Princeton’s campus sits empty. (Photo Credit: Flickr/Ken Lund)
Editor’s Note: In order to respect our sources’ anonymity, The Tory has changed the names of multiple interviewees.
“Can we agree to disagree?”
After months of painful silence, Daniel, a current Princeton student, finally confessed the truth to a friend: he planned to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. His friend instantly recoiled. “I remember seeing fear, and discomfort, and anger, and most of all confusion,” Daniel remembered later. “They just couldn’t seem to reconcile the person they knew and me as a conservative.”
Desperate to salvage the situation, he asked, “Can we just agree to disagree?”
His friend’s reply was immediate.
“I’m sorry,” they said, “but it’s just not possible.”
Four years later, Daniel’s question lingers like a fog over the turbulent, hyper-partisan landscape of 2020 America: can we, in fact, agree to disagree? For conservative and moderate students at Princeton, the answer is far from clear. Navigating academic and social relationships seemed perilous enough before, but in the storm of Princeton’s online evolution, it can sometimes feel like tiptoeing through a minefield while blindfolded. “You have to tread really carefully,” says Daniel, “because it’s become such a personal thing for people. It’s…become attached to people’s identities. You can no longer just have a political conversation.” Are free speech and open discourse at Princeton truly dead? Or is there hope for more respectful, meaningful debate in the future?
To find out, we talked to eight conservative and moderate students representing three classes, seven states, four religions, both sexes, and a wide spectrum of racial and socio-economic backgrounds. Their insights, disappointments, and hopes paint a nuanced and startling picture of free speech at Princeton, and a possible path toward a more politically inclusive future.
Academically, at least, the situation isn’t all doom and gloom: if there’s one area of agreement amongst conservative and moderate students, it’s that Princeton’s faculty are some of the most intentional and effective proponents of free speech on campus. “I’ve always felt that my views have been respected by the faculty,” remarked a sophomore, who requested that we keep his identity anonymous. Another student agreed: “I’ve never felt, in any courses that I’ve taken, that I’ve been penalized for saying things that lean a little more conservative.” Many students cited professors like Robert P. George, director of the well-known James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, as being particularly open to debating alternative points of view; but others have also found welcoming environments in more traditionally liberal departments, such as the Lewis Center for the Arts. One senior worried that his proposal for an “explicitly conservative” creative thesis wouldn’t go over well with left-leaning arts faculty. But to his surprise, they were “actually really excited about it”—one professor even took the time, he explains, to find another conservative artistic work he could look to as a model.
In the classroom, then, the future appears bright. But socially, as another senior put it, “it’s game over.” Many conservative and moderate students feel a constant and consuming pressure to self-censor, often choosing to conceal their political beliefs to avoid being “cancelled” by their peers. Logan Mundy, President of the Princeton Pro-Life Club, suggests “it’s this kind of fear of being ‘the other,’ and being ostracized for your beliefs” that students struggle with before deciding to stay silent.
Their anxiety is not unfounded: one senior, a member of one of Princeton’s eating clubs, revealed that he knew of other members being “blacklisted” for their political beliefs; another student described having a “target on my back” and receiving hateful, expletive-ridden messages after signing a conservative petition. Most interviewed students reported straining or losing their social relationships after revealing that they were conservative or moderate. Engaging with other students politically, then, is “just not worth it,” as one student explained. “I don’t want to be called names just because I’m asking you a question about what you actually believe.” When asked how often she feels that pressure to conceal her true opinions, one student answered, quietly and simply: “Always.”
For many, the product of such constant self-censoring is the creation of dual identities: a hidden, truest self, and the politically correct reconstruction shown to others. It’s a dilemma that Mundy, a member of two dance groups in addition to his involvement in the Pro-Life Club, wrestles with regularly. “I ask myself,” he explains, “‘Should I share this to my personal Instagram? Do I want all of my friends and followers to know that I’m part of the Pro-Life group? Do I want to mix Pro-Life me with dance group me?” Another student confessed that only after leaving Princeton would he feel comfortable being “100% me.” The result of living with a split identity? Many students move through life at Princeton as “closet-conservatives,” never revealing who they truly are or what they stand for. “There are a lot more conservatives than we might even realize,” Mundy says. “They just don’t want to say anything.”
Usually, political and intellectual discourse is seamlessly interwoven into campus life. Students argue about a precept discussion in the dining hall or discuss current events on the way to class. While these conversations might inspire heated debate, sophomore Isaac Gradl notes that most people are “willing to at least consider your opinions and argue with you in a nice manner.”
However, in the absence of a true campus experience due to COVID-19, any and all political discourse occurs via the Internet. One student explains that “what’s been happening right now is an intellectual turning point that we haven’t seen—ever, I think. It’s free speech being presented in this new medium.” Because Zoom classes aren’t conducive to random conversations, political discussion occurs over social media or residential college listservs, instead. Platforms for anonymous posting like Tiger Confessions have become hotspots for debate. Another student describes the dynamic that has replaced in-person discourse: “Once one person with a strong opinion responds, other people with opposing opinions are afraid to counter them, and so it ends up seeming like everyone on the page agrees with the first view.” The ability to like a post or comment to mark agreement with an opinion doesn’t encourage people to defend their position and engage with the idea. Instead, it contributes to the “ideological bubble unique to (Tiger Confessions)… that doesn’t necessarily reflect the rest of the university. But to somebody whose only connection to university life is the page, which is quite a few people now that we’re all online, it can start to feel like that’s how the whole campus is.” So a new environment emerges, one that fosters fear of expressing dissenting opinions.
Facebook Group TigerCongessions has grown increasingly toxic. (Photo Credit: Facebook Screenshot)
While the number of political posts and nature of discussions have varied over the course of several page administrators, the sheer divisiveness of the content and conversations has urged the current administrator to offer a high bar for the quality of political posts. People have pushed to create separate submission pages for different political ideologies, evidently to quell the acrimony and toxicity that exists between posters and commenters of differing political opinions. Now, we are left with an intellectual void, one in which the opportunity to engage with and be challenged by different political ideas and opinions has vanished.
Psychologists have attempted to explain the dynamics of online discourse through the idea of dissociative anonymity. Essentially, a separation forms between a person’s online behavior and in-person identity, eroding their willingness to take responsibility for their actions. One student describes this phenomenon: “The Internet, just in general, is a very interesting place for free speech to take place. There’s a level of anonymity in the Internet that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and you can say quite a bit without facing any sort of real social consequences.” Gradl posits that the root of the problem comes from “not being able to have a meaningful conversation with one or two other people and knowing who they are. It makes it so easy online. I could have a debate with someone from across the country… and it wouldn’t affect me in any way, and I could easily put out very hateful speech without it having any personal consequences for me. So again, we’re not really worried or concerned about being charitable or seeing a person as someone who is good and well intentioned.” This only encourages an intellectually and emotionally toxic environment, one that lacks what Gradl describes as “dialogue and engagement.” What would be a thoughtful response in a face-to-face conversation is no longer subject to the immediate disapproval and hurt signaled by facial expressions and tone. This reduces concern for the feelings of others as well as fear of judgment, and it becomes more difficult to exhibit empathy through posts and comments.
All of these components contribute to more hostile and dehumanized communication, which makes the “campus” political climate appear that much more divisive. It seems that the sentiment expressed in James Madison’s Federalist 10 still rings true: “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man. . . So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.” Having fallen subject to Madison’s “nature of man,” is all hope lost for the prospect of free speech at Princeton, both on campus and online?
Most moderates and conservatives are pessimistic. “I think it’s going to end up turning into a pretty big echo chamber pretty quickly,” one senior noted. “I think it already has.” Other students pointed to a divisiveness which could not only strangle political debate, but it could also tear relationships apart. “There will be increasing polarization,” one sophomore commented, “that can pull at the fabric of our community.”
Some, however, are cautiously optimistic. “It’s the perfect storm right now,” suggests Logan Mundy, speaking of the combination of a global pandemic, looming presidential election, and nation-wide racial tensions. “So if there’s ever a time to be pessimistic, it’s now. But I think that’s because we’re in the middle of the storm. Maybe once we get into the eye of it or start passing out of it, we’ll start to be like ‘oh, the skies are clearing!’”
But how can we even begin to repair the damage of polarization and censorship and move toward a more politically inclusive future? “Talk to a conservative,” one junior would tell her liberal counterparts. “Just talk with them. I think you’ll find that your principles, the things that you’re aiming for, the goals you’re trying to accomplish, are actually really similar. I think the differences are really just in how we get there.” Other students encouraged asking questions of people with different opinions. “Instead of being like, ‘Here’s my well-defined conservative viewpoint—take it or leave it,’” one senior explained, “I will often take an approach of: ‘You think this should be our policy or moral principle–why do you think that?’” Gradl suggests “considering other people’s backgrounds, where they’ve come from, what they’ve experienced. I think learning more about that about an individual before coming to these conclusions about who they are as a result of their political beliefs I think is really important now more than ever.”
Can we, then, agree to disagree? Perhaps we can, if we follow the lead of one Princeton sophomore, who believes that open and respectful discourse is not only possible, but attainable. “While I’m confident in the things that I believe,” she argues, “I’m not so close-minded as to think that everything that I think is right, or that everything I think is free from the biases that I have. I welcome other opinions; I’m happy to engage with anybody on opinions they think I might have. And,” she adds, “I promise to listen.”
Copyright © 2024 The Princeton Tory. All rights reserved.