I woke on February 2, 2017, to a new reality. The night before, riots had broken out at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was then chancellor. One hundred and fifty “antifa” activists, wearing black masks, hats, and backpacks, had marched on Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, to protest a speech by the Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. They smashed open the tall glass windows of the student union and set fire to a propane-powered lamp. Yiannopoulos had to be escorted off campus to ensure his safety. President Trump, in a tweet, accused Berkeley of suppressing free speech and threatened the loss of all federal funds.
Yiannopoulos had come to Berkeley on his “dangerous faggot” tour, promising to insult students who were transgender, undocumented, Muslim, feminist, or simply (and misleadingly) “politically correct.” Many faculty members and students called for the event to be canceled. I refused. I told them that the university is pre-eminently a site for free inquiry, exchange, and debate; I did everything possible to ensure that Yiannopoulos could speak.
Protesters on the left have undermined the value of free speech, which will inevitably come back to haunt them.
Universities have long understood that hateful words deployed against marginal groups can be as antithetical to institutional values as any abrogation of freedom of speech. Commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion require more than either affirmative action or additional resources for minority groups. The charge that universities are coddling, if not creating, “snowflakes” is politically motivated and deliberately inflammatory. Universities have always sought to support and nurture students, while offering access to ideas that are often unsettling, and occasionally offensive.
Universities must nevertheless uphold freedom of speech, not only because of the First Amendment but also because of at least three other compelling (and related) values: institutional autonomy, the importance of engaging ideas no matter how unpalatable they might seem, and academic freedom.
Conservative critics of the university, who have bemoaned for years the putative takeover of the academy by the left, have used free-speech controversies to argue for greater government control over higher education. Last year a bill passed in North Carolina — similar to bills that have now been passed in 10 other states, including Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, and Virginia, and that have been introduced in Wisconsin and California — promising to ensure free speech on public colleges’ campuses.
At first blush, the bills seem reasonable, even necessary, given recent controversies. Read through them, however, and it’s clear that another agenda is at work. State legislatures have been given the authority to monitor free speech, demand yearly reports, insist on (and define) administrative neutrality on all political issues, impose new rules for student discipline (including expulsion) around any perceived disruption of free speech (again, defining what “disruption” might mean, as opposed to the parallel exercise of free-speech rights in the form of protest), and take direct responsibility for controlling campus unrest.
The ideas in these bills draw from language developed and promulgated by the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank that has been campaigning to introduce more conservative views on U.S. campuses. Those on the left who have sought to silence offensive or dissenting views have provided an easy target for this kind of state intervention. By rejecting the procedural commitment to free speech, protesters on the left have undermined its substantive value, which will inevitably come back to haunt them as a precedent to censor their own views.
As these bills make clear, controversies over speakers have provided the thinnest of reeds to undermine the real substance not just of free speech but also of academic autonomy. These legislative interventions garner support both because of general concerns about free speech and because many political figures, liberals as well as conservatives, share a belief that public universities should be managed directly by the state. Given problems like rising costs and the declining legitimacy of higher education, public universities seeking autonomy from political control — a longstanding condition for genuine academic excellence — are fighting an unpopular battle.
While the conservative mobilization around free speech has been deliberately public, parallel efforts to promote the legitimacy of conservative views have been for the most part cloaked in secrecy, as seen, for example, in the recent controversy over gift agreements between George Mason University and the Koch Foundation. And yet, even if efforts to promote free speech are driven primarily by concern that many campuses are inhospitable to conservatives, the recognition that universities need to educate students in how to engage competing and often contradictory viewpoints — whether disciplinary, philosophical, ideological, political, or cultural — is not without merit. The university as an idea stands resolutely in contrast to the like-minded bubbles of insular and uniform thinking that increasingly make up the public sphere, especially on the internet.
The most memorable course I ever took in college was during my first semester. It was a class on free will and determinism taught by a philosopher of religion who had spent his life studying Hegel and by a behavioral psychologist who had been trained by B.F. Skinner. Here were two very smart professors who could disagree fundamentally and yet not only respect each other but contextualize both their own and each other’s positions around long and robust traditions, across disciplines. Far from leaving the class with either a fixed opinion or the belief that all truth was illusory, I came away with a heightened realization of the rigor of academic knowledge, along with a sense of the importance both of ideas and of historical contexts. These lessons did not change my own political positions, chief among them opposition to the American war in Vietnam, but they did help instill a new sense of openness to different ideas.
This is not to say that universities should seek “viewpoint diversity” (to invoke the phrase of the Heterodox Academy) in the service of mirroring political opinions as they exist in society, nor is it to say that universities can be entirely neutral. It is to say, however, that the commitment to freedom of speech and expression should be accompanied by an institutional culture that values disagreement and debate, and that provides a supportive setting for fundamental differences of belief, perspective, and persuasion.
When we argue that a liberal-arts education trains students in the kinds of civic values that are necessary for a vibrant democracy, we do not mean that we are either inculcating particular political views or conforming to the exact range of views that map onto existing political parties. We are training students to form their own views as thoughtfully as possible while respecting and engaging the views of others.
That’s why it’s all the more important to take seriously the critique that free speech doesn’t hold the kind of value on campuses that it did in the days of the Free Speech Movement. But it’s not true, as many baby boomers suggest, that student activists in the 1960s and ’70s were all (or always) keenly interested in hearing every point of view (despite the genuinely principled stance of Mario Savio in 1964). And yet the level of genuine engagement between different views seems to have declined significantly, a reflection in large part of the polarization in American society.
Though I don’t endorse many contemporary critiques of identity politics, such as Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal (Harper, 2017), there has been a tendency to privilege self-representation over the need to engage social difference in terms that are both respectful and critical. Genuine engagement requires humility and historical deference, but it also depends on the willingness and opportunity to interrogate and critique other points of view.
The principles of academic freedom are distinct from the protections of freedom of speech, even as they share some fundamental commitments. Our contemporary understandings of academic freedom were developed through efforts to protect faculty members from censorship or discipline on the basis of their political views. This principle took shape side by side with the evolution of professional standards that would be monitored and enforced by academic peers and protocols rather than by administrators and trustees. The result is that academics are accorded the equivalent of First Amendment rights (whether they work at public or private institutions) when expressing their personal and political views outside of professional settings, while in turn tasking professional guilds with regulating curricula and criteria for academic evaluation.
Still, academic freedom and freedom of speech are widely conflated outside of the academy, and it is clear that some of the tenets of academic freedom do, in fact, depend on the First Amendment. When Governor Ronald Reagan vowed to clean up the mess at Berkeley back in 1966, he meant both the “shenanigans” of students and the political license of professors, and he lumped much of what he found so offensive under the rubric of academic freedom.
We must speak out against hate speech, but we have an urgent imperative to open the university up further.
In recent years, and especially since the election of Donald Trump, concerns about the broad protections of academic freedom — whether around political expression in social media or in efforts to monitor and expose the putative political bias of the professoriate — have escalated and been exacerbated by widespread attacks on expertise, science, and “elite” forms of knowledge. As a result, any real (or apparent) abrogation of free-speech rights on campuses will become inevitable grist for further attacks on academic freedom — a critical ingredient not just for excellence in higher education but also for the health of our democracy.
Allowing full freedom of speech, up to the limits determined by the jurisprudence around the First Amendment (which, significantly, allows universities to regulate “free-speech events” by using the provisions of “time, place, and manner” without judging the political content of any speech), is integral in defending against a full-throated campaign to undermine the American university. This attack is far more dangerous than occasional instances of hate speech.
As we defend the university, we must speak out against hate speech, but we have an urgent imperative to open the university up further: to new ideas, to more-vigorous debate, to more and different types students, to engagement with the world, and to the public more generally, for whom the idea that college is still a public good needs stressing, and demonstrating, today more than ever. This means protecting the rights of those who argue against the values we hold dear — even when they spew hate.
Nicholas B. Dirks is a former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. He is writing a book on the history and future of the university.
