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Mary Runcy
CHQ Guy
Chautauqua, N.Y.
Condemnation of the Aug. 12 knife attack on author Salman Rushdie has been accompanied by shock at where it occurred. The Chautauqua Institution, a summer resort in upstate New York, has hosted lectures since the late 1800s and has a well-earned reputation as a place of open inquiry and civil debate.
Following the stabbing, Gov. Kathy Hochul said of the institution: “This place doesn’t just value dialogue and freedom of speech, freedom of thought—this place exists because of those values.” That may have been true at one time, but times change. Four days before Mr. Rushdie was attacked on stage, I spoke at the Chautauqua Institution. I wasn’t invited by the institution’s leadership, however. Instead, I was hosted by a splinter group called Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, or ABC, which seeks to “achieve a balance of speakers in a mutually civil and respectful environment consistent with the mission of Chautauqua,” according to the invitation.
At a reception prior to my talk, I spoke with dozens of Chautauquans who take issue with Ms. Hochul’s description of the institution today. ABC was created four years ago out of frustration at the overwhelmingly liberal bias of invited speakers. What started as a group of some 40 dissidents has ballooned to several hundred. Paul Anthony, ABC’s president, told me by phone this week that when the nascent organization first approached the institution’s leadership about the lack of ideological diversity in lecturers, it was told that conservatives weren’t interested in coming to speak.
“We said if that’s the problem, we’ll find you some speakers,” Mr. Anthony said. “We put together a package of 12 speakers that we vetted. They used one of them. The next year we gave them 30 more—so a total of 42 in two years—and we got no response.” One longtime resident complained that on the rare occasions when the institution invites a prominent conservative, the person’s remarks tend to be apolitical and steer clear of hot-button social issues. That, or it’s someone who is expected to be sufficiently disapproving of fellow travelers on the political right.
Officially, the institution doesn’t sanction ABC. Its speakers aren’t mentioned on the website. The local newspaper, which offers visitors a daily guide to lectures and activities, refuses to acknowledge—let alone cover—ABC events in its reporting. Nor does Chautauqua give ABC access to its speaking venues, such as the one reserved for Mr. Rushdie. Instead, the group must pay for event space at one of the hotels on the grounds of the resort. Other recently formed affinity groups, it’s worth noting, haven’t met the same resistance—or any resistance. An organized group of black Chautauquans has no problem accessing official venues. Nor does an LGBTQ group, which was free to host a recent drag-queen event.
Still, ABC is less interested in official recognition than it is in fostering intellectual diversity, which it believes the community desires. “We’re bumping up now on 600 members,” said Susan O’Connor Baird, the group’s treasurer. “We’ve done that primarily through word of mouth, and we’ve accomplished that because we’re bringing in people Chautauquans want to hear, people who present another side of these issues.” This year in particular, she added, they’ve been inundated with woke speakers. “You can’t go to anything without hearing about racism and white privilege and how awful America is—regardless of what the talk is supposed to be about.”
Mr. Anthony, who has been summering at Chautauqua for more than 40 years, recalled a time when the intellectual atmosphere was much different. During the gasoline crisis of the 1970s, the institution did a week of lectures on what was going on, he said. “On Monday, they had somebody from Greenpeace, so you knew what their message was going to be and that’s fine. Tuesday, they have a vice president from Exxon, who gave the industry appraisal. On the third day, they would have someone from the energy committee in Congress come address the political response. And so on. That was not atypical.”
In many ways the people who run the Chautauqua Institution today aren’t unlike the people who run other elite enterprises—the Aspen Ideas Festival, the World Economic Forum, almost any university—that have long leaned left but of late have become increasingly intolerant. They spout words and phrases like “fairness” and “free thought” and “critical dialogue,” but in practice those amount to little more than words.
The conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, who has spoken at Chautauqua twice—once through official channels but more recently at the behest of ABC—said these organizations seem increasingly out of touch. “The splinter group is not Advocates for a Balanced Chautauqua,” he told me. “The leadership of Chautauqua is the splinter group—from tradition.”