University a place for ideas, not for banning them

Ever heard of something called the “balloon effect”? It goes like this: Squeeze a balloon in one place and it will inflate elsewhere. The air moves, but does not disappear. Instead, it migrates to a place where there is less compression.

Analysts who work on drug policy along the United States border commonly use this analogy to describe how clamping down on drug production and trafficking in one region simply pushes it into another region. But the “balloon effect” is useful in helping to make sense of a different issue: the current climate concerning free speech and dissent on Canadian university campuses.

The most recent story comes to us out of Waterloo, Ont. During a tutorial about gender-neutral pronouns, Lindsay Shepherd, an MA student and teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, played a clip from TVO’s current affairs program The Agenda. The video featured University of Toronto professors Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Matte debating the use of non-traditional gender pronouns. Peterson, as you may know, gained a certain international notoriety when he spoke out against a policy requiring faculty to use pronouns like “ze” and “they” to address nongender-binary students who do not identify as either male or female. Matte was arguing against Peterson’s point of view.

Shepherd was later called into a meeting and reprimanded by her thesis adviser, program chair and the manager of the university’s Gendered and Sexual Violence Prevention and Support Office for showing this clip. She was told that there had been a complaint by a student or students in her class (this information was not shared), that she had violated institutional policies on sexual violence, that her actions were “transphobic” and that had created a “toxic climate” and “unsafe learning environment” for her students by not condemning Peterson outright. She was told that her professional “neutrality” in regards to showing the Peterson clip was akin to being “neutral” about other contemptible views, such as those of Adolf Hitler.

What is the fundamental role of the university and our higher education ecosystem in today’s changing world? It’s a question I’ve asked in this space before, and it’s one that I continue to wrestle with.

Let me go back to the “balloon effect” analogy to try and contextualize this latest situation at Laurier University. In this case, the free speech “balloon” is being squeezed through increased monitoring, control and surveillance over what can and can’t be said in the classroom. But forbidding the circulation of ideas in the university does not mean those ideas will disappear or that their public influence will be diminished. On the contrary, it simply means that they will go somewhere else, such as online cyber-communities which — as we know — are becoming increasingly hostile places.

Learning to think critically requires exposure to a range of different viewpoints. It requires argument and debate. You cannot arrive at an informed opinion by uncritically accepting what you are told by others to be true, whether that “truth” couches itself in left- or right-wing ideologies.

Educators must have mechanisms in place to call out racist, sexist, transphobic or any other hateful forms of speech in the classroom. But when universities censor or forbid difficult debate, it allows people like Jordan Peterson — whose views I strongly disagree with, by the way — to wrap themselves in the mantle of free speech. And you know what? He’s right.

When I see controversial ideas being silenced on university campuses — even if I personally find those ideas abhorrent — it worries me. Free speech, academic freedom, dissent and debate are cornerstones of a resilient, vibrant democracy.

There is much at stake here. Our current global political climate is marked by deep polarization. Now is not the time to shut down ideas we disagree with, but to engage with them.