Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens will no longer come to campus to discuss civil discourse with the professor who called him a bedbug.
School of Media and Public Affairs Associate Director David Karpf, whose series of tweets calling Stephens a bedbug and documenting Stephens’ reaction went viral in August, said Stephens backed out of the event – previously scheduled for Oct. 28 – two days before invitations were scheduled to be sent out. Karpf said Stephens requested that the event be closed to the media and open only to GW students but withdrew from the event after Karpf disagreed.
Stephens responded to Karpf’s initial tweet by emailing Karpf – copying Provost Forrest Maltzman – to call his comments a “new low” for online discourse. Maltzman responded to Stephens affirming GW’s commitment to academic free speech and invited Stephens to speak at GW about civil discourse in the digital era, which Stephens accepted in August.
Karpf said the event should be open for anyone to attend given the “public” nature of their “altercation” on Twitter. He said no one “explicitly” told Stephens the event would be open to the public.
“That seemed to me like he was trying to either get the event canceled or trying to narrow it in a way that seemed inappropriate to me,” he said. “This had been a very public interaction led almost entirely by him and I think after you use your column in The New York Times to effectively compare me to a Nazi propagandist, I don’t think you then get to turn around and say, ‘If we’re going to discuss this anymore, it needs to be in private.'”
Days after Karpf tweeted his joke, Stephens wrote an opinion piece in The Times comparing hate speech on Twitter to “political fury” channeled over the radio in Nazi Germany. Stephens, a Jewish writer, did not mention Karpf, a Jewish professor, by name, but he included a quote by a Polish anti-Semite likening Jews to burning bedbugs in the article.
Karpf said he “wished” he could have asked Stephens whether he thought he made a mistake in publishing his Times column about Nazi Germany. He added that he would have used the event to outline how Stephens could have phrased his objections in a way that indicated the criticism was given in good faith.
Karpf said he would have “actually engaged” in a conversation with Stephens about civil discourse online if he had not copied Maltzman, a move that indicated that Stephens’ comments did not come from a “genuine place.”
“I think he either would have gotten really defensive – which would have shown that I’m clearly right – or he would have pointed out something that I haven’t thought of before, and it would have been nice to learn something,” Karpf said of Stephens. “So we’re losing out on an opportunity.”
