Ending the campus speech wars
Anew school year beckons, and while college students are wrapping up summer jobs and picking courses, university administrators are thinking about violent demonstrations and how to avoid them. Last year saw disturbances or threats at University of California - Berkeley, Evergreen State, Middlebury and others. In each case, students were upset because someone who held views they deemed objectionable (Ann Coulter, for example, or Charles Murray) had been invited to speak on campus.
University administrators feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can protect free speech and risk the spectacle of a campus melee, or knuckle under to the demands of protesters, cancel the speech, and use “campus safety” as camouflage.
But there is another choice. Speakers are typically invited by student groups, but these invitations require university approval. Administrators should not approve applications to invite a controversial speaker to deliver an uninterrupted lecture. They should approve invitations for a controversial speaker to debate an opponent.
Discussion of these cases has focused too narrowly on free speech: who merits the platform that a college talk provides, who controls access to the platform, which ideas deserve debate, and so on. Professors love such abstract questions, all the more because they are probably unanswerable. But these discussions distract us from what ought to be our focus: What do our students learn when a controversial public intellectual comes to campus?
Yes, currently they are learning that some college administrators will silence speakers if protesters are rambunctious enough. But what initially motivated the invitation? What do university faculty mean for students to learn?
Students are not meant to treat a talk by Coulter as entertainment — a titillating show good merely for an ironic chuckle or a bit of cathartic outrage. Educators intend that these speakers will make students think. Too infrequently are students confronted by a very articulate purveyor of ideas that they think are wrong, and then challenged: “Tell me why you’re so sure she’s wrong.”
This sounds like a good idea, but universities choose a singularly bad mechanism — the academic lecture — by which students are supposed to learn this skill.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re learning to ride a bike or speak French, you learn a skill by instruction, observation and experience. Engaging with a subject. Yet students who are supposed to be learning how to debate abhorrent ideas don’t see a debate. They see a lecture.
If you want to hold forth without challenge, a lecture is your ideal format. The speaker sets the terms under which controversial topics will be discussed, selects which evidence will be examined, and characterizes his opponent’s positions. Researchers have known since the 1950s that messages are especially persuasive when one speaker presents both sides of an issue, and so can shape (and refute) arguments from the other side.
The plan, of course, is that controversial ideas will not go unchallenged. The speaker must field questions from the audience at the end of the talk.
To an experienced speaker, that’s not much of a threat. Most audience questions are simply not very incisive. It’s hard to review what you’ve heard in the past hour and find the real fulcrum of the argument, especially if you’re not an expert in the topic.
Perhaps most important, the speaker still retains power during the question period. That power includes implicit permission to deflect questions with non-answers and briskly move on. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently offered an example; when asked whether the White House was not “in chaos,” she smiled and said “If you want to see chaos, come to my house with three preschoolers. This doesn’t hold a candle to that.” The press corps chuckled, and that was that.
If inviting a controversial speaker to campus is meant to teach students to challenge people who hold ideas they disagree with, administrators should pick a format suited to that purpose. Controversial figures should be invited to participate in a debate, not to deliver a lecture. Protests against controversial speakers have always included faculty. Those faculty members who are certain that Murray or Coulter are intellectually bankrupt ought to welcome the chance to star in their unmasking.
A debate is not only a better way for students to learn from controversial figures, it may solve the dilemma currently occupying administrators: Who should be suppressed, controversial speakers or protesters? Administrators who host a debate cannot be accused of muzzling free speech. And because opposition voices have equal billing, administrators may feel more justified in maintaining order to ensure that the debate is not disrupted by protest.
If university administrators will keep student learning first, everyone will win.