If there’s one thing Americans can agree on these days, it’s this: Political tension has reached a fever pitch. Charlie Kirk was assassinated a month ago. Following Jimmy Kimmel’s classless comments about that assassination—and the Trump administration’s largely illiberal response—the sense that we’re living in a post-civility society has only intensified. Nor were we relieved of that worry when we learned late last week that Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, graphically wished violence upon his Republican colleagues—without, as of this writing, facing calls to withdraw from any prominent figure in his party.
Political violence is rare in this country, but our newfound willingness to equivocate about it or full-throatedly condemn it depending on whether it serves our side—and to be just as wishy-washy about free speech—is a grim reflection of an age that holds nothing sacred but victory.
But perhaps the more important sign of the times, at least for me, is that the political Furies finally reached my small liberal arts college, buried in the woods of Maine.
Colby College is the perfect combination of not-an-Ivy and basically-in-Canada to avoid controversy. Compared with our peer institutions, Colby has weathered the storm of the last decade quite well: There was no encampment and occupation of school buildings, like down the road at Bowdoin. And there certainly has not been an assault on a professor and speaker, as there was at Middlebury in 2017. There seems to be something about that extra 50 miles north on I-95 that has kept the political bugbears away.
But our relative political tranquility has historically come at a price. What we lack in controversy, we make up for in the HOA-style tyranny that imposes a specific, denaturing type of uniformity on both progressives and conservatives. This implicit “Colby Contract” suggests that there will not be leftist excess—so long as conservatives stay invisible on campus.
That contract has been breached in recent weeks. Hundreds of students openly celebrated Kirk’s death on our anonymous forum, Fizz, and hundreds more gleefully quoted Kirk’s now-painfully principled statement about the Second Amendment, a statement they saw as perhaps poetically just.
College administrators offered no initial statement on the killing or those comments, despite in the past telling me that Colby prizes “community” and emotional comfort so much that free speech commitments like the Chicago Statement are impossible here. And for conservative students with whom I have spoken since, who felt represented by Kirk and have long felt that a feature of Colby’s “community” was soft despotism by the liberal majority, this was disheartening and frustrating.
Usually, any political dustups at Colby don’t escalate to action. That changed when the leaders of the Colby Young Republicans Club, who had already proven themselves to be disaffected provocateurs weeks before by promoting their club with a large banner of President Donald Trump as Rambo, tacked up posters around campus bearing two messages: “YOU SHOULD NOT BE KILLED FOR HAVING AN OPINION” and “STOP SILENCING REPUBLICANS.”
It does not take a genius or expert reader of tea leaves to notice that the posters were implicitly implicating campus liberals in Kirk’s killing. This got a rise out of people on a campus that never has posters advocating anything remotely conservative-coded. Colby is not the type of place for such suggestions, many mused on Fizz.
The better part of campus responded with earnest incredulity, with one student remarking in front of hundreds at our campus’ flagship speaker series that it is a shame both sides believe political violence is a key feature of the other side. Many around the room intensely nodded. At least people were trying to talk about it.
But the worst part of campus did something else, which only turned up the heat more: Someone defaced the posters, so that they now read “YOU SHOULD BE KILLED FOR FASCISM” and “STOP CELEBRATING BIGOTS.” Hundreds on Fizz supported the edits made to the posters.
It is likely that the people who supported this are in a deep cave of political partisanship, where that response is the moral reaction; it is unlikely they supported those messages because they yearn for their conservative classmates to actually be killed. Nonetheless, this was an obvious escalation from the posters themselves and the unsavory comments online.
Then Fox News’ own Laura Ingraham heard about it. She tweeted about the incident multiple times, it was picked up by many related accounts, and she dedicated a part of her Sept. 26 show to rip on Colby. “It [Democratic approval of violence] is reaching all the way up to college campuses in beautiful Maine, one of our prettiest states,” she said.
Despite the obviously partisan framing, Ingraham’s observation was the same as mine: Vulgar, political fury (including her own) reaching Waterville, Maine, is really troubling. Maine is known for its uncorrupted natural beauty, its political moderation, and general abstention from the artery-clogging stress of the rest of the East Coast. This is why Maine’s slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.”
In the days since, many students have used the Ingraham episode as further proof that Republicans are bringing ill will to their folksy oasis: If the posters were a trespass, Laura Ingraham was a full-on assault. This sentiment was not helped by threatening phone calls made to campus security, nor by the bomb threat we received last week.
Until now, I have discussed two main things without directly demonstrating why they are related. At Colby, there is a culture that “the way life should be” entails going along with progressive hegemony. And in this country, political tension has not been this high in a while— at least in my lifetime.
It is precisely because most colleges, including Colby, have fallen asleep at the wheel regarding pluralism that we are now not equipped with the proper tools to respond to our trying times. My campus’s political culture relied on a bad bet, that nothing could happen here that would demand a little bit of prudence and goodwill from every student.
Now, we are left only with our impulses and passion—and right now, those tell us only to fight. But the Furies are never warded off by passion and violence; history and myth suggest that the careful application of reason can keep chaos at bay. If colleges hope to prepare students for the political storms of our time, they must recommit to their core task: cultivating citizens trained in reflection and choice, rather than consigning them to the yoke of frenzy and force.
