The importance of freedom of thought
(Conclusion)
A US district judge based in Tallahassee, Florida, Mark Walker, struck down the key provisions of the law as “positively dystopian” and unconstitutional as applied to higher education. “Striking at the heart of ‘open-mindedness and critical inquiry,’ the State of Florida has taken over the ‘marketplace of ideas’ to suppress disfavored viewpoints and limit where professors may shine their light,” he wrote, adding, “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints and cast us all into the dark.”
A federal appeals court has agreed with Walker, blocking enforcement of the law, but that hasn’t stopped other states from trying the same thing, hoping to get a different reaction from their federal courts.
Often, conservative lawmakers are responding to similar impulses on the left, which is more likely to use the tools of media, entertainment and academia rather than the law to shape public discussion. So while a vast majority of these current efforts come from lawmakers on the right, Americans should be as wary of efforts on the left to control what people can think or debate.
California’s community college system recently decided to dictate to its professors a set of anti-racist principles to teach to their students. The college system leadership said that the instructors – all state employees – would be judged on whether they acknowledge “that cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and would have to demonstrate “an ongoing awareness and recognition of racial, social and cultural identities with fluency regarding their relevance in creating structures of oppression and marginalization.”
Recruiting a diverse staff of educators and giving students an opportunity to learn about a wide range of cultures and societies are important goals. And some universities, such as the State University of New York, have adopted policies that allow much more freedom to students and administrators to fulfill those goals as they see fit. But as a recent PEN America report put it, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, “There is a difference between protecting a school’s or faculty member’s right to include DEI programming and mandating that they do so, especially in higher education.” The report called the California mandate “one of the most censorious educational gag orders we have seen.”
Some higher education institutions have required new employees to sign statements supporting their personal commitments to DEI principles, a litmus test that could have the effect of creating a uniform campus culture without a variety of viewpoints. One 2021 survey found that 19 percent of college jobs required these statements. Last year, the Times wrote about a noted psychology professor (and affirmative action supporter) who lost a chance to teach at UCLA because he disagreed with the usefulness of required diversity statements, calling them “value signaling.”
It would be easy to dismiss all of these rules and restrictions as a political tit for tat. But Americans should recognize what is happening as an escalation. Years of policing speech on college campuses, in the name of sensitivity, are now having unintended consequences. There is an “an imbalance around free speech on college campuses,” as Harvard professor Ryan Enos told Michelle Goldberg of the Times. Many who point this out “are not doing it to stand up for free speech; they’re just doing it because they want to shut down speech they disagree with.”
The censoriousness at the heart of all these policies ought to concern all Americans.