Last week we academics were asked to include courses on morals as part of the general education of students. This week we are asked to add “free speech” to our Gen Ed requirements. Again, I don’t pretend this is easy. Here is Jesse Wegman in the New York Times:
… a university’s primary role should be to create a haven — a safe space — for open debate that emphasizes listening and mutual respect, if not agreement. “To be open to both all people and all ideas,” as Suzanne Nossel, who leads PEN America, put it. “The imperative is to make room for vigorous debate, airing ideas that are offensive or make people uncomfortable. That’s imperative in a moment like this. The answer can’t be to shut down that debate.” …
The bottom line is that universities undermine their basic purpose if their students feel in physical danger. Administrators can and should speak out in defense of the safety of their students and the values of their academic community, even if doing so means weighing in on a larger political debate.
As colleges and universities have been discovering, a culture of basic respect and listening doesn’t appear magically. It is unreasonable to expect that students barely out of high school, not yet fully grown in body or mind, should just know how free-speech culture works, even as they are entering what for many of them is the most pluralistic environment they’ve ever encountered. “It’s work!” Ms. Nossel said. “It’s the work of democratic citizenry, how we live together and make space for one another’s ideas.”
That’s why it’s important to make it a mandatory part of first-year education, at the least, akin to the way students are trained to spot and prevent sexual harassment and assault.
The point isn’t to engender some vague idea of civility but rather to instill the importance of building a pluralistic society.
Obviously there are legal red lines to a culture of free speech: threats, intimidation and harassment, to name the obvious ones. But universities can add their own limits — for instance, no targeting of specific students or of groups because of identity.
The rules and limits are likely to be different based on regions and varying campus cultures, but they should err toward permissiveness, and they should be clear and consistent and be communicated in advance.
As with the plea that we teach ethics, it is hard to know what we are supposed to be doing here. “Airing ideas that are offensive or make people uncomfortable” … what exactly does that mean? I have read two hundred and sixty-seven articles by “conservatives” that we need to protect free speech on campus and its perhaps “offensive” ideas without ever specifying what sorts of ideas they have in mind. What are we supposed to be telling students is in or out of bounds?
I think we can narrow things down. Nobody is going to be offended by controversial opinions on hydrolytic enzymes, the reign of Edward III, or the Eroica symphony.
Maybe it is “conservative” ideas that are unfairly proscribed? But the evidence doesn’t support it. I teach a lot of conservative ideas, and have my students read Hume, Burke, even Michael Oakeshott. My Dean has never had a word of complaint that Rushton is going on again about Chesterton fences. So that doesn’t seem to be it either.
In fact, the offensive speech that comes under scrutiny pretty much comes down to a single thing: statements that members of some group are not as welcome as others, perhaps because of a notion that they are in general less academically qualified, or that for some other reason they are not entitled to equal dignity and respect. We had a faculty member at my university who publicly claimed that black students, and female students, were in general not as academically gifted as other students. And it is right to censure such speech, for a black woman who simply wants to get on with the business of earning her BS in Chemistry should not have to put up with that. No other workplace would allow such statements, and for good reason. That such claims ought to have a chance to battle it out in the “marketplace for ideas” has never been convincingly argued, nor will it be.
So what of the current situation on campuses? What makes the Israel-Palestine speech question so vexing is that the boundaries between criticizing a foreign state actor’s policies and criticizing a religion or ethnicity can be blurred - it is difficult to think of a parallel case. Cheering of the brutal terror attacks by Hamas cannot be seen as anything other than anti-Semitic, as it involves seeing the sacrifice of over a thousand innocent Israelis as justified in light of the pursuit of a political goal. Once that claim has been made, of course Jews on American campuses have legitimate reason to feel unsafe. But how are we faculty to teach students out of the appalling sense of morality that justifies terrorism, and of publicly cheering it on?
There is a false sense, that often turns up in venues like the Times, that students at university are looking for a vigorous, open clash of ideas and debate, with no holds barred. I don’t think my campus is all that unusual, and I just never have that sense. Students want a degree, some useful skills, and the friendships and activities that come out of ordinary campus life. Just to get on with things. Speech aimed at making anyone feel inferior, or, worse, unsafe on campus has no value, a negative sum game. And for the most part I don’t think we need to explain this: the vast majority of our students do not wish to offend, they possess empathy, they’ve no time for bigotry, and don’t understand why “making people uncomfortable” is such an important thing.
Yes 100%. This is partly the consequence of the self-image that a very small subset of public intellectuals have of themselves--Stanley Fish used to patrol this street; Yascha Mounk does it now. This idea that they have that the public sphere is about (mostly) men making everybody else uncomfortable by Being So Contrarian and taking the discomfort of other people as validation that they must be right. It's a kind of caricature of the Habermasian idea of the public sphere as a domain where vast, unemotional intellects challenge one another in entirely rational ways and are unmoved by any feelings that result. Not only is this not how most people engage in conversations where they're aware that someone on the other side of the disagreement is feeling very tender or uncertain about the issue at hand, it's not even a good description of how these supposedly rational, distanced figures react to disagreement--they don't welcome it and enjoy it, they slap it down hard or ignore it imperiously, they're as sensitive and fragile most of the time as a newborn butterfly--overreacting to even the least kind of challenge. The only time you'll find them in disagreement is when a narrow-range organization like Heterodox Academy arranges with exquisite choreography a debate between them and someone who only slightly disagrees with them.
For the rest of us, disagreement, especially across wide divides, is a profoundly worrisome thing emotionally and intellectually. That's not because we're suddenly all sensitive snowflakes fretting about cancellation--read ANYTHING about the history of democratic public spheres and you constantly come across people who were good friends or close acquaintances who hovered and fretted at the edge of articulating a disagreement that might mean they'd have to stop being close. Or who worried about hurting someone they valued or even strangers they'd never met. That was a commonplace problem for public intellectuals for generations and now suddenly we've got a small number of people imagining that we have had and should continue to have a public sphere where you shouldn't have to care who you're hurting or what other people will think of you if you say something that seems harmful or callous.