Russell Working: Disgraced Whitworth must invite back Maoist survivor

Jul 22, 2023

Sat., May 6, 2023

By Russell Working

In the late 1950s, during the madness of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, a geology student named Wu Hongda showed up in a university classroom in Beijing to be greeted by an alarming message.

Chalked across the blackboard under a poster of Mao were these words, "Meeting to Criticize the Rightist Wu Hongda."

His fellow students shouted accusations, Wu would later recall. "Wu Hongda still refuses to reform himself!" "Down with Wu Hongda, he must now show us his true face!" At the end of the struggle session, a Communist Party security officer entered and led Wu away to prison. There a police captain asked the 23-year-old student, "Do you know your sentence?"

Wu said he did not.

"You’ve been sentenced to life."

I thought of Wu – who would later immigrate to the United States and go by the name Harry Wu – when I read of my alma mater Whitworth University's refusal to allow a speech by Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Apparently, Whitworth's student government, which denied a conservative group's request to host Van Fleet, didn't like the way she links today's woke cancel culture with the anti-intellectual turmoil and violence of communist China. To protect themselves from bothersome viewpoints, the students voted 9-4 to block the invitation. Van Fleet later spoke at an off-campus location.

I met Wu in 1999 when I was on assignment for the New York Times in the far northern city of Magadan, Russia. Having become a courageous human rights advocate, he had flown to this former Gulag center to commemorate the victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Wu was troubled to see monuments to communist-era leaders still stood in public places.

"You have to remove all the Lenin and Stalin statues and put up Gulag monuments," Wu said. "That's the only way to keep it from coming back."

I would add another way to keep totalitarianism at bay: listen to survivors of these evil systems. Conversely, plugging one's ears and shouting, "I can't hear you!" – as the student government of Whitworth is essentially doing – not only denies oneself an education, it prevents others from learning.

Whitworth has disgraced itself among free speech advocates nationwide. How can it reverse the reputational damage? First, the university must invite Van Fleet back to campus, covering all expenses.

Second, the university must provide adequate protection – violent mobs have threatened speakers at campuses around the country in recent years – and ensure that loudmouths don't use the heckler's veto to shout her down. Any student who tries to disrupt the event should be expelled. Of course, those upset by a discussion of Mao's millions of victims should be allowed to protest peacefully as long as they don't disrupt the event.

But what about those students who evidently enrolled in the hopes of never encountering a differing viewpoint? Whitworth can set up a cry room, complete with beanbag chairs, teddy bears to hug and packets of hot chocolate to stir up and sip through their tears. There they can safely denounce whatever they think Van Fleet might be saying, maybe, had they bothered to listen to her.

Meanwhile, I urge alumni and major donors to withhold contributions until Whitworth's president, Scott McQuilkin, proves the university's commitment to free speech. If a Christian college is too craven to allow an anticommunist speaker, we are already on the road to the nightmare society that Wu and Van Fleet survived.

Russell Working, a Chicago-area author and journalist, holds a B.A. from Whitworth and an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His byline has appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines worldwide.

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