The Silencing (12 page)

Miller-Young’s behavior, while indefensible, is easily understood if one considers the ideological confines of the illiberal left. Seen through this intolerant and narrow lens,
disagreement is violence
. Offending them is akin to physical assault. They are so isolated from the marketplace of ideas, that when confronted with a view they don’t like, they feel justified in doing whatever they can to silence that speech.

Campuses across the United States have become ground zero for silencing free speech. Universities founded to encourage diversity of thought and debate have become incubators of intolerance where non-sanctioned views are silenced through bullying, speech codes, “free speech zones,” and other illiberal means.

Professor Miller-Young’s assault is the headline of the incident, but what led up to the attack is equally alarming. According to Mairead McArdle, then a twenty-year-old student at nearby Thomas Aquinas College, the incident started when she approached Miller-Young and handed her an anti-abortion pamphlet. “As soon as she [saw it] she raised her voice and said, ‘Oh so you are the people who use fear tactics to scare women. And is that your sign? Well let’s go talk about that,’” McArdle recounted to me. “We then walked over to the sign [that depicted an aborted fetus]. From that point on she did not stop yelling at us. With her it never went back to a reasonable discussion. She was just mad. She said, ‘You don’t have the right to be here, you don’t belong here, you don’t go here.’”

So who was the person using “fear tactics” against women here? It seems it was Miller-Young. “She told us, ‘You guys don’t know what you are talking about,” McArdle said. “She was cursing. She called us idiots. She was interrupting us nonstop, we barely got a word in. She threw the pamphlet at me. After awhile some of the other students gathered around, some of whom said they were Miller-Young’s students. They started yelling at us. One of the girls kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Can you please just be a decent human being and take [the sign] away?’ And I told her that I understood it was hurtful to some people, but that we had a right to be there, and they could not just tell us to go away.’”

But this wasn’t enough for Miller-Young. “The professor was inciting the mob. She was talking to them and walking between them and us. She was saying ‘So, should we take away their signs? Should we do it for them? They don’t have a right to be here. They are feeding you a bunch of [expletive],’” said McArdle. “She started a chant of ‘tear down the sign.’ The people in my group looked at each other and it was clear that everyone was scared. We tried to go in and talk to individual people to break up the [mob]. It was fifteen to twenty students. When we did go in to talk to people it worked for a minute or two. As soon as she realized her mob was breaking up she was muscling in between people saying ‘No, they are just trying to break us up, we have to stick together.’”

Multiple students who were participating in the anti-abortion demonstration confirmed that when they were able to engage the students one on one, they would listen respectfully and engage. But then Miller-Young would intervene and try to stir them up. This kind of behavior—tyranny by someone holding a minority view in a group—is a theme that often emerges in stories involving the illiberal left’s silencing campaign. All it takes is one or two people to claim grievance and start bullying everyone else to fall in line.

Eventually Miller-Young realized she had lost the students and upped the ante. McArdle recalls, “She was yelling and walking towards me and I backed up because I thought she was going to hit me. That’s when she
grabbed the sign. She asked a few students to help her and she carried it off. We were all shaken up. One of the girls was crying. A student with [Miller-Young] said, ‘You better guard your other sign or we’ll take that one too.’” In a video of the incident, the professor taunts the girls as she is walking away and says, “I may be a thief but you are a terrorist.”

Thrin Short, the then-sixteen-year-old sister of one of the organizers of the demonstration, was frightened but realized they needed to retrieve the sign, as it was a focal point of their demonstration. She followed Miller-Young and her students—all the while filming them—and caught up with them at an elevator they had just boarded. Thrin recalled, “I was kind of scared to get in the elevator, but I figured that’s what I would do.” Miller-Young blocked the doorway and told her she couldn’t get on. In the video, the professor repeatedly shoves Thrin, smirking the whole time. The video becomes blurry as Miller-Young grabs the girl.
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According to Thrin, the professor was holding both of her wrists, and scratched her, in an effort to wrest the camera out of her hands. Pictures of her wounds were later posted on her group’s website.
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The activists were not able to get their sign back. Miller-Young explained to the police officer that she and her students went to her office and destroyed the sign with scissors.
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She said she had a “moral” right to have acted as she did. Even after the officer explained to her that a crime had occurred, she insisted she had set a good example for her students. She characterized all of her actions as those of a “conscientious objector.” She described the sign used by the anti-abortion activists as “hate speech.”

When the case went to trial, the jury took a different view of the situation, and Miller-Young was convicted of theft and battery.
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Incredibly, she remains a professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She was never sanctioned for her behavior, at least not publicly. On the contrary, peers and university administrators robustly defended her. At least twelve university professors sent letters to the court attesting to her character
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and describing her as an open-minded bridge-builder. She was treated as the
victim in the case, and letter after letter complained of the critical press coverage her actions received, as though it was unmerited.

Dr. Stephanie Batiste, an associate professor in UCSB’s Department of Black Studies and English, expressed sympathy with Miller-Young’s reaction to the activists, reimagining the bullying that ended in a physical altercation as a simple and understandable outgrowth of Miller-Young’s “kindness combined with her commitment to justice.” She described Miller-Young as “a giving, sensitive person with a good heart” and said she was “instinctively kind.”

Miller-Young is so “kind” that she has never directly apologized to the girl she attacked, or to the students she intimidated and mocked and attempted to silence. Instead, in a naked attempt to gain leniency, Miller-Young provided the court with a written apology. As the mother of the victim noted to the court, the apology “says nothing about her pushing, grabbing and scratching Thrin.”
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The letter also doesn’t explain her lack of contrition with the police officer, or why a week after the incident she re-tweeted a tweet by one of her supporters who said she would stand with Miller-Young “until that whining little bigot eats her accusation with a barbed fork.”

But really, whether she is kind or not is beside the point. No one has ever suggested that Miller-Young should be prevented from expressing disagreement, outrage, or even anger at the demonstration. The students were in fact happy to debate the topic with her. That was why they were there. What Miller-Young is not free to do, as a matter of law, is steal property or physically attack other people because she has been exposed to views that upset her. Separate from the law, it’s alarming there is not broader agreement that a professor shouldn’t abuse her power to intimidate young people in an attempt to silence their views. Even had she stayed on the right side of the law, Miller-Young should not have been considered innocent in the eyes of the university or her peers.

The academics defending Miller-Young pretend that she was held hostage and forced to look at images that offended her. Miller-Young was
in possession of two legs that she quite easily could have used to walk away from the sign that she claims sent her over the edge. In her letter in support of Miller-Young, Erica Lorraine Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology at Spelman College, blasted the media’s depictions of Miller-Young as a “crazed feminist studies professor who bullies and taunts young people.” But that’s exactly what she did. She proudly recounted it to a police officer and there is a video of it.

One can only imagine what would happen if a conservative professor who opposed abortion rights harassed, pushed, and scratched a pro–abortion rights activist and then stole and destroyed her sign. It would have led the evening newscasts under the “War on Women” banner and made the front page of the
New York Times
. The professor would have been fired within hours of the incident and escorted off the campus.

Yet the university—a publicly funded institution—never condemned or apologized for Miller-Young’s behavior. When asked for a comment from the media, a UC Santa Barbara representative said the university didn’t discuss personnel issues, but would confirm that the demonstrators were in the campus designated “free speech area” and thus had not been violating any campus rules.

Soon after the incident, Michael D. Young, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, sent a letter to students addressing the fact that “during the past few weeks, UCSB has been visited by various anti-abortion crusaders” and lamented that outsiders were coming on campus to create discord. He labeled them “the most recent generation of true believers, self-proclaimed prophets, and provocateurs.” Miller-Young’s actions were never mentioned. Instead, the chancellor created an “us-vs.-them” paradigm that assumed that every student at this public university shared his pro–abortion rights views. He wrote of how the UCSB community was being “tested” by “outsiders coming into our midst to provoke us, to taunt us and attempt to turn us against one another as they promote personal causes and agendas.”
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What a strange way to describe the expression of free speech on a university campus. How can someone demonstrating against abortion
possibly be construed as attempting to “provoke” or to turn people against each other? Would the chancellor argue that a pro–abortion rights demonstration on a public campus was a hostile act? Unlikely.

While many people might think showing a picture of an aborted fetus is distasteful, the demonstrators told me they chose the image to draw attention to one of the realities of abortion. This was done in the same way one might show a picture of a starving child to show the reality of a famine. Young has no evidence that the activists were seeking to divide rather than inform. But this attitude is typical of the illiberal left. Real disagreement isn’t tolerated. Activism against a liberal cause is construed as an attack. Which is probably why in Miller-Young’s mind—and the minds of her defenders—she was justified in her actions.

It’s easy to write Miller-Young off as an unstable kook, but by all accounts that would be wrong. The judge in the case expressed the belief that outside this event, she had “impeccable character.”
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Indeed, her letters of support attest that this woman is well liked and respected by people who share her worldview. There is little reason to doubt this. That is precisely the problem. Miller-Young, like many of her fellow illiberal left travelers, appears to be able to function perfectly as long as she is surrounded by people expressing ideas and beliefs she shares. She is isolated in a cocoon where she doesn’t have to confront information or ideas that conflict with her worldview. This in itself is not unique. Many Americans have chosen to limit their interaction to people who are like them. Of course, most Americans aren’t university professors who are supposed to be broad-minded and able to teach students with diverse views. University professors should, ideally, encourage debate. A campus should be a place where students are confronted with challenging and new ideas. College brochures and mission statements are laden with promises of free thinking and debate, precisely because there can be no rigorous education without these elements.

Most Americans also don’t feel justified in harassing and intimidating people who hold beliefs with which they disagree. When someone expresses
a view they don’t share, they don’t label it “hate speech” as Miller-Young called the anti-abortion demonstration. They lack the sense of entitlement of the illiberal left, which believes that anyone who doesn’t hold the “right” views deserves to be ostracized. Most Americans, whether liberal, middle of the road, or conservative, have learned to live with the tension of differing beliefs in a pluralistic society. They may not actually enjoy having to hear the differing beliefs—which is why they often tune into forms of media that will affirm what they already believe—but they aren’t actively trying to silence people with whom they disagree.

Thankfully, physical assault is not the preferred silencing tactic of the illiberal left. Jail time isn’t their goal: shutting people up is the mission. But Miller-Young’s case is instructive because of the terminology she chose to defend herself. She was offended. The demonstrators were engaging in “hate speech.” The demonstration had caused her “harm.” This language appears repeatedly in cases where the illiberal left has worked to silence their ideological opponents. Opposing points of view aren’t legitimate: they are malicious, vicious attacks that justify a host of silencing techniques, including the kind of fierce intimidation exhibited by a university authority figure like Miller-Young.

NO OFFENSE

The root of nearly every free speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, or even expelled. If the left can preemptively silence opposing speakers or opposing groups—such as getting a speech or event canceled, or denying campus recognition for a group—even better.