“Free speech zones” and the campus echo chamber
The Colorado legislature did something important this year about growing academic intolerance, and did so with broad bipartisan support. Lawmakers banned “free speech zones” on college campuses, directed schools to impose the fewest possible restrictions on the “time, place and manner” of student speech, and put schools on notice that they must not discipline students “as a result of his or her expression.”
Meanwhile, Senate Bill 62 emphasized that none of these free-speech guarantees give students a right “to materially disrupt previously scheduled or reserved activities.”
Unfortunately, no single law can guarantee a new flowering of open discourse on campuses. Nor can it banish speech codes or stiffen the spines of university administrators when faced with raucous demands that a controversial voice be silenced.
After all, some of the biggest threats these days to free speech don’t involve the suppression of students’words so much as the speech of controversial outsiders invited onto campus by student groups. And these incidents— at Berkeley, ClaremontMcKenna, UCLA, Middlebury and elsewhere— are fueled by an ideology that seems to be gaining steam.
That theory contends students— and particularly minorities andwomen— are threatened by speech they find offensive. Attempts to suppress such speech are therefore campaigns of self-preservation.
For a glimpse into this logic, consider a recent oped in TheNewYork Times by Ulrich Baer, aNew YorkUniversity vice provost. He argues that protests that shut down a scheduled event “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of
free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship.” Baer believes “the parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing.” Free-speech protections, he says, “should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned. … What is under severe attack, in the name of an absolute notion of free speech, are the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse.”
Baer’s thesis may resonate in some academic quarters, but it is hard to reconcile with reality. The idea that right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter or obnoxious provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos represent a threat to any group’s ability to participate in “public discourse” on a 21st century college campus is patently absurd.
Moreover, Baer frames his argument as if menacing protests were targeting mainly white nationalists like Richard Spencer and other bigots, when that is not the case. Nowhere does he acknowledge a single instance in which an angry mob’s judgment— or heckler’s veto, as he calls it— is misguid- ed. Short of assuming protesters are always right, who will decide when the heckler’s veto is beyond the pale?
Heather MacDonald, whowas prevented from speaking at ClaremontMcKennaCollege in California, has sharply criticized the Black Lives Mattermovement for exaggerating the scope of police misconduct. She maintains police have pulled back enforcement for fear of being falsely accused of brutality. Right or wrong, her position iswell within the norms of traditional political debate. To suggest that her writings threaten “someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech” is equivalent to saying the only permissible views on police and crime emanate fromthe left.
Under Baer’s logic, activists would be forgiven for disrupting an appearance by someone who favors restrictions on immigration, opposes racial preferences in college admissions, or rejects the idea that climate change is the world’s most pressing crisis. After all, these views— and many others— are said by opponents to demean or undermine certain groups and even threaten human survival itself.
Baer says the parameters of public speech are constantly being adjusted. True enough, but here is a more sinister truth: In the long sweep of history, humanity’s default position on dissenting opinions has been to suppress them. Either the government did this, or religious hierarchies, or some other institution— or the task was left to braying mobs— but it happened with clocklike regularity. Free speech is a delicate flower because human nature rebels against tolerating opposing views. Its protection requires a civic culture and legal norms that keep the mobs at bay.
Former Stanford provost John Etchemendy recently warned his university’s board of trustees of what he sees as a growing “threat from within.”
“Over the years,” he said, “I have watched a growing intolerance at universities … a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.”
Etchemendy predicts that resisting this mood will be difficult. The alternative, though, is for university officials to abandon the field to the latest in a long line of enemies of intellectual freedom.