Until recently, and for roughly half a century, American universities enjoyed an era of relatively robust academic freedom. In the past few years, though, that has changed. Ironically, the threat to academic freedom in the United States today comes not from government and not from the institutions themselves but from a new generation of students who do not understand the nature, the fragility, and the importance of this principle.
Universities must educate our students to understand that academic freedom is not a law of nature. It is not something to be taken for granted. It is, rather, a hard-won acquisition in a lengthy struggle for academic integrity.
Students today seem not to understand that, until well into the 19th century, real freedom of thought was neither practiced nor professed in American universities. Before then, any freedom of inquiry or expression in American colleges was smothered by the prevailing theory of “doctrinal moralism,” which assumed that the worth of an idea must be judged by what the institution’s leaders considered its moral value. Through the first half of the 19th century, American higher education squelched any notion of free discussion or intellectual curiosity. Indeed, as the nation moved toward the Civil War, any professor or student in the North who defended slavery, or any professor or student in the South who challenged slavery, could readily be dismissed, disciplined, or expelled.
Between 1870 and 1900, however, there was a genuine revolution in American higher education. With the battle over Darwinism, new academic goals came to be embraced. For the first time, to criticize as well as to preserve traditional moral values and understandings became an accepted function of higher education.
College students used to demand the right to free speech. Now they demand the freedom from speech they find upsetting.
In 1892, William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, could boldly assert: “When for any reason the administration of a university attempts to dislodge a professor or punish a student because of his political or religious sentiments, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university.” But, despite such sentiments, the battle for academic freedom has been a contentious and a continuing one.
For example, in the closing years of the 19th century, businessmen who had accumulated vast industrial wealth began to support universities on an unprecedented scale. But that support was not without strings, and professors who offended wealthy trustees by criticizing the ethics of their business practices were dismissed from such leading universities as Cornell and Stanford.
Then, during World War I, when patriotic zealots persecuted and even prosecuted those who questioned the wisdom or the morality of the war, universities collapsed almost completely in their defense of academic freedom. Students and professors were systematically expelled or fired at even such distinguished institutions as Columbia University and the University of Virginia merely for “encouraging a spirit of indifference toward the war.”
Similar issues arose again, with a vengeance, during the post-World War II Red Scare. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, most universities excluded from academic life those even suspected of entertaining Communist sympathies. Yale’s president, Charles Seymour, went so far as to boast that “there will be no witch hunts at Yale, because there will be no witches. We will neither admit nor hire anyone with Communist sympathies.”
We now face a similar set of challenges. We live today in an era of political correctness in which students themselves demand censorship, and colleges, afraid to offend those students, too often surrender academic freedom.
In recent years, student pressure thwarted speakers’ scheduled appearances at Brown University, Johns Hopkins, Williams, and elsewhere. Colorado College suspended a student for making a joke considered antifeminist and racist. William & Mary, De Paul University, and the University of Colorado all disciplined students for criticizing affirmative action, and the University of Kansas disciplined a professor for condemning the National Rifle Association.
At Wesleyan University, after the school newspaper published a student op-ed criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement, students demanded that administrators defund the paper. At Amherst College, students demanded that the administration remove posters stating that “All Lives Matter.” At Emory University, students demanded that the university punish whoever had chalked “Trump 2016" on campus sidewalks because, in the words of one, “I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe. … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school.” And at Harvard, African-American students demanded that a professor be taken to the woodshed for saying in class that he would be “lynched” if he gave a closed-book examination.
The latter is an example of a so-called “microaggression” — words or phrases that may make students feel uncomfortable or “unsafe.” Such microaggressions, whether uttered by students or faculty members, have been deemed punishable by colleges and universities across the nation. A recent survey revealed that 72 percent of current college students support disciplinary action against any student or faculty member who expresses views that they deem “racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive.”
The core obligation of a university is to invite challenge to the accepted wisdom.
Another recent innovation is the much-discussed “trigger warning.” A trigger warning is a requirement that before professors assign readings or hold classes that might make some students feel uncomfortable, they must warn students that the readings or the class will deal with sensitive topics like rape, affirmative action, abortion, murder, slavery, the Holocaust, religion, homosexuality, or immigration.
And then there’s disruption: If students who disagree with a speaker’s views can’t get a speech canceled, they disrupt the event to silence that speaker. Too often, college administrators, fearful of seeming unsympathetic to the protesters, terminate the events because of the disruptions and then fail to discipline the disrupters for their behavior.
How did we get here? It was not long ago when college students were demanding the right to free speech. Now they demand the right to be free from speech that they find offensive or upsetting.
One often-expressed theory is that students of this generation, unlike their predecessors, are weak, fragile, and emotionally unstable. They’ve been raised, the argument goes, by parents who have protected, rewarded, and celebrated them in every way from the time they were infants. Therefore they’ve never learned to deal with challenge, defeat, uncertainty, anxiety, stress, insult, or fear. They are emotionally incapable of dealing with challenge.
But if that is so, then the proper role of a university is not to protect and pamper them but to prepare them for the difficulties of the real world. The goal should not be to shield them from discomfort, insult, and insecurity, but to enable them to be effective citizens. If their parents have, indeed, failed them, then their colleges and universities should save them from themselves.
There is, however, another possibility. It is that students, or at least some students, have always felt this way, but until now they were too intimidated, too shy, too deferential to speak up. If so, this generation of college students deserves credit, because instead of remaining silent and oppressed, they have the courage to demand respect, equality, and safety.
I think there is an element of truth in both of these perspectives, but I am inclined to think that the former explains more than the latter.
Faced with the continuing challenges to academic freedom at American universities, the University of Chicago’s president, Robert J. Zimmer, charged a faculty committee last year with the task of drafting a formal statement on freedom of expression. The goal of that committee, which I chaired, was to stake out Chicago’s position on these issues. That statement has since become a model for a number of other universities. Here are some examples of its central principles.
- “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”
- “Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”
- “The University may restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the core functioning of the university. But these are narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression.”
- “The university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that robust debate and deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the community, not for the university as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.”
- “Although members of the university are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.”
Why should a university embrace these principles?
First, bitter experience has taught that even the ideas we hold to be most certain often turn out to be wrong. As confident as we might be in our own wisdom, certainty is different from truth. The core obligation of a university is to invite challenge to the accepted wisdom.
Second, history shows that suppression of speech breeds suppression of speech. If today I am permitted to silence those whose views I find distasteful, I have then opened the door to allow others down the road to silence me. The neutral principle, no suppression of ideas, protects us all.
Third, a central precept of free expression is the possibility of a chilling effect. That problem is especially acute today because of social media. Students and faculty members used to be willing to take controversial positions because the risks were relatively modest. After all, one could say something provocative, and the statement soon disappeared from view. But now, every comment you make can be circulated to the world and called up with a click by prospective employers or graduate schools or neighbors. The potential costs of speaking courageously, of taking controversial positions, of taking risks, is greater than ever. Indeed, according to a recent survey, about half of American college students now say that it is unsafe for them to express unpopular views. Many faculty members clearly share that sentiment. In this climate, it is especially important for universities to stand up for free expression.
How should this work in practice? Should students and faculty be allowed to express whatever views they want, however offensive they might be to others?
Yes. Absolutely.
Should those who disagree and who are offended be allowed to condemn that speech and those speakers in the most vehement terms? Yes. Absolutely.
Should those who are offended and who disagree be allowed to demand that the university punish those who have offended them? Yes. Absolutely.
Should the university punish those whose speech annoys, offends, and insults others? Absolutely not.
That is the core meaning of academic freedom.
Does that mean the university’s hands are tied? No.
A university should educate its students about the importance of civility and mutual respect. These values should be reinforced by education and example, not by censorship.
A university should encourage disagreement, argument, and debate. It should instill in its students and faculty members the importance of winning the day by facts, by ideas, and by persuasion, rather than by force, obstruction, or censorship. For a university to fulfill its most fundamental mission, it must be a safe space for even the most loathsome, odious, offensive, disloyal arguments. Students should be encouraged to be tough, fearless, rigorous, and effective advocates and critics.
At the same time, a university has to recognize that in our society, flawed as it is, the costs of free speech will fall most heavily on those who feel the most marginalized and unwelcome. All of us feel that way sometimes, but the individuals who bear the brunt of free speech — at least of certain types of free speech — often include racial minorities; religious minorities; women; gay men, lesbians, and transsexuals; and immigrants. Universities must be sensitive to that reality.
Should students be allowed to express whatever views they want, however offensive? Yes. Absolutely.
Although they should not attempt to “solve” this problem by censorship, universities should support students who feel vulnerable, marginalized, silenced, and demeaned. They should help them learn how to speak up, how to respond effectively, how to challenge those whose attitudes, whose words, and whose beliefs offend and appall them. The world is not a safe space, and we must enable our graduates to win the battles they’ll have to fight in years to come.
But hard cases remain. As simple as it may be to state a principle, it is always much more difficult to apply it to concrete situations. So let me leave you with a few cases to ponder.
A sociology professor gives a talk on campus condemning homosexuality as immoral and calling on “normal” students to steer clear of “fags, perverts, and sexual degenerates.” What, if anything, should the chair of the sociology department do? In my judgment, this is a classic case of academic freedom. The professor is well within his rights to offer such opinions, however offensive others might find them.
A student hangs a Confederate flag, a swastika, an image of an aborted fetus, or a “Vote for Trump” sign on the door of his dorm room. What, if anything, should administrators do? The university should not pick and choose which messages to permit and which to ban. That is classic censorship. But in the context of a residence hall, where students are a bit of a captive audience, the university can have a content-neutral rule that bans all signs on dorm-room doors.
The dean of a university’s law school goes on Fox News and says “Abortion is murder. We should fire any female faculty member and expel any female student who has had an abortion.” The university president is then inundated with complaints from alumni saying, in effect, “I’ll never give another nickel to your damn school as long as she remains dean.” What should the president do? A dean or other administrator at a university has distinctive responsibilities. If she engages in behavior, including expression, that renders her effectively incapable of fulfilling her administrative responsibilities, then she can be removed from her position. This is necessary to the core functioning of the institution. At the same time, though, if the dean is also a faculty member, she cannot be disciplined as a faculty member for the exercise of academic freedom.
We needn’t rely solely on hypotheticals. There was the situation at DePaul University in which a student group invited a highly controversial speaker who maintains, among other things, that there is no wage gap for women, that as a gay man he can attest that one’s sexual orientation is purely a matter of choice, and that white men have fewer advantages than women and African-Americans. A group of student protesters disrupted the event by shouting, ultimately causing the talk to be canceled. They maintained that their shouting was merely the exercise of free speech.
What should the university do in such circumstances? Should it permit the protest? Arrest the protesters on the spot? Allow them to protest and then punish them after the fact?
Such a disruption is not in any way an exercise of free expression. Although students can protest the event in other ways, they cannot prevent either speakers or listeners from engaging in a dialogue they wish to engage in without obstruction. In such circumstances, the protesters should be removed and disciplined for their behavior. (DePaul’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, apologized to the speaker but also criticized “speakers of his ilk” for being “more entertainers and self-serving provocateurs than the public intellectuals they purport to be.”)
Or consider the incident last year at the University of Oklahoma when a group of fraternity brothers, in a private setting, chanted a racist song. Someone who was present at the time filmed the event and circulated it online. Was the university’s president, David Boren, right to expel the students? In my judgment, no.
As these examples attest, there are, in fact, marginal cases. But we should not let them obscure the clarity of our commitment to academic freedom. That commitment is now seriously and dangerously under attack. It will be interesting to see whether our universities today have the courage, the integrity, and the fortitude — sometimes lacking in the past — to live up to the highest ideals of a “true” university.
Geoffrey R. Stone is a professor of law at the University of Chicago, where he formerly served as dean of the law school and provost of the university. This essay is adapted from a keynote speech he recently gave at the Scholars at Risk Network 2016 Global Congress, in Montreal.
