Update: On Wednesday morning, Middlebury College canceled Legutko’s talk.
More than 300 students and faculty at Middlebury College have signed a letter protesting a lecture scheduled for Wednesday by conservative Polish politician, philosopher and writer Ryszard Legutko.
Legutko’s writings suggest that contemporary liberalism shares a trait with the communist leadership under which he grew up: a tendency to stifle free speech.
It’s been two years since angry protestors shut down a lecture on campus by ultraconservative author Charles Murray. A Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, was injured by protesters as she helped Murray flee to a waiting car.
This week’s dustup has similar themes.
An online protest letter brands Legutko a racist and a homophobe and asks the Middlebury Political Science Department and Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs not to sponsor the talk, set for 4:30 p.m. at the McCardell Bicentennial Hall.
Legutko has criticized multiculturalism, portrayed gay marriage as a destructive experiment and characterized gay pride as “anti-Christian and shocking,” according to the letter. Giving him a platform to speak in a series known as the Alexander Hamilton Forum does not meet the forum’s stated goals to foster thoughtful engagement, the letter states.
“There is nothing thoughtful about giving even more space to homophobes, racists and misogynists than they already occupy in the American political sphere,” it says.
“Students have voiced again and again that bringing speakers such as Legutko is not productive,” it says. “Academic departments should set a standard as to what is debatable, and we firmly believe that homophobia, xenophobia, racism, and misogyny are not, are never debatable.”
The letter also refers to the Murray incident, for which dozens of students were disciplined.
“A cornerstone of any kind of ‘thoughtful citizenship’ should always be listening, and we urge you all to recall the events of March 2, 2017 where the administration, including President Laurie Patton and the PSCI Department, failed to listen to the voices of students,” the letter states.
After the Murray talk, students “faced mental, emotional, academic, and personal challenges from having their existence on this campus trivialized. We see this event as coming dangerously close to re-inflicting a similar pain on the student body,” the letter stated.
Backers of the speech disagreed. In a letter to students posted online Monday, Keegan Callanan, an assistant professor of political science and director of the Alexander Hamilton Forum, defended the decision to bring Legutko to campus.
After the Murray incident, Callanan joined Stanger on a panel at Princeton University. Callanan criticized the “intellectual homogeneity” at Middlebury, according to the Middlebury Campus, the college newspaper.
This week he insisted the Legutko talk would go forward. He urged students who are critical of Legutko’s views, such as on gay rights, to debate him at the event.
“No questions are out of bounds at Hamilton Forum events. Tough and incisive questions are the coin of the realm,” Callanan wrote.
He emphasized Legutko’s past as a young man who “defied the dictates of the Soviet-backed tyranny in Poland when he served as editor of an illegal scholarly journal, Arka. He risked much for liberty and has a unique perspective on what it is like living under a tyrannical regime,” Callanan wrote.
He also noted that Legutko’s most recent book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, has been hailed as “the indispensable book about the current crisis of liberalism” by Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law.
Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and a member of the European Parliament representing Poland. He is also a member of the Law and Justice Party, which critics in the protest letter said is known for “homophobic, racist, sexist and xenophobic orientations.”
Callanan questioned some of the characterizations in the protest letter.
He wrote:
Perhaps you have already seen a number of quotations from Prof. Legutko being circulated around campus. Some are doctored and others accurate, some in context and others not. For my part, I find in these quotations the words of a man who has been sharply critical of the methods of activists in the EU, and who holds the same position on same-sex marriage once held by President Obama, President Clinton, and Secretary Clinton. Although this is not the subject of his talk, it is up to you to decide whether you would like to pose frank questions of Prof. Legutko on the topic of same-sex marriage and gay rights.
The protest letter was signed by leaders of student groups including the Black Student Union, Queer and Trans People of Color, the Student Government Institutional Diversity Committee and Asian Students in Action.
Here’s a copy of the letter of protest; to see signatures as well click here:
Here’s Callanan’s full letter:
This story was updated on April 17 to include the embedded letter of protest.
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“”A cornerstone of any kind of ‘thoughtful citizenship’ should always be listening, and we urge you all to recall the events of March 2, 2017 where the administration, including President Laurie Patton and the PSCI Department, failed to listen to the voices of students,” the letter states. “
Wow…that seems like an outright threat to silence those who say things they disagree with. It’s easy to know who the real fascists are when they make their tendencies so blatantly obvious.
Oh my, the poor psyches of the students who do not want to tolerate any opinion other than their own. One of the basic tenets of our democracy is the ability for different points of view to be allowed. Unfortunately we now have a younger generation who thinks they are right and there is no need to listen to any other opinion that may disagree with their own. I have always tried to listen to different sides of issues and make up my own mind, not just bury my head in the sand and ignore anything that is different. I see the professors and politicians promoting this one sided approach as a means to solidify their opinions as the right ones
Typical liberal reaction. Don’t agree with them, you must be silenced. Some, repeat some, of these kids may have some smarts, but few if any have any real-world experience. Most are living off the efforts of their parents. Many now favor socialism, but have no problem going to a high-priced school. Wonder if they would be willing to go to a community college and give the money saved to some less fortunate kids so they can get an education,also. We all know the answer to that question.
The neo-Maoists strike once again. Nuance is not the coin of their realm, but shutting down, shaming, and demonizing is. Recently the Supreme Court unanimously supported the right of an all -Asian US band to call themselves The Slants. The SJW micro-aggression crowd wouldn’t have it but the SCOTUS upheld the band’s right to call themselves what they want under the right of free speech guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. The entire concept of ‘hate speech” is a political, not legal, construct used used to browbeat any viewpoints into submission by totalitarian means that the new Cultural Revolution crowd doesn’t cotton to, and is antithetical to free speech. It’s protected under the law, however offensive that it may be to some. Money is NOT free speech, but Prof. Legutko’s views are, and if some students can’t bear to hear them, they need not. Either all have free speech or none do, there is no cherry picking.
It would seem as if the letter signers wish to demonstrate the very point that Professor Legutko makes, “that contemporary liberalism shares a trait with the communist leadership under which he grew up: a tendency to stifle free speech.” They only demonstrate how little intellectual integrity they have.
It is funny to me that someone argues these students have no real world experience of their own. Just based on the signatories, many are transgender and queer and of color. All three categories exhibit higher suicide rates and are victims of violent hate crimes at disproportionate rates. Maybe we should trust that they do have real world experience.
Most of the comments on here are spot on EXCEPT for the fact that they point the fingers at the students. These kids are just poor indoctrinated sheep who cannot think for themselves.
It’s the University and it’s GroupThink leaders who set the agenda. Follow the trail folks.
Sadly it’s now the job of of Neo-Liberalism to ban books (It’s happening on Amazon folks) and set the thought agenda. Liberalism is now thought fascism….way to go snowflakes.
Middlebury College but make up their minds. Either they support free speech and open debate as a means to find common ground, or they now to the few whos mentality can not handle even hearing someone that thinks differently than them. With their resources, they can secure these events without a problem if they choose to. Whos running this place after all???
The intellectual rot starts at the top as in academia these days tenure will not be granted to aspirants in social science/literature/philosophy departments who dare voice any heterodoxy of thought to the “party line”. Dr Jordan Peterson, Prof. of Clinical Psychology at Univ of Toronto, has become a lightning rod for this very issue of academic free speech. Even the brilliant writer David Foster Wallace was heavily criticized 20 years ago for suggesting to his new students of Writing and English Literature that use of the proper “King’s English” was preferable to street slang and/or “Ebonics” in furthering one’s career advancement.. just try that in the academy today unless one desires termination. Any student who feels so threatened by a lecture containing ideas that they oppose that they force it’s cancellation perhaps should spend more time studying the history of totalitarianism.
Travis Sanderson,
I don’t think you get how statistics work.