Creeping Totalitarianism

Last week, former Harvard University President and current University Professor Lawrence H. Summers blamed student activists for “absurd political correctness” and “creeping totalitarianism” in education.

But for the first three years of high school, administrators barred my campus newspaper from publishing articles and op-eds I’d written on LGBTQ+ issues. I submitted them anyway, and by my senior year, I’d worn my administrators down. Then, after the newspaper published two stories I wrote on the topic, students and parents boycotted the discussion of queer people. On our website, anonymous commenters railed against the inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues in a school publication. They demanded the administration step in to stop the newspaper from publishing articles I had written.

That’s why I know that when conservatives and their centrist enablers criticize trigger warnings or student activism for impinging on free speech, it’s nonsense. Students of color have the right to a campus free from racism, and women have the right to a campus free from misogyny. All minority students have the right to a campus free from oppression. Those who criticize efforts to realize this truth—on the far right, at the center and center-left, and at Harvard—are wrong, and they are hypocritical.

Conservatives contend that minority students have invented a “right to not be offended,” refusing to acknowledge the truth of pervasive and violent oppression. They insist that students of color won’t be satisfied until professors can teach only activists’ left-wing orthodoxy. But conservatives mobilized against the 2014 AP U.S. History Course for being insufficiently pro-American. They forced the College Board to rewrite its curriculum for hundreds of thousands of students to conform to a conservative political agenda predicated on American exceptionalism.

In North Carolina, a conservative think tank closely affiliated with Republican Governor Pat McCrory is advocating that English departments restrict course offerings to the “traditional canon of Renaissance, British, or American literature.” The report warns that English majors are being exposed to “multiculturalism, feminism, postmodernism, [and] postcolonialism,” and derides as frivolous the study of women writers, queer writers, and writers of color. Shortly after the forced resignation of University of North Carolina President Tom Ross earlier this year, the Board of Governors discontinued the Africana studies and gender studies majors at North Carolina’s second-largest public university. Ross, a Democrat, was not considered an ally to McCrory and the General Assembly’s Republican majority.

Conservatives disguise their views in apocalyptic warnings about students of color, but they are the ones weaponizing education and eviscerating intellectual freedom. Contradicting their own stated values, conservatives advance the singular, unflinching supremacy of their oppressive political agenda. Meanwhile, minority students advocate only for institutions across the country to stop pretending as though it is acceptable to disagree on their value, legitimacy, and basic humanity.

After being censored and boycotted, I’m insulted that Harvard’s leaders identify student activists—this time around, students of color—as the real threat to free speech. President Faust calls it “erasing [history]” to change the names of Harvard buildings, but she will not call it racism when students of color are forced to live, study, and work on a campus that glorifies slaveholders. Larry Summers calls it “creeping totalitarianism” to treat microaggressions as though they are “morally serious.” But he will not call it sexism when a university president says women are underrepresented in STEM fields because of “intrinsic aptitude.”

When people call it fascism or censorship or coddling when minority students demand a campus that is safe for them, that’s wrong. It’s discrimination and it’s dangerous. And we should call it oppression.

Ted G. Waechter '18, a Crimson editorial writer, is an African Studies concentrator in Quincy House.