Fortunately, there were many who supported me. A few weeks after Derbyshire’s event was canceled, NPR ran a debate series called Intelligence Squared about free speech on college campuses. It was live-streamed from Yale University. Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer, writer, and civil libertarian, was arguing on the side of free speech. She had interviewed me prior to the debate and told me that she planned to reference my story in her argument.
On the night of the debate, I told some of my friends on the basketball and football teams at dinner that I’d be mentioned, and they said they wanted to watch it with me. I knew that many of them didn’t really care about the issue of free speech on college campuses the way I did, and it was a Friday night when they surely had other things they’d rather be doing. But they showed up anyway and watched intently, asking questions and commenting on various points being made. It meant a lot.
From across the common room, Cole tossed me a beer. I still wasn’t a big drinker, but throughout sophomore year I’d gotten more comfortable with the party scene on campus. I was responsible and always observed my limits, but I did go out a bit more and have a good time.
As the debate went on, I was disappointed that I wasn’t mentioned. But when it was time for Kaminer’s closing argument, she began by saying, “We have just been talking about intolerance for speakers with dissenting views. A few days ago, I spoke to Zachary Wood . . .”
My friends and I were hyped. She told my whole story—the canceled events and the backlash, even the implicit threats. She also spoke about how disturbing it was that some black students on campus had talked about me in slave dialect and liked Facebook comments referencing slavery, such as, “We need the oil and switch to deal with him in this midnight hour.”
Kaminer’s entire argument concluded with my story, and when the vote came in from the live audience, 66 percent were on her side and only 25 percent against, with 9 percent undecided. I wasn’t satisfied, but I was happy, if only for a few minutes. My friends live-tweeted and Snapchatted the entire closing statement; it felt good to get the win, and even better to have their support.
On my way to the bathroom soon after, I ran into a guy in my dorm named Bryce. “What up, Zach. Yo, what was everybody talking about on Snapchat earlier?”
“Big debate on free speech,” I told him. “One of the debaters talked about me in her closing statement.”
“That’s sick, dude. Huge for the program.”
That was the first time I’d actually talked to Bryce. He was a specimen, virile and irreverent. He walked around with a royal air, the kind of confidence that had no memory or fear of vulnerability. I envied that about him. Bryce wasn’t the best student, but that didn’t matter. He was tall, white, rich, and good-looking. He played on the football team, dated the most popular girl in the sophomore class, and took enough hits from his gravity bong to live in the clouds.
I would love to tell you that I only wanted to be myself, that, by this point in my life, I felt that what I had to offer was good enough. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to live like Bryce or act like him. I wanted to worry as little as he did. I wanted to feel as secure about my manhood as Bryce felt about his. I wanted to measure up to my mother’s unrealistic ideal of a real man.
Yet I’d also learned to reject grand theory, the idea that any one view or understanding of the world could capture reality in all its complexity. Humanity of course entails commonality and some degree of empathy. But what it means to be a man or manly differs for different people. Scholars often discuss this idea of hedging our bets in terms of arguments about nature and nurture and cultural relativism or the limits of drawing inferences from representative samples. But the main takeaway, as I’ve come to see it, is that context matters. What it means to be right or wrong, happy or sad, masculine or feminine, admirable or detestable, and so on depends on more factors than any of us can fully ascertain at once. Theory is useful because it helps us dissect, compartmentalize, and better understand facets of reality in intelligible ways. But every theory is imperfect. When they’re strong, theories and the evidence used to support them offer a sense of cohesion, clarity, and cogency that helps us make sense of our lives. But no one argument or view adequately explains every aspect of any issue. With that perspective, I still couldn’t deny my mother’s influence, but I tried to think less about my mom’s opinions and more about how I could honor my own sense of what it meant to be a person of value and strong character.
I was determined to see things to fruition. If I couldn’t get Derbyshire to campus, perhaps there was a way to bring someone else who shared similar views but whom Falk could not shut down without being accused of blatant censorship. This led me to Charles Murray, whom I’d heard about years before. Murray was a political scientist, columnist, and author best known for the book The Bell Curve, in which he uses the genetic component of intelligence to argue against social welfare programs. Murray was controversial, but he was a scholar held in high regard by many. It would be nearly impossible to argue against the value of debating someone like Murray, whose beliefs were echoed in the current presidential campaign and certainly not being censored there.
When I posted the invitation to the event, the comments came. The criticisms came. The outrage came. But this time the tone was somewhat more subdued, as if my harshest critics had realized that I wasn’t backing down and they had to find another way to counter my actions.
Directly before the event, the Williams College Debating Union invited Joseph L. Graves Jr., an evolutionary and nanobiologist and historian of science, to deliver a speech called “Race, Genomics, and Intelligence: Slight Return,” which countered Murray’s ideas about the connection between intelligence and race. Many of the students who attended Graves’s speech stayed to hear Murray, using what they’d learned to push back against his claims. I relished the idea of this. It was precisely the type of debate I had been wishing for since arriving at Williams. Plus, this meant that the auditorium was packed when Murray arrived to give his talk.
In his speech, Murray emphasized the importance of genetics, claiming, “Nothing has zero heritability.” Then he warned the students in the audience to “buckle up,” knowing that what he was about to say would be met with skepticism and hostility. His argument was that genetic knowledge should be incorporated into the social sciences, stating that this would lead to a rediscovery of human nature and human diversity that would prove the equality premise was wrong. People, he said, “are not equal in their latent abilities and characteristics.”
“I just don’t believe that there is any college professor who seriously believes that all the kids in his classes, if they had had identical upbringings and environments, would have identical academic ability,” Murray said. “I don’t think anybody believes that.”
In the front row of the auditorium, I sat forward in my seat. I hadn’t expected for anything Murray said to resonate with me, but his statement made me think about the connections in my own life between my upbringing, environments, and academic ability. Yes, genetics clearly played a role. My mom, despite her flaws, was brilliant. She’d taught me so many invaluable things, particularly about human nature. And though my dad didn’t share my intellectual drive, his own intelligence lay in the perceptive and discerning way he viewed the world.
My upbringing and my environments growing up had provided seemingly endless challenges at times but also opportunities. Would I have developed the same thirst for knowledge if I didn’t have access to the books and magazines in Lola and Papa’s basement, if my mom hadn’t drilled into me the importance of being presentable and well-spoken? Or even if I hadn’t been motivated at times to lose myself and escape from my reality in the world of a book?
As Murray finished his speech and began fielding questions, I thought about the fact that I couldn’t separate one from the whole. There was no way to tease apart where each separate element of my character came from—my intellectual dri
ve, my ambition, and my desire to connect with others and understand them so that I could one day do whatever was in my power to help them. These things were a combination of the gifts, curses, and blessings I’d received from my parents, and so was I.
* * *
—
I saw my mom that summer for the second time since I had left her home six years before. She asked me to come up to Michigan to visit, but I said that I preferred for her to come to DC. Though she didn’t say it explicitly, I sensed from talking to her throughout the year that she understood she’d done some things to make me feel uncomfortable during our last visit and did not want to repeat those mistakes. So I felt optimistic about our visit and more comfortable seeing her on my own turf. I knew that if she said or did something that was out of line, I could leave.
After checking in to her hotel, she picked me up at home. Over the next few days, we explored DC and went to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. I showed her around the Bullis campus and Potomac, Maryland. And we went shopping. She bought me more clothes than I’d ever had at one time in my life. It felt good to know that I wouldn’t have to worry about having enough clothes for the foreseeable future.
Throughout those four days, we talked. And our conversations were for once as meaningful as they were normal. She spoke to me and treated me differently than she had in the past. She was appropriately affectionate, gave me space, and treated me like an adult. For the first day or two she was there, I braced myself for something to go wrong, but when it didn’t, I began to relax and actually enjoy our time together.
It was a good visit, the best yet by far, and I held on to the hope that things between us would continue to improve. It was that hope, that faith in humanity and one’s power to change and learn and grow, that had kept me going. Without it, I would have been lost years before in a storm of confusion and anger. But now the storm had dissipated, and I left that visit with my mom determined to keep pushing forward to do and accomplish more than before—not just to help students with a paper or expose them to uncomfortable views but to find a way to make a positive fundamental difference in their lives. I wasn’t there yet, but I wouldn’t rest until I arrived.
Epilogue
I haven’t seen my mom since she visited me in DC last summer, but we’ve talked regularly over the last year. Talking about the past is too difficult, so we mostly act as if it never happened. It’s surprising sometimes how naturally we try to tread carefully around certain subjects and avoid pushing each other’s buttons. Usually our conversations are about my goals, ideas, and role models; my understanding of the world and people around me; and the discrepancies between things as they are and things as they should be. Despite small bumps in the road, she’s been there for me over the last year as an adviser, a loyal fan, and in some cases even a confidante. When I think about our relationship now, it’s easier for me to see it in a more positive light, to recognize the knowledge and insight I’ve gained from her, to appreciate her contributions to the man I am today and the man I want to become in the future.
It’s been almost two years since I became a controversial figure for advocating free speech and intellectual engagement on college campuses, no matter how provocative or offensive the subject matter or speaker. To some, free speech has become a defining issue for my generation. In the last few years, too many speakers have been disinvited by college administrators. To promote inclusion, various measures—often contested by activists—have been taken to discourage and constrain free debate at universities across the country. Like any other complicated issue, free speech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with issues of racism, sexism, and bigotry. Rarely, if ever, are there easy answers to questions regarding entrenched moral and political disputes.
But I believe that making headway with issues of expression and inclusion in America will require patience, persistence, and a demonstrated willingness to thoughtfully engage from all sides. It should be acknowledged that some conservatives have used arguments about free speech and intellectual freedom to attack liberals and dismissively characterize them as narrow-minded, intolerant, and oversensitive. In response, several liberal commentators have hit back, suggesting that some conservatives only champion free speech now because their views are less prominent in American institutions of higher education.
The dispute between the liberals and conservatives over free speech has only intensified in light of recent legislation passed in North Carolina, Tennessee, and several other states that requires college administrations at public universities to punish students for repeatedly disrupting speakers. While the legislation passed in Tennessee is fairly comprehensive and thoughtful and sets an important precedent, there are pros and cons to the bills passed in each of these states. Although some of the legislation takes a step in the right direction, it is critical that the focus of educators and administrators remain on ways of enhancing education as opposed to merely enacting punishment.
Since becoming the president of Uncomfortable Learning, I’ve had the opportunity to attend many conferences focused on issues of free speech and intellectual diversity on campus. At these conferences, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and talking with some of the most distinguished First Amendment scholars in America. Though I’ve learned a great deal from many of them, I was most intrigued by the arguments of Stanley Fish. After we attended a conference together, I made a point of staying in touch.
Over dinner recently, we discussed a range of issues from cultural appropriation and hate speech to the pitfalls of ideological approaches to problem solving. His argument about free speech was one of the most compelling I’d heard and the only one that challenged me to see the free-speech debate in an entirely different light. Put simply, Stanley argued that free speech doesn’t exist and that we should be happy about that. Rather, the real value to fight for in higher education is free inquiry for faculty, not students. In his view, censorship happens all the time in the form of grading, tenure review, academic publication, and who gets called on in class. In each of these cases, speech is suppressed and, at times, literally discouraged, based on subjective criteria. To Stanley, the purpose of a university is the pursuit of truth and the creation of new knowledge. All that requires is the freedom of faculty to interrogate whatever they choose and design their courses as they see fit.
To the surprise of some of my supporters, I hardly disagree with any of that. My contention is more a matter of context and practicality. As I see it, within the bounds of the current debate, supporting free speech on college campuses is a way of promoting intellectual growth and sparking debate, a way of resisting the impulse to become insular and tribalistic in our engagement with controversial topics. Whether free speech ever literally exists, then, is somewhat beside the point. What matters more to me is that people make an effort to use dialogue and disagreement to test their assumptions, to build understanding, and hopefully to cultivate greater empathy.
Over the last few years, I’ve learned that common ground is more likely to be found when I approach people in good faith and do my best to give them the benefit of the doubt. More often than not, that approach feels like a tall order when I consider the degree to which human beings are naturally self-interested. So I fall short of that goal and many others more often than I’d like to admit. In his memoir, My Life, Bill Clinton quotes at length from an essay he wrote in high school about self-knowledge. Though I’ve written papers with similar sentiments, I refer more often to his words when the going gets tough:
I am a living paradox—deeply religious, yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity. . . . I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day. . . . I, in my attempts to be honest, will not be the hypocrite I hate.
I refer to this passage because I can relate to it but also because it is comforting
if not encouraging to remember that someone as capable and successful as Bill Clinton experienced similar feelings of self-doubt. Whether we express it or keep it to ourselves, I think all of us share a common complexity of being that is far deeper than the rhetoric surrounding any controversial topic. I love to debate, and sometimes I try to spark it. But understanding people—what motivates them and gives them joy, what empowers them and inspires them—is indispensable to being the kind of leader and change agent I aspire to become.
I believe that change and progress are often incremental. And sometimes it’s frustrating, having a vision, moral or political, that must be revised or adapted to be feasible in the context of the real world. I often find myself trying to reconcile the need for pragmatism with the value of conviction, the importance of consistency with the power of open-mindedness. But when I reflect on these tensions and others that don’t lend themselves to satisfying resolutions, I think about the aspects of my identity and personal history that shape my engagement with issues I care about and discuss with others. In light of all that I don’t know, I am reminded of what I know for sure: I’ll always have something to gain from the perspectives of others.
Acknowledgments
I am immensely grateful to the many people without whom this book could not have been written. I am particularly indebted to Jodi Lipper, who devoted more than five months of her life to helping me shape this book and craft it into an engaging story. Without her insight, patience, and dedication, this manuscript would have never seen the light of day. To Brandi Bowles, thank you for giving me a chance—for believing in me and in the potential of my story to make a positive difference. Without your guidance and encouragement, this book would still be just a proposal. To Jessica Renheim, I simply couldn’t have asked for a better editor. Your judgment and feel have greatly improved the quality and readability of the manuscript. Throughout this process, and particularly when I’ve faced challenges in dealing with difficult personal issues within these pages, you’ve been kind, helpful, dependable, and understanding. Thank you, Jess, for being an absolute pleasure to work with.
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