President Trump at this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference.Tasos Katopodis, Getty Images
Over the past few years, The Chroniclehas represented every side of the fierce debates swirling around free speech and campus culture. Galvanized by disturbing incidents like the white-supremacist march at the University of Virginia, in 2017, and by contentious skirmishes over speaker disinvitations and the limits of student protest, our contributors have been asking hard questions. Has the liberal tradition of free speech begun to fade? Or is the idea that campus speech is under threat a right-wing fantasy? What kinds of campus speakers, if any, should never be invited? What roles do race, power, and status play in attitudes toward free speech?
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President Trump at this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference.Tasos Katopodis, Getty Images
Over the past few years, The Chroniclehas represented every side of the fierce debates swirling around free speech and campus culture. Galvanized by disturbing incidents like the white-supremacist march at the University of Virginia, in 2017, and by contentious skirmishes over speaker disinvitations and the limits of student protest, our contributors have been asking hard questions. Has the liberal tradition of free speech begun to fade? Or is the idea that campus speech is under threat a right-wing fantasy? What kinds of campus speakers, if any, should never be invited? What roles do race, power, and status play in attitudes toward free speech?
President Trump’s new executive order on “free inquiry, accountability, and transparency at colleges and universities” makes these essays required reading.
There is no reason for sending in the feds to manage speech at our colleges and universities. Granted, our standards for declaring a national emergency have grown lax, but this is ridiculous.
The notion of freedom of speech is being co-opted by dominant social groups, distorted to serve their interests, and used to silence those who are oppressed and marginalized. All too often, when people depict others as threats to freedom of speech, what they really mean is, “Quiet!”
The freedom to speak is not experienced equally by all persons, any more than is the freedom to breathe or the freedom to live. But the right to speak your mind may come as close as we can get to a touchstone of equality.
Academic freedom and freedom of speech are never primarily about the rights of people with power. They are always about the rights of people who would be silenced by those with more institutional or structural power. Having powerful white academics claim that marginalized groups — trans people, black people — are impinging on their academic freedom misses the obvious point that those groups rely on freedom of speech to be able to dissent from harmful ideas and to resist their dissemination. These dust-ups in academe are always about who has the power to shape knowledge production. So I must always stand with those who have to fight for the right to be heard.
Bills meant to guarantee “free speech” on campus 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.
A disturbing hypocritical piety persists sometimes in the rhetoric of the defense of free speech: that hypocrisy is what Trump exploits. … The university is viewed as in some way papering over or even implicitly defending inequities and injustices. We have to find a way to counter that claim and separate the idea of freedom of speech and academic freedom from any tacit alliance with those injustices.
These days, free speech is the mantra of the right, its weapon in the new culture war. The invocation of free speech has collapsed an important distinction between the First Amendment right of free speech that we all enjoy and the principle of academic freedom that refers to teachers and the knowledge they produce and convey. The right’s reference to free speech sweeps away the guarantees of academic freedom, dismissing as so many violations of the Constitution the thoughtful, critical articulation of ideas; the demonstration of proof based on rigorous examination of evidence; the distinction between true and false, between careful and sloppy work; the exercise of reasoned judgment. To the right, free speech means an entitlement to express one’s opinion, however unfounded, however ungrounded, and it extends to every venue, every institution.
