Critics observe that the increasing polarization of many Western societies and frequent violence against dissenters are due in part to leftwing indoctrination in their educational institutions. In my experience, few radical leftwing academics advocate violence. Yet many of them helped build an environment that condoned violence through their blind adherence to dogmas.
Ironically, though, many willfully ignorant academics deny that the far left can be as violent as the far right.
In 2021, I joined an academic freedom chat group based in Germany. I was then asked by the group chair, a Western-born academic who received most of her education in the United States, to give a talk on colonialism to her students. I do not hold radical views concerning my birthplace, Hong Kong: while I yearn for the good old days of the colonial era, I am aware that the city, despite its recent political upheaval, has retained many advantages. Overall, my lived experience informed me that British colonialism brought both advantages and disadvantages, a view supported by historians. I included factual details that none can deny by portraying British Hong Kong as a prosperous and cosmopolitan haven of liberties where people fleeing wars and persecution sought refuge.
This professor, however, took offense at my lived experience of a place that she had never set foot in. She claimed to feel shocked and uncomfortable because my portrayal went against what she read about colonialism and believed that it would fuel racism against the Chinese. She even insinuated that I did not belong in academia because none of her colleagues thought like I did. She told me to join a study group on Edward Said to properly educate myself on colonialism. (RELATED: ‘Sexual Life of Colonialism’ Professor Denied Tenure at Harvard)
In fact, I read Said and other postcolonial theorists many years before this encounter. I found out that mainstream theories do not always apply easily to places like Hong Kong. Our experience of colonialism was not about oppression by the colonial power, and that of postcolonialism was not about liberation from tyranny. Our ambivalent relationship with the British Empire is reflected in local literature in the form of wordplays and mixed sentiments of nostalgia for the peaceful colonial rule and fear of what the end of British colonialism might bring to a thriving and diverse culture. Any attempt at applying such theories, therefore, needs to be done with discernment. (RELATED: Can Artificial Intelligence Reduce the Left-Wing Bias in University Classrooms?)
This professor, on the other hand, became interested in colonialism much more recently — since the refugee crisis in the West over the past decade. Adhering to simplistic narratives, she was reluctant to send a message to her students that colonialism brought benefits to the colonized. I emailed her a short story by a Hong Kong English-language fiction writer showcasing some features of postcolonial writing of the area, which she acknowledged curtly with a one-sentence reply.
In fact, colonialism was a recurrent topic in that chat group, numerous members of which were scholars from the Middle East who claimed persecution by their governments. Yet they were soon discontented with the Western world that welcomed them. One such scholar decried the presence of statues of colonial figures in Western cities, claiming that they continued the legacy of oppression.
I commented that those statues presented a great learning opportunity, as societies can choose between removing them or, better still, preserving them and engaging the public in fact-based dialogues about the figures’ accomplishments and failings. When I called the arson committed against Catholic churches in Canada’s “Indigenous lands” a dangerous form of resistance, one scholar disagreed, deeming it a justifiable way to resist the “bloody and murderous colonialists.”
Another remarked half-jokingly that the statue of Saladin — the Muslim general of the 12th century — should replace those colonial relics. “But wouldn’t that be replacing one form of colonialism with another?” I asked. My remarks prompted two members to request, rather clumsily, that I refrain from voicing contentious views in the group.
From then on, I refrained from engaging in discussion and only forwarded announcements about activities that I found interesting. The straw that broke the camel’s back was my announcement of a world-famous public intellectual’s lecture in Berlin. A member claimed deep offense at my “eulogizing” the “ultra-conservative” figure, which I did not. On behalf of the group, this member said they did not want to hear from me because my discourse sounded “dangerous.”
In response to this open confrontation, a group administrator — a native German — emailed the group saying that my views were “far removed” from those held by any group member. He believed that I was fully aware of that. In his view, I therefore set myself up for the attack and had no one but myself to blame. Seeing how dissenting views are sufficient to trigger pre-emptive attacks from radical academics who label such views as “dangerous,” I quit the group.
If my gentle attempt at open dialogue quickly led to vilification and ostracization from intolerant academics, then violence against influential figures from the extremely radicalized — sometimes mentally unstable — is foreseeable. Ironically, though, many willfully ignorant academics deny that the far left can be as violent as the far right. My experience teaching young people nonetheless reassured me that keeping conversations alive is an effective way to push back against ideologues who enabled violence in academic and political life.
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[email protected] is the author of In Defense of Free Speech in Universities: A Study of Three Jurisdictions(University of Michigan Press, 2023) and The Right to Parody (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and winner of the Voltaire Prize for Tolerance, International Understanding, and Respect for Differences, Franklyn Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression, and Pen Canada’s Ken Filkow Prize.