Opinion | The Campus Certainty Trap
“Violence” is not the problem with Walsh’s speech, “Certainty” is
A critique of the ideological monoculture and stubbornness plaguing campuses nationally
By the Editorial Staff
Left: the Stanford Law School protest of Judge Duncan; Right: the W&L Law School protest of Rodney Cook (credit Bri Hatch); Center: Matt Walsh (credit YAF)
[Update: Matt Walsh has decided to reschedule his visit to Washington and Lee University on March 30, 2023, following threats and security concerns in Nashville, Tennessee. The new date for Walsh’s speech has not yet been determined.]
The simple truth is that Matt Walsh’s visit to campus on March 30, 2023, poses no threat to anyone involved.
Unlike the mandatory Orientation Week (O-Week) training that forces First-Year students to entertain the far-left perspectives of speakers like Ibram X. Kendi and participate in guided discussions of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that make many students feel uncomfortable, nobody is being forced into the chapel to hear Mr. Walsh speak.
But just as those O-Week events can prompt useful reflection among conservative students and peers, so too might Walsh challenge some of the beliefs of progressive students. Furthermore, one might argue that Walsh’s Q&A session enables even more dialogue than O-Week, which is notorious for allotting scant opportunity for incoming students to challenge the facilitator.
After all, it was never the intention of The Spectator and College Republicans to congregate a mass of 500 homogenous-thinking students in the historic pews of Lee Chapel, National Historic Landmark. Not even all the leaders of those two conservative groups agree with Walsh’s position and demeanor, yet they recognize the value that his visit to campus might have in stimulating intellectual debate and political inquiry, both before, during, and after March 30.
This will not be achieved, however, if members of the W&L community continue reaffirming their absolute intolerance to conservative events and messages that do not adhere to the current status quo.
The opposition to Walsh’s speech — which was reported upon here — obeys an obstructive cycle that has only served to enhance partisanship and ignorance.
One need look no further than the recent lecture by Rodney Mims Cook, Jr.
Cook is a genuinely nice guy, a peacemaker trying to live up to his father’s esteemed legacy. He has tried to quell the intense vitriol that has risen between dissident alumni and the university administration over the last few years. If there is anyone suited for that goal, it's Cook.
But before Cook had the chance to come to campus with a striking sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and before he had the honor to be introduced as a dear friend of their family by Alveda King, W&L students began criticizing Cook as a racist, white supremacist. The subsequent protest speeches and Ring-tum Phi coverage of the event did nothing to recast the speaker in a more accurate light.
Judging by his feature in the latest petition against a campus speaker (Matt Walsh), those same students gained nothing from Cook’s reconciliatory address. Few students who disagreed with Cook even stayed to hear him out, rather entwining themselves deeper in what one columnist has called the “Certainty Trap.”
Ilana Redstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, defined this counterproductive phenomenon as “a resolute unwillingness to recognize the possibility that we might not be right in our beliefs and claims.” She recently applied it to the debacle at Stanford Law School when student hecklers were joined by the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in denouncing the conservative message of Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan.
Stanford’s example — which has fortunately (and perhaps surprisingly) resulted in a productive recommitment to their guarantee of free speech — began with a trend not dissimilar from Washington and Lee. And while the protestors’ behavior may slightly differ between the two schools, their obstructive ideology and inhibition to campus intellectualism is the same.
The Certainty Trap can snare conservatives and liberals alike, and is not fixed to any particular environment. In recent years, however, it has been especially pertinent to college campuses. This is a major problem.
Colleges are already “moving toward becoming an ideological monoculture,” says Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru. College professors are at least 5-to-1 left-leaning nationally, which for obvious reasons “undermines higher education.” Conservative arguments are ignored (except for the seldom strawman “counter” argument); liberal students do not get challenged or trained to adequately defend their beliefs; and conservative students feel pressured to keep to themselves and refrain from engaging in academic dialogue. Over time, the partisan gap widens and both sides find themselves less and less motivated to intellectually engage with each other. Sometimes, their interactions become polemic, hateful, and ad hominem.
According to Redstone, the Certainty Trap “is what gives us the satisfying sense of righteousness we need to judge harshly, condemn and dismiss people with whom we disagree.”
The relationship between the Certainty Trap and campus ideological monoculture is, therefore, a reciprocal one: monoculture feeds Certainty, and Certainty feeds monoculture.
Let’s look at some examples.
Protestors denounced Rodney Cook’s lecture because they were certain of the — to quote a sign held up by the protestors — “White Supremacy Meeting Straight Ahead.”
As Cook himself responded, “I wonder if that young man ever had a cross burned in his yard to write such a thing against me.” The KKK burned a cross in Cook’s Atlanta yard when he was 6 for his father’s support of civil rights.
Likewise, despite many claims — including by The Phi — that Cook propagated the Lost Cause, Cook reiterated that “There was no Lost Cause rhetoric of any sort.”
So who was wrong? Maybe Cook; maybe the lecture really was a rally for white supremacists to applaud “The Marble Man.” Or, maybe the protestors were wrong.
After all, many W&L students have a tendency to boldly pronounce that any event referencing Lee is one of white supremacy. In January 2022, a handful of students in a GroupMe chat removed any student who merely promoted or defended a lecture on Lee’s presidency. The lecture was sponsored by Students for Historical Preservation (SHP) and delivered by respected community leader and professor, David Cox. In addition to vulgar ad hominem attacks, one individual even warned students that an upcoming SHP event about Dr. King was a “pro-confederacy” ploy: a baseless and ignorant accusation to say the least.
As was also the case with the visit by conservative radio host Larry Elder last year and the effort to “Retain the Name” of Washington and Lee University in 2021, it has become the standard for protestors to fall into the Certainty Trap. Rather than respectfully acknowledge or hear out an opposing view, some students (and faculty) take immature measures to inhibit the message: tearing down flyers, drawing false equivalencies to Nazis and the Klan, and in Stanford’s case, heckling the speaker.
Milder protestors — like those who walked out during Cook’s speech and who are organizing the Walsh counter-event — act in accordance with university guidelines, but are still just as stubborn. What might one hope to achieve by signing a petition to bar Matt Walsh from speaking on campus? Certainly, not any civil or intellectual discourse.
The petition expresses a common rebuttal to this point. “Matt Walsh,” the petition says, “does not create spaces for productive, academic discourse, but rather, he insists that only his transphobic viewpoint be heard.”
Disregarding the fact that his talk features a Q&A segment, is it reasonable to assume that there would be any less opposition to the event if The Spectator had brought another speaker to discuss modern gender ideology? Would certain students be less offended if transgender ideology were questioned in the classroom or at lunch? Would a conversation between a conservative and a progressive about gender elicit any less criticism of the conservative?
As the aforementioned examples show, students fall into the Certainty Trap even when the event is not political — like historic lectures and reconciliatory talks — because there is the false Certainty that those events will espouse hateful beliefs. It naturally follows that any explicitly conservative position will fare no better in the eyes of the ideological monoculture.
The main error of this Certainty lies in an unwillingness to ask, as Redstone puts it, if disagreement is truly “rooted in ‘oppression’ or a denial of one’s ‘humanity and right to exist’.” It is quite possible that a conservative stance — be it gender, Lee’s legacy, or tax policy — is not rooted in a fundamental desire to oppress particular minority groups
Yet this is the assumption made about Walsh, The Spectator, and College Republicans.
Many protestors assumed that The Spectator invited Walsh to speak on March 30 because it was a day before the International Transgender Day of Visibility. If anyone had asked us, we would have politely reassured them that the date was purely coincidental, a mere scheduling decision made in early February that best reflected student and speaker availability. Truthfully, we had no idea that March 31 held any significance to the transgender community.
Other protestors passed rumors that The Spectator had implemented some policy against wearing pride-themed clothing to the event. This was a baseless assumption that served only to further slur those involved.
Repeatedly, protestors have expressed the danger associated with Walsh’s talk, both ideologically and physically.
Professor Brenna Womer claimed that “Matt Walsh is an extremely dangerous person who represents a very real threat of physical violence against trans and nonbinary people specifically, but also to all women, queer people, and people of color.”
The counter-event planning email warned to “be careful of the crowd” and Walsh’s private security detail. They listed “protecting our safety” as their primary objective, and omitted further details “for [their own] safety.”
The petition, likewise, uses the word “harmful” at least once in every paragraph, with frequent sprinklings of “violence” and “threats.”
If the goal is to prevent someone from being oppressive and harmful, vilifying them will not work. Rarely do people form ideologies out of pure maleficence, but rather from well-intentioned beliefs and principles. Conservatives are not the bad guys, nor are liberals. But we are all ignorant if we refuse to occupy alternative beliefs and self-examine our own.
If you think there is a better setting and speaker to achieve this, The Spectator welcomes your feedback for future events.