University of Virginia student Emma Camp recently penned an important essay in the New York Times where she talked about her time at Mr. Jefferson’s university and discovered that she and so many other students regularly self-censor for fear of woke mobs and rampant cancel culture. After publication of the essay, Ms. Camp was unsurprisingly and viciously attacked on social media by known media personalities and journalists, along with thousands among the masses. Some professors — who are supposed to be guardians and promoters of viewpoint diversity and student learning — even piled on, stating that it was irresponsible for the Gray Lady to even run the op-ed.

Sharing her own experiences as a student at the University of Virginia and empirically backing up her views with robust data documenting just how deeply students fear sharing their ideas out of concern for real social and academic consequences, Ms. Camp very publicly and correctly challenged the progressive blocs that control so much of higher education today, asking them to be true to their purported values of real diversity and inclusion and address the free speech crisis higher education faces today. Challenging this liberal hegemony is risky and I certainly have been in Ms. Camp’s position on quite a few occasions. When I empirically documented that viewpoint diversity and intellectual vitality is at risk on today’s college and university campuses, my family and I were threatened both online and offline. Fortunately, quite a few have rushed to defend Ms. Camp’s absolutely fair and thoughtful essay, and much has already been written about both the substance and reactions to her important piece.

One facet of the reaction to Ms. Camp’s piece that has not been explored has been the idea of “lived experience” and the many attacks on the validity of Ms. Camp’s experiences as a UVA student. If one visits a college classroom or even attends a professional talk by many activist academics, one will regularly hear the term “lived experience,” which basically means that one individual’s particular story and personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events is the real truth and fully legitimate. While individual experiences are real and legitimate they may not be indicative of larger truths and trends, and impressions and experiences may not necessarily square with general trends in social science and clear facts about behavior and social life. When this happens, lived experience is often invoked to justify views, attitudes, and behaviors and is now a tactic regularly used by those on the left and in the social justice community to advance ideological agendas, anchor the legitimacy of a particular view, and dismiss ideas, theories, and data which do not sync up with their own positions.

This raises the question, then, of why
Ms. Camp is not being given the respect of those on the left for the validity
of her unique lived experience as a senior in Charlottesville. Of course, it is
highly likely that Ms. Camp’s critics would most certainly invoke the idea that
one’s lived experience — in other contexts, for other issues, and with other
people — is absolutely real and worthy of debate and discourse. In this case,
these critics notably have nothing to say at all about Ms. Camp’s actual
experiences and feelings aside from attempting to delegitimize them entirely.

The fact is that individual experiences are legitimate data points, but those experiences should not be explicitly privileged over other facts. It is not the case that we as a society only learn from direct experiences. (If that were the case, history, physics, and a host of other fields would be utterly useless.) This is a ridiculous proposition.

In reality, we should have compassion and respect for
lived experiences in our complex world, but then make decisions in response to these
narratives based on data and the merits of various arguments and ideas — not on
the backgrounds of those who share their experiences.

Emma Camp shared her lived experiences as a UVA
student and then demonstrated that her experiences matched up with quite a bit
of data which revealed the depth of how many students on both the left and
right self-censor and are afraid to question and debate on collegiate campuses
today. Sadly, Ms. Camp has been attacked and maligned for sharing her
experiences which are as legitimate as any other student’s. But her personal
story does not perfectly fit into the progressive mold and thus, her lived
experience is not legitimate or valid in the minds of the progressives who have
attacked her. Lived experiences should be part of the equation when trying to
make sense of the social world for everyone — and not just for those who stay within
a set of talking points.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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