Is the Left Eating Itself on College Campuses?

For some left-wing advocates, the answer is a clear "yes" or "no." For others, however, deciding whether or not the Left is eating itself is a bit more complicated when it comes to assessing restrictions on free speech on college campuses today.

In a spirited debate on the matter inside the auditorium of the New York University Law School in lower Manhattan last Thursday, four of the most controversial left-wing voices to emerge in the debate in recent years pondered the question: "Is the Left eating itself?"

In varying degrees, all of them except one agreed that it isn't.

Brendan O'Neill, a free speech absolutist and editor of spiked, Britain's first online-only current affairs magazine, dismissed the movement to silence some voices on campus that students don't agree with as simply "not left."

"They are not left. And I understand that's semantics but it's incredibly important that we get this right. I know they call themselves left but North Korea calls itself a democratic republic. People lie and more importantly people use progressive phrases to disguise reactionary agendas. That is a longstanding historical phenomenon and that is what we face on campus today — the dressing up of the new reaction against enlightenment thought as something progressive," he said.

"I think what we face on campus today and across many institutions in the West today is far worse than left on left battles. We face the slow motion agonizing death of enlightenment thought and the return of reactionary ideas," O'Neill explained.

And he should know, he was banned from Oxford University in 2014 because of his freewheeling views. Now he's stirring debate on U.S. university campuses with Spiked's "Unsafe Space" free speech tour.

"What we have on campus in the U.S. and the U.K. today is not left," he said. "It's hyper racial consciousness."

Despite the ongoing debate on sexual assault and racism on college campuses, the current movement that has been sweeping college campuses seeking to police discussions on the subjects isn't in line with liberal thought.

"This insistence on female fragility, this paranoid philistinism so that books are defaced with trigger warnings and everything from tabloid newspapers to sexy pop songs can be banned. This disavowal of your own autonomy, your own adulthood, and you're bleeding with bureaucracy to provide you with psychic comfort. This use of racial phrases like white men, as if all white men have the same privilege, as if class, the building block of left politics was irrelevant for such as small thing that didn't bear talking about. None of this is left," O'Neill said.

"None of this is what I understand to be left. In fact, it has far more in common with the politics of reaction than it has with the politics of the left. It is a replay, in my view, of the carnivals of reaction that greeted the rise of enlightenment thought. The birth of mass democracy, the liberation of women and ethnic minorities from second class oblivion. In my view, today's campus agitators better resemble the reaction against those progressive radical leaps forward for humankind than they do progressive radical leaps forward themselves," he argued.

The "politics on offer is either black self-pity or white self-loathing," O'Neill said, arguing that it is also demeaning to women and ethnic minorities.

Laura Kipnis, a feminist essayist and professor of media studies at Northwestern University whose writing on campus sexual harassment policies caused her to become the subject of two Title IX investigations at Northwestern, gave a "provisional no" to the question if "left" was taken to mean broadly "anti-capitalist" and if by "eating itself we mean broadly the freedom of speech on campus issue."