With student protests gripping the University of Missouri, Yale and now other schools across the country, it’s hard not to ask what lessons to draw from all the turmoil. The Cavalier Daily’s managing board has written two relevant editorials this week — one on administrative attentiveness to racial controversies and one on the importance of press coverage of public events.
In the second editorial, The Cavalier Daily stood up strongly for reporters’ duty to inform the public despite the efforts of protestors at Mizzou to curb his access to the public space they had claimed for their demonstration. The Cavalier Daily is right to be asking what these recent controversies mean for the press — and, of course, right to affirm the role of the press.
The paper should also be leading all U.Va. students and faculty in asking what these other schools’ scandals mean for U.Va. and for the integrity of the American university as a place of free exchange of ideas.
U.Va., so far, has remained blessedly free of the breed of campus activist whose demands, complaints and protests would make them tyrants.
But university protests elsewhere have pushed still farther to the fore a constellation of recent questions about America’s college students: Are they coddled? Are they too eager to claim status as victims, to hide from microagressions and to take cover under trigger warnings? Are they too quick to trust or turn to authorities for rules? Are they smart but uncritical—“excellent sheep,” as William Deresiewicz put it last year? Is their newfangled rhetoric — for example, in phrases like “check your privilege” — designed to silence rather than to spur debate?
These questions leave behind, in some ways, the issues of racism and free speech at the heart of the recent events at Yale and Mizzou. But, sooner or later, while racism will continue to demand attention, the immediately precipitating events at those schools will recede from the public eye; after all, any free society — and any university — must recognize and struggle with the inherent tension between free speech and comfort, and these latest incarnations of that conflict will take their place in a long series of illustrations of the difficulty of maintaining a free, open and just society.
What will remain when the dust has settled at Yale and Mizzou — and thus what remains important at schools like U.Va. where that dust has not been raised — are questions about how such drastic events came to be: about the nature of today’s students and the world and universities they want to inhabit.
Many of these are disconcerting questions. But they are not questions about which college students can be apathetic. The Cavalier Daily should continue to lead investigations into difficult terrain, through editorials, longer essays, reported pieces and columns by U.Va. students and faculty. In its role as a leading university and interrogator of truth, U.Va. ought now to take up the mantle of interrogating itself; these questions should not fade once Mizzou and Yale have found resolution to their immediate troubles. The task begins with the students. The Cavalier Daily has begun — who will proceed?
Julia Fisher is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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