While my economic proclivities lean decidedly left, I've been pretty clear on here many, many times that I am very wary of over-policing speech-acts and other forms of not-physically-injurious expression, especially on university campuses. Many (though by no means all) of the right-leaning posters here have claimed, in recent years, that such policing is exclusively the purview and pursuit of "liberals" or "the left" (which are not, as I've belabored, really synonymous—but, as Horsie used to say, I digress...). While I've always rejected the notion that any corner of the ideological spectrum has a monopoly on reactionary outrage, I also wondered if the sense that "liberals want to control speech" (and its unvoiced correlative: "... and conservatives don't") was as much as the product of the current institutional political regime as anything else. With that regime set to transition to a very different one, at least in terms of rhetoric and optics, I will be interested to see which groups seem to be struggling most "to control speech."
To wit, yesterday saw the very same sort of reactionary silencing from conservatives that I've been told is the stock-in-trade of their liberal counterparts, when a Drexel University professor satirically tweeted about the (mythical, shadowy) concept of "White Genocide"; the right-leaning backlash was so strong that the University publicly censured him. While Professor Ciccariello–Maher is tenured, and thus his rights of expression are inscribed in his employment agreement, this sort of reaction from the University—as Ciccariello–Maher notes—sets a constricting precedent, especially with regard to non-tenured faculty.
So my question to our resident thought-police police is: This is bad too, right? The slippery-slope ethics of silencing don't suddenly straighten out when you dislike the person or ideas being silenced, right? I know I'd be alarmed if my alma mater cancelled an appearance by, say, Paul Wolfowitz*, just because of student-pressure; his ideas are bad, but he deserves a space to share them, just as students deserve to hear those ideas, and likewise deserve (especially in an environment explicitly committed to learning-objectives) the challenge of cultivating critiques and rebukes to bad (as well as good-but-not-great) ideas.
*(My alma mater wouldn't—their record is actually quite good on this issue, plus Wolfowitz is an alumnus.)
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