'Free inquiry is an essential feature of our nation's democracy'

The above was written in the name of President Trump in the text of his controversial executive order regarding First Amendment protection on college campuses. Somewhat less than half of the text is devoted to federal guarantees of "free inquiry" on campuses; more is dedicated to mandating a system that allows applicants for admission and their families to judge colleges on the basis of graduate earnings and loan repayment rates. The news, however, was that Trump presumably wanted to force alt-right speakers into campuses across the land, using the threat of federal sanctions to make academia safe for his presumed rhetorical champions.

The overall language of the order is inevitably vague, and it reads more like a set of recommendations than a set of commands. Whether it can get to the heart of the matter, as far as most conservatives most likely are concerned, is unclear. The problem lately is the threat of antifa types disrupting talks, sometimes violently, by those they designate as fascists and/or bigots. To solve this, the order would need to make school administrations responsible for the actions of students in a way that may not be fair. It would seem to require schools to take all steps to protect controversial speakers, yet in a way, as consistency requires, that would not compromise the First Amendment rights of those who want to express their disapproval of political provocateurs. To guarantee the provocateurs' safety, will demonstrators need to be relegated to the dreaded "free speech zones?" Should violence break out, how exactly are schools to treat the violent to satisfy the Trump administration? All of this will have to be worked out by the relevant federal departments, but so long as it's all done evenhandedly there should be no cause for alarm in the executive order. It's worded with appropriate vagueness to implicitly guarantee safe space on campuses for the entire range of political opinion, and in any event that sort of safe space is needed more urgently than some that have been erected lately. I could go on about how people should be willing to hear their beliefs challenged, but it would really be irrelevant, since nothing in the order compels students to hear speakers they find abhorrent.

If anything, Trump and his writers could be clearer on the really relevant point, which is that ideology neither licenses anyone to physically attack anyone else, nor makes anyone liable to physical attack. The federal government is under no obligation to respect, and in fact has a duty to dispute the pretense that so-called fascists have no right to a platform in our society. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that not every question of political philosophy needs to be rehashed perpetually, but the liberal tradition under which we live allows no one to claim authoritatively that any question is so firmly settled that further debate can only be harmful. That's probably still a good thing given the common tendency to confuse genuine free inquiry with the allegedly settled questions of fascism, marxism, racism etc.  While we still live in a sociocultural environment in which nearly everyone identifies disagreement with his point of view with "hate," free inquiry probably needs stricter safeguards regulating those institutions that normally should foster it than is normally necessary. These might be exploited cynically by right-wing provocateurs who feel deprived of the platform to which they feel entitled, but as long as the language of the order doesn't favor them explicitly or exclusively that same cynical option is open to everyone from fascists to Stalinists, from the hardcore Christian right to NAMBLA. If one campus is to be sullied, supposedly, by speakers who don't represent the majority of students or faculty, the only real remedy may be to sully them all.