Why One Scholar Sees Little Evidence on Campus of a Free-Speech ‘Crisis’ — but Plenty of Panic

The issue is personal, says the lecturer in politics at Acadia University, in Nova Scotia — he wants students to feel comfortable expressing a variety of viewpoints in his classes, which touch on sensitive topics regarding Islam and Middle East politics.

But it’s also broader: He worries that all the talk of repressive policing of speech will further erode conservative students’ trust in their professors. And he’s concerned that isolated campus protests, amplified for maximum outrage, could result in harmful state policies and unconstitutional crackdowns on campus protests.

His articles, with charts from data he has collected and with surveys conducted by Gallup, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and other interested parties, have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, and scholarly blogs. He’s also taken his arguments on the road, speaking recently at Texas Christian University, and has served as an external reviewer on a report by PEN America that also cast doubt on the idea of a free-speech crisis.

Sachs spoke with The Chronicle about the moral panic he sees in free-speech debates, why he thinks it’s dangerous, and the reason he doesn’t think today’s college students should be called “snowflakes.”

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You’re a political scientist whose research largely focuses on the Middle East, but much of your recent writing and research focuses on campus free speech. How did that come about?

On a personal level, I care deeply about all my students — no matter what their ideology is — finding space inside the classroom and elsewhere on campus to speak their minds and to feel comfortable. Above and beyond that, there’s been a clear erosion in bipartisan support for higher education in the United States, and we’ve seen a collapse in financial and political support for the academy, particularly among conservative Republican voters. To the extent that this alleged free-speech crisis is responsible for that collapse, it poses a massive threat to the integrity of higher education. I’m pretty alarmed by it. There is so much misinformation out there that it makes sense to get a more balanced view. That’s what I’m trying to provide.

You’ve disputed the idea that campuses face a free-speech crisis, but we continue to hear reports about controversial speakers being shouted down and conservative students claiming that their views are being stifled. Are there free-speech issues you feel we should be worried about?

I do think there are real problems. There are cases and dynamics that are alarming. But the language of crisis and catastrophe that has enveloped the debate is driven largely by political actors who see this as a potent line of attack. The skepticism among some political actors toward higher education is not new. Whether it’s William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale or Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, there is this current running through American conservatism that is very skeptical of the academy. In today’s climate of extreme polarization, that skepticism has metastasized into outright distrust, bordering on disgust in many cases.

Why do you feel it’s important to tamp down the rhetoric surrounding the so-called free-speech crisis? What impact might it be having on efforts to regulate campus speech?

People don’t make policy very well when they’re in a panic. We see this with these Goldwater Institute-inspired state-level campus-free-speech laws that mandate that specific disciplinary actions be taken in the event of a speech-related controversy or else expose universities to liability. At a very simple level, the panic is leading to bad policy. I see Trump’s executive order [regarding free speech on campus] as a continuation of that.

This kind of narrative also breeds mistrust among some students toward the academy. Conservative students already report high levels of mistrust toward their faculty. To the extent that the “crisis” rhetoric exacerbates that, it makes the mission of the university more difficult. It’s harder to get students to learn in an environment like that.

Do any recent controversies come to mind? What about the students who were arrested at the University of Arizona after a videotape circulated of at least one of them calling Border Protection agents the “murder patrol” through an open classroom door?

Those arrests were a massive overreaction by the campus police and the administration. It’s hard not to think about this in terms of politics. If you look at the specifics of what happened in Arizona, this kind of case is catnip for anyone, especially on the right, who is convinced there is a free-speech crisis. If the university did not come down hard, it would be accused of not valuing free speech. Yet while there’s a lot we still don’t know, there is every indication this was a constitutionally protected protest.

In another case, at Utah State University, two students were detained by campus police and investigated because they silently unfurled a banner after an event had completed. For some reason, they were immediately removed from the building by security. As long as a university’s access to federal funding is contingent upon its protection of free speech, I worry we’re going to see more administrators overreacting and panicking and coming down very hard on constitutionally protected speech.

Critics from the right describe today’s college students as “snowflakes” who are always seeking safe spaces to escape ideas that offend them. What’s wrong with that narrative?

For one thing, it’s so condescending. It’s not the language you use when you’re trying to make allies and reform a system. It’s the language of a culture war. We have seen, in polling data, significant numbers of students who associate certain kinds of speech with violence. But I don’t think the rhetoric of coddling, or of snowflakes or victimhood, gets us very far.

Why have we seen so many incidents in recent years of clashes between right-wing speakers and angry left-leaning students?

There is a rising industry in triggering or angering students. There’s money to be made and attention to be had and careers to be built on coming to campus and raising hell and trying to get yourself attacked verbally so you can be refashioned as a free-speech warrior.

The high-profile agitators have partly disappeared, but there are plenty of others who have similar motivation for coming to campus. In their promotional literature or YouTube videos, they’ll say things like “Charlie Kirk [founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group] came to campus and triggered the libs.” It’s part of their explicit sales pitch.

But we also saw a shift in the behavior of liberal students, especially in 2016 and 2017, toward the use of more disruptive forms of protest. I suspect that’s the result of increased anxiety and political mobilization during the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump’s victory. Since then we’ve seen a significant improvement.

What issues surrounding free speech do you feel are being overlooked?

This story is intimately bound up with the increasing adjunctification of faculty. There’s a new class of instructors being introduced on American campuses who have far fewer protections and far less speech security, and that’s alarming. And with the increasing adoption of learning modules and pre-prepared course content, it’s easy to imagine a situation where faculty have very little control over what’s taught in the classroom. There’s an obvious free-speech difficulty there.

Critics describe college campuses as places where students and faculty members are inhibited from expressing views that aren’t politically correct. Is there any truth to that?

We’ve developed this image of campuses as being especially repressive or conformist. If anything, the opposite is the case. Once students graduate and go out into the world and get jobs, they’ll experience far more censorship. On a campus, you can stage an anti-university demonstration. You can give interviews to the campus newspaper that criticize the university. I can’t imagine someone whose job and health care and economic security depend on their boss engaging in the kind of rhetoric a student could about a professor or administrator.

If you are in the business of hunting down and amplifying a controversial act that serves your political purposes, you will not walk away disappointed. But these isolated incidents won’t give you an accurate depiction of what higher ed, faculty, or students look like. Until we drill this fact into our heads, these examples we read about in the press are going to continue to give us a distorted view.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.