Postmodernists Against Free Speech
Those who complain about the current social and intellectual atmosphere in the academy are generally pretty sure of just one thing they’re for and just one thing they’re against: They’re for free speech, and they’re against postmodernism and critical theory. Now, it’s not always clear what is meant by those things, or why they should be natural opponents. But sometimes the inspiration, if not the underlying logic, shines through — as in the case of two recent books by two academics who could quite fairly be called postmodern theorists. One is Ulrich Baer’s What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus. The other is Stanley Fish’s The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. (That sure is a lot of topics to tell us “how to think” about!) Baer’s What Snowflakes Get Right seems to have been hastily assembled based on a single article (of the same title and in The New York Times’ so-called “philosophy” section, The Stone) that inspired some agent or publisher to tell Baer that a book …