Trevor Floyd ’23
Guest Writer
On Monday, March 7th, the New York Times published an op-ed from UVA fourth year Emma Camp[1] entitled “I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead.”[2] Camp’s thesis is a familiar one, essentially that free speech is stifled in favor of groupthink at UVA and college campuses across the country. She supports her thesis with a few anecdotes, choice quotes from sympathetic professors, and misleading statistics.
Camp’s piece comes on the heels of the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium held at UVA Law with a keynote address delivered by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. That speech similarly bemoaned the supposed stifling of free speech on campus, including the suggestion that “cancel culture” happening on campuses and elsewhere is the greatest threat to democracy.[3] The irony was not lost on me that this claim was made at a summit of conservative law students which was given free reign of the school for two days, was opened with remarks from the Dean, and whose organizers and attendees openly and without consequence ignored the university’s indoor mask policy[4] otherwise used as a cudgel against regular students for nearly two full school years.
Camp cites a statistic that, on its face, seems stunning – 80% of students admit to “self-censorship.” Peel back just a single layer, however, and that statistic quickly falls apart. The study she cites asked students if they censor their viewpoints “at least some of the time” and only 21% report censoring themselves “often.”[5] It does not take much more interrogation to realize the flaw. Some level of moderate self-censorship is a natural and frequently necessary part of interacting with others. I don’t tell dirty jokes in class. I hold back half-baked thoughts in academic environments so that I am not taking up space which might otherwise be filled with actual learning. Beyond that, when self-censorship at UVA is done for purposes of conformity, I would wager that it is predominantly done by students with marginalized identities. Being gay at UVA means engaging in some level of self-censorship in virtually every space I enter, out of both self-protection and an instinct to conform with the dominant culture. I have also, at times, spoken up in ways that make some within that culture uncomfortable and have felt some amount of ostracization for it. None of this means that my free speech rights are being violated by my peers. Quite the opposite.
The truth is that when people like Camp and Youngkin argue for more free speech on college campuses by citing to the reactions and consequences of unpopular statements, they are actually arguing against free speech. Camp at one point cites an experience where she expressed a point of view that made her classmates upset, obtusely writing that she “can tell” when a discussion “goes poorly” for her. Camp also references a Republican peer who chooses not to talk about his politics openly because he does not want his classmates to react poorly. According to Camp’s essay, these and other similar stories amount to an assault on free speech and debate. But what Camp seems to want is speech at any time without consequence. Perhaps students in class don’t engage in “debate” in the way Camp desires because they recognize they are there to learn, not to be the loudest person in the room. Perhaps students react poorly to a peer trumpeting conservative politics because they find those politics harmful. Nobody has threatened to imprison or harm Camp for exercising her speech, but she seems to believe that a reciprocation of that exercise is essentially the same thing.
One final point. The header image of the piece is Camp standing in front of the rotunda, with a statue of Thomas Jefferson in the background. Yes, that statue – the one that white supremacists encircled while holding tiki torches in August 2017. Camp rather audaciously calls herself “brave” for the act of, among other things, putting a sign on her dorm room door that was larger than university guidelines permitted in protest of the policy. The people at UVA who are actually brave are the ones who put standing up for what is right over their own comfort. Heather Heyer was brave. Against this backdrop, and the backdrop of UVA’s long and complicated history, we should acknowledge what it looks like when speech actually costs something real.
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tsf7n@virginia.edu
[1] This op-ed addresses Camp’s claims directly and as her own since she is the author of this NYT essay. I do want to note that her essay very quickly became a wide topic of conversation on Twitter, primarily criticism of Camp and the piece. Some have expressed discomfort with Camp being the target of Twitter’s ire since she is just a college student who, prior to this essay, had very little online presence or following. I do not know her, but I would argue that she is still an adult who invested serious time and energy into producing a piece for one of the world’s biggest news platforms and therefore she ought to be (and probably is) prepared for the criticism coming her way. Nevertheless, I will also take a second to say shame on the New York Times for laundering this overcooked take through a college student who doesn’t have the resources (or piles of cash) of your average Thomas Friedman to weather the storm, so to speak.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/campus-speech-cancel-culture.html?smid=tw-share
[3] https://www.nbc29.com/2022/03/05/virginia-gov-youngkin-gives-speech-uva-law-critizing-washington-politics-colleges/
[4] I mean we all saw this, right? At least all of us who showed up to our Friday classes because we were on call did.
[5] https://reports.collegepulse.com/college-free-speech-rankings-2021