A Moment for Mercy

When I learned that Amherst finally had an outspoken conservative voice, I was glad, and even more so when he chose to become a regular contributor to The Student. As I have written previously in The Student, I believe that Amherst is seriously lacking in conservative discourse, and I thought Jeb Allen was the perfect person to help bridge that gap. He’s a talented journalist with interesting and well-reasoned things to say. I happen to disagree with many of his opinions, but I strongly believe in his right to espouse them, so I was disheartened to see the vitriolic response his articles began to elicit from some members of the student body. 

I empathize with those like Sarria Joe ’27, who see any defense of conservative beliefs as an attack on themselves. And Sarria is right that, “For those who are privileged, it’s easy to stand on a soapbox and lecture oppressed people about bridging our shared humanity when they are unable to empathize with our apprehension and sympathize with our dehumanization.” I will do no such soapbox lecturing here. I do not believe, however, that it requires holding any particularly fanatical beliefs about free speech to maintain that Jeb Allen deserves the right to publish what he thinks without receiving death threats.

My appreciation for Allen, however, has now worn thin. 

I say this in reference to his recent article for the Washington Free Beacon, in which he excoriated Amherst’s administration for its production of “Voices of the Class.” I take issue with many aspects of that article. I found it sensationalist and unrepresentative of campus culture. I found strange its intimation that queer sexual education contradicts the legacy of Amherst’s Christian founding. But the article was, we can all admit, based in fact (though the same cannot necessarily be said of re-published versions of his article that appeared in other publications). We can also recognize that Allen is not entirely alone in drawing the conclusions he has from those facts; his view of Amherst is shared by, at the very least, the students he quotes in the article.

I will devote this article neither to disputing the claims Allen makes in his, nor to questioning his right to make those claims. Instead, I will focus on a decision he made that had nothing to do with his argument, which was to include in his article photos and videos that clearly captured the faces of Amherst students pantomiming sexual acts.

I will begin with the obvious: This decision was a harmful one. By including these images, Allen chose to expose a number of Amherst students to doxing. His article was picked up by various high-profile media outlets, including the New York Post, bringing the circulation of these images into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions — one social media reposting has received, as of the writing of this article, 350,000 views. Some students have since had their home addresses leaked and their social media pages flooded with hateful messages. Some have even received death threats.

And there is more to this than emotional harm. Conventional wisdom tells us that once on the internet, images stick around forever. It may well be that these images will follow these students around for the rest of their lives — to job interviews, background checks, perhaps even campaign trails. With luck, their lives will be materially unaffected, but even in the best-case scenario, these students will live with the knowledge that these images are out there, somewhere, ready to disrupt their lives. 

I, of course, have no idea how much harm this decision will ultimately cause. The point is that there was some, when there could just as well have been none. Blurring faces would not have been hard, would not have detracted from the article, and would have been enough. 

But neither Allen nor his editors at the Free Beacon chose to take these protective measures. The publication has since rejected the college’s request to retroactively blur the images. Instead, it decided to publish a new article in which it both recirculates the photos and ridicules the college for making its request. That article drew a bizarre and misleading connection between Amherst’s desire “to protect students from unspecified ‘threats,’” and the college’s supposed disinterest in protecting Allen after death threats were made against him. Allen himself, however, has written in the National Review that he “requested to dismiss all disciplinary action and instead have a conversation with the student,” explaining that “revenge only deepens divides.” He repeated the same in the New York Times.

I will feign no surprise at why the Free Beacon would choose to act in this way. Michael Goldfarb, the publication’s founder and chairman, has described his approach to journalism as, “We get up every day and say, how do we cause trouble?” The Free Beacon has no commitment to the well-being of Amherst College students and staff. I would not, however, have liked to think the same could be said of a student in our midst. 

But let’s try to see things from his perspective:

A conservative student comes to a liberal institution, determined to make a change. He throws himself into campus life and writes thoughtfully for the student newspaper for two years. Then he receives a death threat, and, all of a sudden, many of the liberal students he sought to reason with are upvoting Fizz posts attacking him. Then, the next fall, Charlie Kirk, a man he found deeply inspiring, is assassinated, and to make matters worse, Amherst students cheer his murder. 

This fall, Allen wrote in the National Review that “For many conservative students at Amherst College, Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the most radicalizing event of our lifetimes.” And why not? This story does indeed sound radicalizing. It might very well produce the kind of person who would cease to care about the liberal students he once sought to educate. It might produce the kind of person for whom the high-minded ideals he once professed had now lost their sheen. It might produce the kind of person who would resort to exactly the kind of revenge he had once sworn off. 

For that is, I must now make clear, exactly what this looks like. It looks a great deal like revenge, and not much like principled journalism. The Student Editorial Board’s recent article on the topic examines this point better than I could. 

Maybe it wasn’t revenge. Maybe it was simple carelessness. Or maybe it was a calculated move, but calculated with no malice towards the students and staff whose lives the article would touch. Maybe Allen sacrificed the well-being of these individuals and the reputation of the college for the advancement of his career.

I don’t know why he did what he did, but the purpose of this article is not character assassination, so I will attempt this psychoanalysis no further. Nor will I advocate that any particular course of disciplinary action be taken against Allen. It may indeed be that what he did breaks the Student Code of Conduct, and I am by no means here to suggest that the affected students would be wrong in calling on the college to enforce the rules we have all agreed to live by. 

But formally disciplining a college student for writing a news article that does, after all, happen to be factually accurate, gives off a whiff of censorship. Now, would it really be censorship? An abridgment of Allen’s free speech? I think not, but I have no doubt that this smoke would be enough evidence for the Jesse Watterses of the world to make the case that, in fact, all of higher education is engulfed in flames. 

I believe there is also another, more important reason to refrain from castigation. 

I believe that what Allen did was wrong. Callous. Morally reprehensible, even. I believe it was cowardly, too — publishing his article two days after The Student published its last issue of the semester ensured that a response (like this one) would not come until the following semester. I am also tempted to consider this within a larger pattern of behavior that places the Amherst community in harm’s way. That includes his most recently published National Review article, which discussed our campus’s reaction to the Kirk murder. And it would be wrong for me to omit that the college has recently fired a number of staff members with connections to the Voices performance. The administration has maintained that these layoffs are part of long-term restructuring, denying that they are related to recent events. If, however, this is not the whole truth, these firings should, too, perhaps be added to Allen’s ledger. 

But it is for precisely these reasons — precisely for the fact that we would be justified in choosing the course of punishment — that now may be the time to exercise restraint. We can come down with a heavy hand; to, at the most extreme, cast Allen out, and in so doing add another data point to be cited by those who insist on echoing the tired refrain of reactionary leftist intolerance. Or we can stay that hand, and teach Allen and others in his camp the lesson that they purported to teach us. For revenge does indeed only deepen divides, so let’s treat this as a moment for mercy.