A post received from Michael Hawrylchak
On November 22, 2021, the MIT Alumni Association hosted two virtual town halls on freedom of expression at MIT. I attended the 8pm town hall, and what follows are my impressions of the event.
Overall, I found the experience to be fairly disheartening. Admittedly, my conclusions are based on a small sample size, but it seems to me that support for free speech often runs a mile wide but only an inch deep. A lot of people will profess support for free speech in the abstract, but when faced with concrete situations, this support quickly evaporates or is overridden by other concerns.
The town hall got off to a bad start with the introductory remarks by Annalisa Weigel, president of the alumni association. Weigel referred to the Abbot situation and then explained that the negative response to his disinvitation was driven by incomplete information. I found this insulting and condescending. I think it shows bad faith to invite people to participate in a discussion and then poison the well by preemptively characterizing one side of the debate as ignorant and uninformed. Or, if she truly doesn't understand how someone could be fully informed about the Abbot incident and still highly critical of it, that says a lot about the ideological echo chamber she operates within.
After the brief introductory statements, we were placed into breakout sessions. There were initially five alumni in my room, and a sixth joined later. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only member of MFSA in my group. There was also a facilitator who played very little role in the conversation.
We began with introductions and then started discussing the first question: "As alumni, are you concerned about matters of free expression at MIT?" I was happy to hear all five of the alumni express strong support for a broad right to free expression at MIT, including the right to express unpopular views. The Abbot incident was mentioned as a particular concern by several people, but some in the group noted that they weren't very familiar with the details. After that point, we didn't stick to the provided questions but just let the conversation flow, and much of the discussion centered around the Abbot situation.
At one point, in response to someone's statement that Abbot had been disinvited due to the opinions he expressed, one of the participants stated that he believed MIT's actions had been misunderstood. In his telling, Abbot wasn't disinvited due to the specific views he expressed, but because of the controversy those views had stirred up, which threatened to undermine the purposes of the program for which he had been invited. He compared it to commencement, where you wouldn't want a divisive speaker because the ensuing controversy would detract from the purpose of celebrating the graduates.
I responded that even if he's correct, and MIT's disinvitation was based on the controversy rather than his substantive views, this is still bad from a free speech perspective. It allows a small vocal group to manufacture grounds for disinviting anyone they disfavor for ideological or political reasons, simply by stirring up the very controversy that justifies the disinvitation. I also noted that small vocal groups are often highly unrepresentative of the views of the broader community. This seemed to get a positive reaction from others in the group, and a concession from my interlocutor that I had a point.
A little later, this same person made a different argument in support of the disinvitation. He noted that there was a long time between Abbot's invitation and the planned lecture date because it had been delayed due to COVID, and said that when Abbot was first invited he hadn't yet made his controversial public statements. Had his views been known beforehand, he wouldn't have been invited in the first place. In other words, the disinvitation was just returning things to the situation that would have occurred under normal circumstances without the long gap between invitation and lecture.
I responded, agreeing that it was very possible Abbot never would have been invited had his views been known earlier, but this is part of the problem. If administrators are choosing not to invite certain people because of their political opinions -- either because of substantive disagreements with their views or because they might spark controversy -- then the range of opinions being expressed on campus is being restricted. But this is an invisible problem. We'll never know when someone's speech causes them to not be considered in the first place.
This is why it's so important to draw the line at disinvitations like Abbot's. The decision to invite him shows that he was at one point deemed qualified and worthy of giving the address, and it was his speech on other topics that caused the invitation to be withdrawn. This argument also seemed to get a positive reaction from others in the group.
At some point a sixth participant joined the room. She was invited to express her views, but she said that she wanted to just listen and collect her thoughts for a few minutes first. When she was ready to talk, the conversation took a sharp turn.
She explained that in her view the real problem with the Abbot incident was that it had given ammunition to conservatives to misrepresent the situation and make MIT look bad. She then imitated her perception of what "conservatives" have been saying by literally making yapping noises like a dog. She gave no explanation of what had been misrepresented nor did she show any recognition that there were any legitimate free speech concerns at play.
This led another member of the group to jump in and agree with her. I was surprised, because this individual had earlier expressed agreement with several of my statements. Now, however, he suggested that MIT's real misstep was that it didn't own its mistake in inviting Abbot in the first place. He said that when MIT revoked Abbot's invitation, the institute should have forthrightly explained that had Abbot's opinions been known beforehand, he never would have been invited to begin with, and this was a failure by MIT in not appropriately vetting him.
At this point we ran out of time and I wasn't able to respond.
Bearing in mind that I'm making judgments on the basis of a single relatively short conversation, this is my impression of the participants:
Two members of the breakout group (aside from myself), to the extent that I could interpret their views, seemed genuinely troubled by the Abbot situation and supportive of stronger free speech norms.
One member professed support for free speech, but was quick to make excuses for MIT's actions. I perceived him as someone who likes to think of himself as a supporter of free speech, but who interprets free speech in such a weak and narrow fashion that it's not worth much in practice.
One member seemed utterly disdainful of the idea of free speech, or at least completely unconcerned that it is under any threat.
My impression of the final member of the group is that he's someone who has never thought deeply about free speech, and he seemed to be in the process of forming his opinions during the course of the conversation, swinging one way and then the other after hearing different arguments. He ended the town hall in a position that strikes me as antithetical to strong free speech norms, but he likely doesn't even realize he's done so because he's not familiar with the terrain.
I've since heard that some other MFSA members who attended the town halls had more positive experiences in their breakout sessions, but I think my experience usefully illustrates the range of opinions in the alumni community.