s student newspaper, Journey rejected the notion that her course is racist, stating, “This class is about interrogating whiteness as a social construction, not as a biological fact.” Yet one needs only to substitute another color for “white” to see this argument collapse. “The Problem of Blackness” would end the career of anyone who proposed it. Moreover, the Justice Department, the accreditors, and the mob would soon see the institution burned, figuratively or literally, to the ground.

Among the ironies of the UChicago saga is the fact that Journey is herself white, a circumstance that underlines her course’s faddishness while doing nothing to abate its bias. Another is that the university is rightly famous in free-speech circles for its superb Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, known colloquially as the Chicago Statement. A staunch rejection of censorship from any direction, UChicago’s 2015 pledge affirms the academic community’s “broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” An example employed by the statement’s crafters is instructive. In 1932, the American Communist Party’s candidate for president spoke on campus despite outcries from both faculty and the public. It is difficult to argue that Journey’s course deserves less protection than Soviet sympathizing at the height of Stalinism.

Difficult, but not impossible. Discussing the matter in post-liberal quarters, one hears certain dark phrases repeated. Attacks on “whiteness” are “pre-genocidal.” They bring frighteningly to mind the treatment of Jews “in Weimar Germany.” To defeat these attacks is “more important” than abstract values such as free inquiry. Are such concerns overblown, even ridiculous? Absolutely. But they are nevertheless shared by no small percentage of conservatives, who still have, as of Tuesday night’s announcement from Mar-a-Lago, their champion.

The arguments in favor of untrammeled discourse are subtler but easier to sustain. To create “hate-speech” codes is to empower an army of bureaucrats whose rule will necessarily be arbitrary. To muzzle the professoriate is to freeze knowledge in place and live with the endless, unforeseeable consequences. Conservatives are right to bemoan the near-total progressive dominance of the academy, and courses lambasting “whiteness” really are abhorrent. But attempts to silence our opponents will surely fail. More than that: They will see us stripped of the speech protections that we presently enjoy. To paraphrase Robert Bolt’s Sir Thomas More, where would we hide then?

If the answer to the UChicago problem is not censorship from the right, what is it? Certainly not a tit-for-tat academic regime in which every course on “whiteness” is accompanied by an offering criticizing some other race. Such a “solution” would be both practically and morally untenable.

No, what is called for is widespread professional restraint on the part of university professors. Having announced her class, Journey should see it through, and UChicago should defend her at any cost. Then, quietly, she should pack the course away, never to list it again. Indeed, all racialist provocations should be voluntarily removed from the nation’s curricula.

The alternative is a dispensation in which right-leaning supporters of free inquiry grow ever more timid, shaken from their positions by the excesses of those they would defend. Can academic freedom survive if progressives are its only advocates? I think not. It will be open to attack on too many fronts. And the Left is constitutionally unsuited to the defense of liberty in any case.

In sum, and thankfully, Professor Journey and her colleagues have every right to say what they will on campus. That doesn’t mean they should do so.