Why Students Must Shout to Be Heard

The politics of campus speech appear to have become inverted with dizzying speed. A decade ago, campus protests — for racial justice, for strengthened protections against sexual harassment and assault — frequently invoked the principle of student safety and called on college administrations to act protectively by disciplining transgressors. This in turn provoked a politics of self-declared free-speech absolutism from the center and right, albeit one that picked its battles far less absolutely than it proclaimed, ignoring the rise of job insecurity that is the single greatest threat to academic freedom, and carving out an enormous exception for pro-Palestinian speech.

Today, on the other hand, histrionics about student safety come from the center and the right, as peaceful protesters on American campuses, Jews often numerous among them, are labeled antisemitic, even terrorists, by faculty members, administrators, and the Israeli government. Authorities from deans’ offices up to the White House make ominous noises about imminent danger to Jewish life and threaten whatever repression proves necessary in response.

It would be easy to say that these are symmetrical errors, with hyperbole and panic ping-ponging from left to right. But this represents a lazy misreading of the situation. Across the apparent discontinuity from 2015 to 2024, there is a single thread: the undemocratic university.

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The waves of student protest from 2015 to 2020 represented, above all, a complaint that the formal adjustment of campus life to the presence of significant numbers of women and people of color had not been accompanied by sufficient substantive change in the everyday functions and social routines of the institutions. Thus many members of campus communities — undergraduates especially, but also graduate students and even faculty — detected hostility to their presence, but often in slightly subterranean or indirect forms: not a burning cross on the quad, but a dorm administrator arguing for students’ right to wear racist costumes on Halloween, or undue attention from the campus police; not the formal prohibition of a woman from a science lab, but her tacit exclusion from work collaborations that run through male academic friendships. When students raised objections, critics dismissed them as paranoid, fragile, or self-aggrandizing, and some went as far as to attempt to establish or rebrand their own institutions — including my own, the University of Chicago — in opposition to this perceived hypersensitivity.

But why did these protests use the language of vulnerability? If this was historically new, then it had historical causes. As the political scientist Melinda Cooper argues in her 2017 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, the escalation of tuition costs re-established the university administration as an actor in loco parentis, a status that student movements in the 1960s had successfully banished. Students now operated in an environment saturated by debt, which was understood as the financial condition of future professional success in a more competitive labor market. Accordingly, they appealed to their administrations to protect them because the indenture that they and their families had assumed materially positioned the university as the custodian of the student and the student’s future.

The student became the customer, as is often observed in critiques of corporate higher education — but not an ordinary customer. An unpayable debt that is the cost of entry to adulthood and economic security is not a typical, anonymous market transaction, but instead imposes social burdens that one might associate with premodern authority relations. It has the structure not of buyer and seller, but of patron and client.

The terms of the relationship are, of course, set by the university far more than the student. (Although behind this fact are larger structural changes in labor and financial markets, as well as public policy.) Universities do not compete to provide students the best possible education, but rather to keep their clients sufficiently satisfied — a quite different proposition. Otherwise, why would so many institutions push students toward pre-professional degrees that substitute for workplace job training, or toward online education? Why would they be so busy replacing tenure-line faculty with contingent instructors who are structurally impeded from providing the same attention? No one defends these moves as the most pedagogically sound, only as the most practical. They are strategies to locate the happy point on the cost curve where the university provides the minimum possible education for which students will still fill up all the paid spots.

It is true that universities need things from their students (as all patrons do from their clients) — tuition, first and foremost; later, maybe donations. But students do not correspondingly get to participate in the decisions of universities, except indirectly through protest. Instead, universities have proliferated bureaucracies to absorb students’ grievances and manage their experience, rather than treating them like equal and fully adult participants in the collective life of the institution. Under this institutional infantilization, student discontent flows into the channels of institutional bureaucracy, presenting a demand on administrations to manage student experience better. This, the bureaucracy finds a way to do, and the patron-client relationship is adjusted but preserved.

This is how protest, and the bad press that sometimes accompanies it, became the only means by which administrations could be made to absorb criticism. What has been mocked by outsiders as shrillness and hyperbole is in fact, very often, the condition of any successful form of political speech on a college campus. The less students are listened to, the louder their shouting must become. The fact that elite institutions, where debt loads are relatively lower, are often the first place where protests break through is a result of the greater ease with which more privileged students can make themselves heard. But it should not be mistaken for a phenomenon of elite campuses only: in 2015, often described as the first year of this style of campus protest, student activity erupted almost simultaneously at Yale University and the University of Missouri at Columbia; the former has been much commemorated and denounced, the latter largely forgotten. (Today too, it is not only Columbia, New York, and Yale Universities that are facing protests and cracking down, but also the Universities of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Pittsburgh, along with California State Polytechnic at Humboldt. More will surely follow.)

In the typical pattern prior to this year, administrations had understood that these challenges are episodic. Student movements were mollified symbolically and stalled for time, rather than faced up to, on the expectation that they would eventually fade away. If they were ultimately crushed by force, as some were, it typically came after a longer period of administrative prevarication and co-optation.

In other words, the protests of the 2010s did encounter real limits on campus speech, not in what was allowed to be said but in terms of whose voice might matter. Because discontent was largely released as so much steam from a kettle, however, university administrations had no effective feedback mechanism. Thus in recent years they have faced increasingly frequent and major student revolts, votes of no confidence from faculty, and massive strikes from instructional and noninstructional staff. Except when students, faculty, or staff have resorted to regulatory enforcement — particularly civil-rights or labor law — administrations have proved that they can generally ride it out. The constituency to which they are truly answerable is not, after all, found on campus.

When E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, decided last year to radically scale back the curriculum available to students, laying off 143 faculty members and cutting 28 majors and academic programs, there was loud student and faculty outcry and national media coverage — to no consequence. In the end, Gee was one of a growing number of university presidents to face a no-confidence vote from the faculty: Twenty-three such votes occurred in 2023, including at Rutgers and Temple Universities, and the University of Arizona. But these votes rarely compel university leadership to change course.

In contrast, donors and bullying elected officials need do little more than snap their fingers to accomplish a crackdown on student speech. This effect has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent months, bringing university presidents to their knees in the process. The demand for “student safety” now comes from billionaire trustees and powerful elected officials, and university leadership has desperately sought to get itself into alignment with this pressure. Each president to testify before Congress has cravenly accepted the baseless idea that Jewish students face real and widespread danger on campus; Columbia’s Nemat (Minouche) Shafik even seemed to spontaneously make personnel decisions in a futile attempt to placate Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Prohibition of student organizations and actions, mass suspensions and even arrests of violators: such moves go far beyond any of the intentions or consequences of student movements in the 2010s, which mainly limited themselves to noise and disruption. It is for this reason that we would do well not to make too much of any resemblance the present bears to the so-called politics of safety in the earlier period of student protest. The waves of protest in the 2010s arose from students’ inability to exercise meaningful sway over their institutions except through the very client status that already condemned them to a kind of conservatorship. The only resource they had was their voices: They could shout, but not forever. In today’s climate of protest, administrators have laid claim to the safety idea for their own purposes, and fashioned from it a tool to force the campus into silence. In both cases, meaningful deliberative participation in the governance of the campus community has been denied to students, faculty members, and staff, forcing them to shout if they wish to be heard. Then, when they do finally raise their voices, they are written off as shrill, fragile, and childish (a decade ago) or menacing, antisemitic, and terroristic (now). In the meantime, the excavation of mass graves in Gaza has been pushed from the headlines; the complete and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s universities seems to figure not at all in the debate about academic freedom.

This is not only a problem in terms of the democratic norms of the academic community. It touches on questions about the function and purpose of the university education in unrecognized ways. It has been common in recent years to hear worries and complaints from critics of academe, and indeed from faculty members and administrators too, about the climate of conformity on campus and about students’ waning attention to classwork. These phenomena, to the extent that they are real, are rooted in a climate established by universities themselves, which communicates to students that their development as autonomous thinkers is not the purpose of their time in school. If students’ ideas were what mattered to universities, why would they have to shout to be heard? And why, when they do raise their voice, would they be met with suspensions and arrests? Last week, Columbia University, which has already prohibited student organizations and called the police on peaceful protesters, briefly threatened to close down the student radio station. Does this sound like an institution that is concerned with its students’ intellectual self-development? When students vote overwhelmingly for divestment and administrators ignore them, the unmistakable conclusion is that the development of students’ critical thinking is an inconvenience to the institution, not its primary purpose.

For those who truly wish to see a vibrant culture of speech and debate, the answer should be obvious. Substantive democracy on campus — in which students, faculty members, and staff are meaningful participants in the governance of the university — is the only way to realize the values of academic freedom and freedom of speech that are so widely touted by university leaders and the donors and politicians whom they serve. The rapid spread of collective bargaining at universities is the most important step already taken in this direction, and unions are a crucial shield against administrative repression. Still, if the university’s role as a place for the free development of critical thought and democratic citizenship is to be taken seriously, then meaningful, democratic representation for students, faculty, and staff on university boards is probably the only institutional mechanism that can secure it. The people who make up the actual life of the institution should hold a majority, not merely a token seat or two. If such a reform would seem to imply a radical restructuring of university financing away from private donors and toward public investment, then that would be an implication worth playing out.

These matters of academic freedom and university governance are, of course, morally secondary to the heedless violence still unfolding in Gaza. The purpose of the current campus struggles is not merely to secure reform on campuses but to win peace and freedom for Palestine, through the demand for divestment. At the same time, the way one question bleeds into the other indicates an encounter between two universal values: national self-determination and free inquiry and expression. Gaining freedom for Palestinians turns out to be entangled with the unequal and undemocratic structures of American social institutions, an entanglement that student movements have revealed.

Free speech without democracy is a contradiction in terms, an impossibility that requires increasingly authoritarian enforcement to hold in place. By such enforcement, the critical capacities that are supposed to be at the heart of higher education themselves become suffocated.

Ironically, although it is often trustees and wealthy alumni who champion the values of free speech and expression the most loudly, they are also the single greatest obstacle to their realization. If they wish to hear robust speech and debate emanating from the students and faculty, the first step is simple: They need to release their grip on their throats.