Speaking Up About Free Speech on Campus

When Ulrich Baer contributed an opinion piece to The New York Times in 2017 on speech on campus — the subject of his new book — the response was furious.

As he does in What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus (Oxford University Press), Baer, a professor of comparative literature, German, and English at New York University, called into question some cherished notions about free speech in the United States.

He says nearly 1,200 people responded on the Times website before it closed comments. Many of them, apparently ginned up by far-right commentators, wrote in hostile tones. Comment moderators removed references to his children, which schools they attended, and his family’s home address, he said in an interview. “It’s not a pleasant experience to go viral.”

The voices that assailed him were not just reactionary ones, he says. “I was very surprised that the liberal media joined in.”

In his new book, Baer brings a much-expanded exploration of his arguments to an academic audience. Whether it is more willing to listen than was the public one of 2017, he is about to find out.

His thesis is that academe allows academic freedom to be conflated with free-speech “absolutism,” in which the concept of free speech is invoked to allow “even the most vile and incendiary speaker to get a hearing” on campus. As a result, he writes, disruptive voices with little if any interest in academic freedom or pursuits are able to drown out or suppress altogether the contributions of other speakers who have qualified to be part of academe’s carefully fashioned quest for knowledge.

University communities are struggling, he writes, to explain “where is the line between robust exchange and interference in a university.”

He asks: What if students who object to invitations to polarizing speakers to deliver on-campus provocations are not “snowflakes” — overly sensitive, privileged, averse to views they oppose — but instead are objecting to being bullied, silenced, and subjected to demonstrably absurd notions that their professors would rightly never allow in classroom teaching?

Students justifiably object, he says, to a silencing that has racial and ethnic dimensions and that leaves minority students and faculty voices with an empty promise of participation in public discourse.

As the title of his book suggests, Baer does not offer a blanket exoneration of “snowflakes.” He writes that they may be guilty, at times, of “irrationality, impulsiveness, and incoherence.” But he argues in an interview that many are saying that what is really at stake is “equality and access to participation” for those within academe, as opposed to a free-for-all for those making incursions into it.

In addition to teaching literature and photography, Baer held positions in university administration from 2007 to 2018. He has also hosted almost 70 conversations about free speech with legal and cultural thinkers as part of his podcast series Think About It. He argues that university administrators, academics, and students must do a better job of explaining academe’s “gatekeeping function” — against, for example, obsolete ideas and deliberate distortions — and of describing how that function differs from instituting speech codes, legislating civility, or restricting debate.

Having taken a beating in 2017, Baer has adopted a feistier media stance now. A self-described “proud naturalized American” who was raised in Germany, he objects to frequent assertions that he somehow cannot understand American free speech. He does point to the different understanding of free speech and racial vilification in many European and other nations that bar hate speech — but that legal tradition, he notes, also exists much closer to home.

It can be found, he said, in such American academic fields as critical legal studies and critical race studies, and also in Supreme Court rulings that have supported universities’ right to control speech in certain circumstances, as well as in American society’s more-general right to curtail some forms of speech.

Those scholars and Supreme Court justices, Baer argues, have been saying of the broadest construction of “free speech” that “this approach isn’t working for America.”

Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.