Colleges are trapped in a false dilemma about their responsibilities regarding free speech. At the University of Missouri, Middlebury College, New York University, the University of Washington, and elsewhere, students have objected to talks by controversial figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and Heather Mac Donald. Last month, a day after white supremacists marched on the University of Virginia, violence erupted in Charlottesville, when the marchers clashed with counterprotesters, resulting in multiple injuries and one death. Most recently, Ann Coulter, Yiannopoulos, and Stephen K. Bannon were invited to speak this fall at the University of California at Berkeley. The problem that these events represent seems straightforward: Colleges have a responsibility to create environments where their students can study in relative safety, without fear of insult or injury. But they also have a responsibility to support free speech.
These two goals now appear in conflict. Social media have helped formerly fringe individuals achieve a kind of cultural/political stardom. Political preferences now function powerfully as identities, driving divisions that can be deeper than those defined by religion or race. The demarcation between words and actions has blurred, as psychologists and activists argue that language itself can be a form of violence.
Exemplifying this complicated context, the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit in defense of Milo Yiannopoulos while condemning his malicious, bigoted views. After Charlottesville, the organization finds itself in an awkward position, trying to balance its traditional mission as an unconditional guardian of free speech with its new role as a vehicle of progressive resistance to Trumpism.
Ignoring protesters’ demands comes across as disregard for students’ wishes or even their well-being. But acceding to those demands could constrain free speech. College presidents have struggled to navigate this conflict — typically condemning violence and testifying to the importance of free speech — and they have not always been successful. The president of the University of Missouri system, Tim Wolfe, was forced to resign after he failed to respond to student protests against racism.
Most conversations surrounding this issue, however, have been misguided. Colleges certainly should protect freedom of speech as a general principle, but that is just the beginning of their duties. They must also endorse the value of worthy speech — that which seeks insight or to provide a reasoned defense of a position, rather than merely to titillate or provoke. Endorsing worthy speech means that a college will sometimes need to deny a platform to a public speaker.
Worthy speech is both intellectually and morally responsible — it is beholden to basic standards of discourse and behavior, such as avoiding gross generalizations, refraining from the cavalier dismissal of established knowledge (including facts that are inconvenient for one’s position), eschewing ad hominem attacks, and demonstrating a basic level of respect for one’s interlocutors.
Worthy speakers recognize their duty to offer evidential support and to adhere to basic norms of rationality. Worthy speech is rigorous but civil, welcoming disagreement in the context of dialogue that seeks to be both courteous and challenging.
In short, worthy speech is precisely the kind of dialogue that we professors seek to foster in our classrooms. It does not favor particular parties or individuals; it is not limited by specific perspectives or causes. It is simply the respectful and reasoned discourse in which all adults should be able to engage, and which is particularly necessary for issues that are delicate, complex, and consequential. We hold our students to such a standard, and we ought to do the same for the speakers invited to our campuses. If our institutions provide a spotlight for those who flagrantly disregard basic moral and intellectual standards, how can we expect our exhortations to students to practice worthy speech to be at all meaningful?
The public square has never been easier to access. Celebrity may now be achieved through nothing more than the tactical use of social media, allowing individuals with no particular expertise to amass audiences that number in the millions. The Supreme Court recently opined that social media are among the “most important” sites for the public exchange of ideas. It simply is not the case that denying a provocateur a stage on a campus quadrangle amounts to the quashing of free speech.
But just because colleges and universities are not the gatekeepers to the public square does not mean that they are insignificant as venues for public expression. Institutions of higher learning lend legitimacy and authority to our guests; in offering one to an individual, an institution implicitly indicates that she is worth hearing out. That imprimatur ought not to be given lightly.
What is in danger today is not free speech but worthy speech. Personal experience and emotional preferences now substitute for fact; the president of the United States lies regularly and egregiously; the media are seriously undermined by both fake news and accusations of spreading fake news; civil and political discourse have been debased by petty insults and infantile taunts; the very concept of expertise is rejected as elitism. In this context, free speech is not in danger of being curtailed — it has been bastardized by the rejection of any standards whatsoever.
Colleges’ responsibility is to encourage worthy speech, to push back against the pervasive degradation of discourse, and to provide models of speech that deserve the attention of our communities. We are not required to provide a soapbox for every blowhard with a following on Twitter.
Our responsibility is to raise the level of public discourse and to support basic, invaluable standards of thought and speech — civility, thoughtfulness, accountability, and, yes, truth. Upholding a higher standard for those to whom we give campus platforms does not constitute an assault on free speech. It is a necessary first step in rehabilitating the kind of public discourse that is worth hearing.
Jason N. Blum is a visiting assistant professor at Davidson College.