Last year at Harvard, the defense of free speech was tested. And the defense of free speech failed.
I was part of that defense. I could often be found among those standing up for minority views to skeptical students or to colleagues. I commented publicly on the dangers of liberal political homogeneity on campus. In the spring of 2023, when the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH) launched to considerable fanfare, I was pleased to be tapped to join their ranks. I knew that many colleagues saw free-speech organizations as the domain of political conservatives, but I told the Harvard Crimson that the CAFH was necessary, even for political liberals like myself, because “at certain times, we might find that our own ideologies are the ones that are in the minority.”
The failure to defend free speech began almost immediately after the notorious open letter from the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, issued the day after the October 7 attack on Israel, which put the blame for the terrorist violence on the Israeli occupation and its dehumanization of Palestinians. The response to this letter was swift and one-sided. Larry Summers, the former Harvard President, criticized the university for not denouncing the students. A Democratic congressman called them “morally depraved.” Bill Ackman, the billionaire Harvard donor, urged his social-media followers to expose the students and blacklist them from future employment, leading to on- and offline doxxing.
I was sure that the recently formed CAFH, facing its first real free-speech challenge, would rise to the occasion and flex its principled muscle to defend these students. After all, this was academic freedom red meat: The articulation of an unpopular opinion on a politically charged topic was causing students to be criticized and harassed by powerful people inside and outside the university. But to my astonishment, the first word I heard on the topic from my academic-freedom colleagues was the circulation of a letter for signatures, written by two of the CAFH co-presidents, demanding that the university do two things usually considered anathema to campus free speech: take a political stand condemning the attacks on Israel and denounce the speech of the students.
For the next several days, justifications for not defending the speech of the doxxed students flowed into the CAFH email list. One email suggested that the students be called before the administration to be “taught the error of their ways.” Others compared the students to the KKK or Nazis; another suggested they were under the influence of Russian intelligence operations. When some members suggested that the CAFH at least oppose doxxing, the response from others was that the students had to learn the consequences of their actions. Even though these students came under withering attack for their unpopular ideas — some even reported receiving death threats — the most that the CAFH could muster was a tweet purposefully avoiding mentioning the students or defending their right to dissident speech, instead simply affirming the university president’s earlier announcement that Harvard has a commitment to free expression.
When one of the leaders of the CAFH circulated a self-serving justification for why the defense of unpopular speech by an organization explicitly founded to defend free speech did not apply because the speech in question was “repugnant speech,” I decided I’d had enough. I announced my resignation on the email forum.
Over the next several months, I heard similar stories from others who had resigned from the CAFH. Active members would sometimes forward me justifications from the email group for why the university should be doing more to punish student protesters. To be sure, this view was not universal. But to see so much anti-speech sentiment in a free-speech organization was shocking. One frustrated member told me it was like joining a free-love organization that was primarily concerned with policing counts of romantic partners.
This past academic year, the attacks on academic freedom became so severe that the American Association of University Professors called the situation an “existential threat to democracy.” But the CAFH never raised its voice in protest — in fact, some members did quite the opposite. In October, as colleagues and I argued for the protection of dissident speech, leaders at the CAFH wrote to justify their public shaming of students for their views. Then in the spring, as student protesters encamped on Harvard Yard, administrators attacked free speech by doling out punishment to students wildly out of proportion with historic precedent. In response to these events at Harvard and in the shadow of a sweeping national crackdown on speech at college campuses — with over 3,600 students arrested nationwide, sometimes with alarming brutality that even targeted faculty — the CAFH leadership took up their pens, not to condemn the oppression but to urge the university to shut down the peaceful Harvard encampment.
When students and faculty members returned to Harvard this fall, they found free speech in a sorry state. We are reminded repeatedly about the consequences of breaking campus rules designed to curtail speech, including bans on posting fliers and writing with chalk on university property. A colleague recently called the situation “Singaporean.” Student protesters, once eager to make their voices heard at campus events, told me that they were now afraid to do so.
How was this allowed to happen? Why have the self-appointed free-speech advocates not risen to challenge these rules?
There is a lesson in Harvard’s failure to defend free speech. The defense of unpopular speech is especially likely to fail when free-speech organizations are politically one-sided. At Harvard, because many of the CAFH’s leaders were especially repelled by the politics of the student protesters, they proved incapable of the principles they had come together to defend.
For the last decade or so, conservatives and their allies have wrapped themselves in the mantle of free speech, which makes their recent failures to protect controversial campus speech all the more galling. But their actions are not dissimilar to those of campus progressives in recent years. The extent of progressive intolerance toward unorthodox views is surely exaggerated, but the problem is not invented. At Harvard and elsewhere, this intolerance tends to involve a small minority of activist students raising objections to someone’s speech on political grounds and seeking professional or social sanction, often via social media. Many faculty members were uncomfortable with this canceling, but they were unwilling to put their necks out and defend speech that ran counter to the campus political majority. Often, I heard faculty speaking in hushed tones about how unreasonable the activists were. But those whispering never spoke up. More than once, when scholars were attacked, I was advised by well-meaning colleagues to “keep my head down.”
This past academic year, the attacks on academic freedom became so severe that the American Association of University Professors called the situation an “existential threat to democracy.”
Last year, the tables turned. An anti-progressive backlash, first gaining traction in response to the excesses of progressive dominance on campus and then opportunistically accelerated after October 7, enabled conservatives to gain a foothold in campus politics. But after having spent a decade in the wilderness decrying the lack of free speech, the CAFH sat back and watched it happen rather than defend speech they found objectionable. Once again, after I wrote a column arguing that we should protect the dissident speech of students, many colleagues — including several Harvard administrators — told me in hushed tones that they agreed. Yet none were willing to speak up.
Some will see my pointing fingers at both progressives and conservatives as hollow “both sidesism.” But there are, in fact, areas in which both sides come up short. And it is not surprising that free speech is one of these. Humans don’t have any natural inclination for free speech, after all; decades’ worth of social-science research has shown that our instinct is to avoid or shut down speech that we find challenging. That’s why speech is protected in the U.S. Constitution and in the charters of many universities, including Harvard. It is a great accomplishment of liberalism (small L) that free speech is an abstract good, to be protected regardless of content.
But that’s easy to forget when most people agree with you, and when voices of dissent are mostly silent.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the fact that the CAFH, formed against a background of institutionalized progressive dominance, contained a disproportionate number of conservatives (and, in the current dispute, a large number of pro-Israel liberals). But there is a risk of political capture, whereby protecting free speech becomes merely a matter of politics, rather than principle. Such political capture is likely among the reasons that when Harvard and other universities found themselves under brazen political assault from Republicans in Congress in one of the gravest attacks on free speech at colleges in generations — far more threatening to free speech than any cancellation levied by progressives in recent years — many supposed advocates of free speech did little more than stand by and watch or make mild statements that barely counted as objections.
Such capture is by no means an exclusively conservative phenomenon. Indeed, critics have pointed to capture by progressives as a reason that the ACLU has sometimes failed in its central duty to defend free expression. Because people tend to feel more comfortable around those similar to them, it is the nature of institutions that as they start to tip one way or another, unless there is a powerful force preventing it, they will tumble toward homogeneity. This homogeneity can mean there will be no check on political impulses that get in the way of core principles.
In the past, when I raised the importance of free speech to fellow progressives, they would often respond that free speech was just a code word for conservative speech and that, given the opportunity, conservatives would throw liberal speech under the bus. To skeptics, the failure to protect pro-Palestinian protesters confirms their worst suspicions about the motives of conservative free-speech advocates.
Given what happened at Harvard last year, it is hard to argue. Progressive skeptics of free-speech conservatives often pointed out that conservatives seemed to train their sights on students practicing social “cancellation” on campus while largely ignoring the far more dangerous attacks on higher education by conservative-led state governments with truly coercive power. They have been affirmed in this belief. And so, perhaps ironically, the conservative defense of free speech means we find ourselves in a situation where the defense of free speech is not only more fractured and weaker than ever, but blind to the gravest threats.
It is important to note, though, that not all organizations failed to defend free speech during the recent on-campus turmoil. FIRE, for example, has been constant in its content-neutral defense of free speech and academic freedom, as has the inter-college Academic Freedom Alliance, of which I remain a member. We should ask what accounts for their admirable consistency.
While some progressive colleagues now tell me that they would never consider joining an academic-freedom organization, others have told me how in the past year they came to realize how important it is to protect all speech, even speech they find offensive, and that they regret having sat on the sidelines when colleagues were silenced.
The rediscovery of the value of free speech among progressives in the campus majority presents an opportunity to remind everyone that free speech is a principle of general value. It cannot simply be ignored when it is politically advantageous to do so. This is the silver lining of a year in which progressives have found campus politics aligned against them.
How then do we move forward? Both progressives and conservatives can take corrective action. Conservatives must back away from the schadenfreude that has characterized their reactions to progressive calls for free speech in the past year, which will do nothing to bring progressives, already skeptical, into the fold. And just as progressives would do well to encourage ideologically diverse campuses, conservatives would do well to encourage ideologically diverse free-speech organizations.
And progressives, who despite the recent pushback will surely remain the dominant political force on campuses, must use the experience of the past year to see the value in principled evenhandedness — and also in empathy. Having unpopular ideas under attack should help you understand why protecting unpopular ideas is everyone’s work. Progressives will also have to swallow the bitter pill and become more active in the organized defense of free speech; allowing the ideological capture of free-speech organizations is simply too dangerous. It is only by recommitting ourselves to a principled defense of all speech that scholars will have a means of defense when, inevitably, we find ourselves in the minority again.
To be sure, the details of free speech on campus are complicated. There are legitimate debates about how a campus should balance the right of assembly and protest with rules, such as those recently implemented at Harvard, that are facially neutral but easily abused. Such conversations over the exact shape of free speech are necessary if we are to implement the protection of free speech in any practical sense. But a few things should be non-negotiable: We must protect speech even if we find it offensive or distasteful, including speech that pushes the boundaries of a narrow definition of civility. In complex or ambiguous situations, we must err on the side of protecting speech; an insistence on the strict application of rules that may stifle speech in favor of order can too easily be turned around to restrict speech in the next instance. And we must be active and vigilant, not remaining silent when we find our political opponents in the crosshairs of cancellation. We must be willing to risk our reputation to come to the defense of our colleagues, including when we disagree with them most strongly. It is only by doing so that we give them an incentive to come to ours.
