This chapter surveys the influence and thinking of Hannah Arendt and Che Guevara regarding education. Despite their many differences, both thinkers are surprisingly similar in seeing authority in an ideal community as self-justifying and therefore authorizing a certain amount of repression by the state. The essay turns to the later thinking of Michel Foucault and his theory of a utopian liberalism to provide individuals a way to both join in but not be subjugated by larger collectivities. The chapter concludes that universities can embrace a form of Foucault's utopianism and allow the left and right to debate their respective positions and not need to censor views except in the most extreme cases. The goal in free speech should be to make students into thinking subjects.
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Scholarship is divided as to how real political correctness is as a phenomenon. Some on the left consider political correctness largely a myth or even mainly benign (Rorty, 1998). Some on the right frame it as an existential threat to liberal society (Bloom, 1987; Kimball, 1998). Still others see some areas for legitimate concern but largely dismiss it as a right-wing hoax (Chomsky, 1971; Pollitt, 2007). Some go so far as to question whether the idea of free speech is real seeing it as a social construct that fluctuates due to political factors (Fish, 1994).
Two major issues are in contention. On the one hand, the issue is a debate over how power should be divided in society. There remains disagreement over how the right or reactionary tradition is to be defined or theorized. Yet there is substantial agreement that the right is, overall, defined by wanting to preserve the status quo of (mostly) dominant groups (Diamond, 1995; Harris, Davidson, Fletcher, & Harris, 2017). In the context of the US and, more broadly, Western Europe, defense of privilege often is defense of white nationalism. For instance, in 2017, one year after Trump’s election, at Salem State University in Massachusetts graffiti on campus was discovered that read “Trump #1 Whites Only USA” (Edwards & Rushin, 2018, p. 21).
This defense of white privilege is sometimes blatantly articulated as when white nationalist and explicit Trump supporter Richard Spencer states: “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves [whites] and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us” (Quoted in Harris, Davidson, Fletcher, & Harris, 2017, p. 6). Reactionary ideologies vary and the defense of privilege is not always racial – it can be sexual or economic or intellectual. Still, the upshot is that the dominant group is entitled to preserve its dominance.
Movements of the left have often arisen to contest such dominance. Contestation occurs at all levels of society. However, universities have always had a curious, paradoxical place in these political battles. Universities are gathering places for elites yet universities also have, historically, been outside the norms of society (Huntington, 1968).