Free Speech, but Not for All?

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle

Just over a century ago, the president of a distinguished college barred the suffragette and human-rights activist Jane Addams from speaking on campus, and suspended a student named Inez Milholland for organizing others in support of women’s rights. Milholland would go on to become influential in the women’s movement, and the college president, James Monroe Taylor, would become yet another example of an overly protective and historically myopic educator. He believed that women should be “not leaders, but good wives and mothers” — the prevailing view of the day.

The college was Vassar.

I thought of that this week as I read an essay in The New York Times by Ulrich Baer, New York University’s vice provost and a professor of German and comparative literature, who defended the right — indeed, the moral imperative — of universities to deny certain speakers a forum. It was not, he argued, that students were delicate “snowflakes” needing protection, but rather that the disenfranchised and marginalized in society were somehow disadvantaged or jeopardized by those voices that disparaged them. Baer’s is among a number of recent defenses of curtailed speech. Aaron R. Hanlon, an assistant professor of English at Colby College, offers a similar apologia in The New Republic, as have the philosophers Kate Manne and Jason Stanley in The Chronicle Review.

Baer cites the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who “shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good. … Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.”

On its face, the argument has its appeal, and it will most certainly make the professor a darling of the left and a hero of this ever-expanding faux-liberal position. But the analysis is as pernicious as it is flawed. The history of colleges’ banning speech is steeped in their uneasiness with controversy, new ideas, challenges to the status quo, and movements that might undermine their prestige and authority. In short, their reflex is to shut their ears to the very issues of greatest import to the underrepresented, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised. Baer’s sort of argument is often wielded at the expense of emerging progressive movements — the very sort he may well embrace — and it further legitimizes those who would suppress them.

It has always been the gateway argument for limiting speech, this idea that curtailing expression for some enhances the social and political position of others. The irony is that those who promote this position often do so to protect the underprivileged from the overprivileged, oblivious to the elitist position in which they have cast themselves as self-appointed arbiters of what speech is and is not acceptable for society at large.

Baer suggests that denying controversial speakers a forum still leaves them with the internet, disregarding that the internet also provides a powerful forum for groups whose voices were long suppressed. The internet and social media have removed many of the barriers to entry and provided accessibility to even the most splintered and historically marginalized of groups. To ignore this or to suggest otherwise is to infantilize such groups or imply that their messages are not competitive or compelling in the marketplace of ideas. To shield minorities from such speech is to disrespect them and assign them a fragility that many would not welcome. “To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong,” said Betty Friedan.

Baer suggests that student demonstrations against the appearance of racially controversial figures like Charles Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship.” The logic here is as facile and suspect as it is no doubt appealing to a certain body of students he may be courting.

But the very groups that Baer and his ilk defend and promote are those who have been most harmed historically by the curtailment of speech and the banning of controversial speakers. Administrators and educators have always invoked the name of the vulnerable in defense of their actions. Harvard banned Ralph Waldo Emerson for decades after his 1838 speech at the divinity school. His remarks were seen as a threat to the institution’s piety. Never mind that they were groundbreaking in terms of America’s evolving identity and the movement toward a liberal Christianity.

Abolitionists, gay and lesbian people, civil-rights activists, feminists, and others on the cutting edge of social change were all, in their day, barred from one university podium or another. Educators argued that their remarks might cause a disturbance, might undermine moral teachings, discomfort students, and offend the wider community. The playwright Arthur Miller was barred from speaking about his play The Crucible at the University of North Carolina for fear he was a Communist.

Note also that no empirical study has backed the idea that limiting someone’s speech advances the causes of those at society’s margins or inhibits the formation of hate groups. In Baer’s native Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust; until recently Germany barred publication of Mein Kampf. None of that prevented the rise of neo-Nazis there or the advent of a virulent strain of xenophobia directed against foreign laborers and other immigrants.

Barring speakers or preventing hate speech does not safeguard the oppressed. It empowers the oppressors, and it suggests that their words are to be feared for a compelling, persuasive power that, absent the muzzle, might infect others.

Baer’s argument is part of a tectonic shift in Western culture, one in which identity politics, revisionist history, and progressive agendas have become intertwined at the expense of true liberal values. Free speech is now widely viewed by those in academe as a kind of cafeteria offering. The elitist conviction is that conscience, alongside well-considered political and social engineering, will guide a deputized few to exercise superior moral insights in representing minority interests. This enlightened squad can identify which speech is safe and which is contrary to social goals of inclusiveness.

But take heed whenever any self-appointed guardians decide which speech is to be protected in the interest of any particular groups. The fragmentation of a society often begins with such noble goals.

We have seen time and again that speech is the common fault line where a misguided liberalism and a nascent fascism meet. Both appear more than comfortable dispensing with the rights of others in pursuit of some grander objectives. Hitler or Mao, Pinochet or Castro, the ends of the political spectrum converge around the perceived dangers of free speech.

What is happening at the university is happening across American institutions. It is why Stephen Bannon feels emboldened to tell the Washington press corps to “keep its mouth shut,” why thugs at campaign rallies used force to silence the opposition, why some textbooks remove material deemed objectionable or unpatriotic, and why science itself is suspect. Intellectual freedom, reverence for facts, political and religious tolerance, academic integrity — the most essential elements of liberty — are all inextricably linked to free speech.

Baer suggests that the free-speech argument is overly simplistic and static. “The parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing,” he says. Yet the idea of an organic and flexible standard of free speech, appealing as it may be, would strip it of the consistency that is the bulwark that stands between all controversial speakers and the despots who would silence them. It is not difficult in some far-left and far-right schemes to imagine the likes of Professor Baer himself being silenced. And his advocacy of a dynamic line between protected and unprotected speech grants a license to those in power to smother dissent of all sorts, particularly that of minorities and outliers.

The absolutist approach to free speech, to be sure, has its flaws. But for all its offenses, for all the broken china, for all the divisiveness and trauma it has caused, it remains the best and only instrument for insuring a free intellect and a more just society. It is not a matter of equality versus liberty, but as Owen Fiss, the Yale scholar of the First Amendment and outspoken champion of free speech, has argued, equality through liberty. Fiss observes that when speech has been curtailed, it has historically been the unheard, the underrepresented, and the deprived who have paid the steepest price. The lesson then is not to turn the quest for equality into a cudgel to be wielded against those whose values or positions one does not share.

For every Ulrich Baer, altruistic though he may be, there is an alt-right advocate who embraces the same credo — that the marginalized must be shielded, that those left behind ought not bear the burden of unfettered speech. It is a frighteningly slippery slope between the suppression of speech in the name of social justice and the fatwas issued against those accused of blasphemy and desecration. Wherever speech has been controlled in the name of some higher purpose, that very purpose is at risk. Speech is not a property of the few or the many, but belongs to all equally. The fact that many Americans have not had equal access to speech, or to the political, economic, or social power it represents, cannot be remedied by its curtailment.

Free speech is the greatest single ally of social justice and, even at its most noxious and repulsive, is often a catalyst for reflection and remediation. It is easy to mistake it for a tool of repression when, in fact, it is the antidote. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism do not respond to verbal anodynes. They must be addressed at their roots. Argument, reason, confrontation, and direct exposure to the psyche of bigotry remain the best hope.

Baer concludes with an appreciation for all those student protesters, activists, and “other ‘overly sensitive’ souls for keeping watch over the soul of our republic.” Romanticizing movements that target unfettered free speech, be it from the left or the right, is itself the strongest evidence for the need to protect free speech, no matter how welcome to some, or how invidious to others.

Ted Gup is an author, journalist, and professor of journalism at Emerson College. He is currently serving as writer-in-residence at Durham University, in England.