Is Free Speech on Campus desirable?

Should there be privileged spaces in Society that are freer than other places? In an autocratic or elitist society, the answer must be yes. Some people who have or will have great power over the common ruck should have access to alethic sources of information and freer forms of discussion than the masses who must remain ignorant and engrossed in a 'noble lie' or ignoble state of metaphysical terror or paranoid hatred.

Furthermore, if the elite have a safe space where they can rape children and torture virgins in an emotionally supportive, tastefully decorated, milieu, then they can blow off steam before resuming their pastoral duties ministering to their flock.

In a Democracy under the Rule of Law, on the other hand, we would want the maximum freedom to be associated with private spaces available to the ordinary person. Freedoms and immunities should only be curtailed in public spaces with greater restrictions being placed on public spaces with more specialised functions or on the basis of greater vulnerablility imputable to those more constrained to use them.

Thus you can say what you like and exclude or include who you like in your own home but you must be more circumspect on the street. Entering your place of work or education or accessing health or other services, further constraints apply. In specialised professions- the law, medicine, accountancy etc., we expect higher standards and lower immunities.

How does this relate to the University Campus? Should speech be freer there than elsewhere? The obvious answer is no. Paying a fee or passing an exam can't entitle one to superior freedoms. 

The NYBR takes a different view.

When members of the National Socialist Party of America planned to march through the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, in 1977 with swastikas on their banners, they were not supposed to be interfered with. That was their right; that was what the First Amendment required as far as the regulation of speech on the streets was concerned.

Nonsense! The Village of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors resided, had a perfect right to ban the Nazis from marching. A Jewish lawyer with the ACLU stuck his nose in needlessly. There was no victory for 'free speech' at Skokie. All that happened was that an elite asserted obligatory passage point status for itself and tainted Liberty with an obnoxious interessement mechanism.

Who benefited? Reagan. He would soon refer to Liberalism as 'the L word'. The backlash against virtue signalling, holier than thou, Public Intellectuals had begun.

But does that right also apply on campus? When a few hundred white supremacists staged a nighttime march through the University of Virginia in August 2017 carrying torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” should that have been protected as free speech? Would the campus setting and the link with education have made it just as wrong—perhaps even more wrong—for university authorities and student groups to try to stop the white supremacists in Charlottesville as it was for the village of Skokie to put legal obstacles in the way of Frank Collin and his little band of Nazis forty years ago?

Of course! Villages should be able to stop hate-mongering nutjobs from invading their streets. So should campuses.

I don’t ask this as a constitutional question. Technically, the First Amendment constrains only government actions, so it applies differently to state colleges like the University of Virginia and private ones like Middlebury College. But let’s put that technicality aside. Behind the First Amendment there is supposed to be a principle of free speech that applies to everyone in our society—a strong ethic that says we should never shut down the expression of controversial views just because of their content. The question is whether that ethic of free speech matters more or less on campus than it does in society generally. Should we say, as Sigal Ben-Porath says in her book Free Speech on Campus, that “colleges and universities hold a unique place in the conversation about speech”?

No. We'd look silly saying any such thing. Campuses represent a social process of neoteny- they artificially infantilize their clients and prolong their heteronomy and emotional and intellectual dependency.

The question seems to crop up every month, with some new concern about speakers invited onto campuses being heckled or disinvited because of the prospect of protest. In February 2017 Milo Yiannopoulos, a provocateur from Breitbart, was invited to campus by the Berkeley College Republicans. On the day of his speech it was canceled because protesters lit fires and started breaking windows. In March, Charles Murray, the coauthor of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), a discredited study of the correlation between race and intelligence, was invited to Middlebury by the student chapter of the American Enterprise Institute. The event culminated in an ugly confrontation between Murray and some students in the audience who jostled and assaulted him after he was shouted down. His faculty interviewer, Allison Stanger, suffered whiplash and a concussion as a result of the melée. In April, students interrupted a speech at Auburn University in Alabama by the white nationalist Richard Spencer (of “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” fame). The university had tried to cancel the event (which had been booked by Spencer himself, not by a student group), but a judge held that it could not prevent Spencer from speaking on campus.

So, there is no such thing as free speech on campus. All that obtains is one form of bullying is  condoned while another is stigmatized. But bullying has nothing to do with liberty or fundamental rights or Public Justification or Epistemic Discourse. The truth is, certain types of bullying are a good thing. I recall being mercilessly ridiculed whenever I spoke up in my Topology class. Slowly but surely, the nerds convinced me that the subject referred to 'Set theory' not 'Sex theory' as I had ignorantly thought. Anyway, that's when I decided to switch to Accountancy- till the same thing happened again with reference to the true meaning of the phrase 'Double Entry'.

There are concerns too about students on campus being disciplined for or prevented from offending other students. In 2015 at Youngstown University, signs advertising Straight Pride Week—“brought to you by the students that are sick of hearing about your LGBTpride”—were taken down by the campus authorities because they were “counter to our mission of being a diverse and accepting campus.” Incidents like these—and one could cite hundreds of them—recently led Attorney General Jeff Sessions to say, in an address at Georgetown’s law school in September, that “a national recommitment to free speech on campus…is long overdue.” There’s a sort of moral panic going on: writer after writer, politician after politician, says we ought to be frightened about what’s happening on campuses because that is where the future of free speech will be determined.

This seems perfectly reasonable. Straight people have never been stigmatized or persecuted. These kids were being silly.
Most people leave the campus and get jobs and become proper grown ups. They may retain irrational loyalties of a tribal sort and this may have unfortunate political consequences. But this isn't the fault of 'free speech' on campus. It is the result of the adolescent tendency to form gangs and bully each other.

Are campuses special because they are isolated and self-contained? No. They are special precisely because of their connection to the rest of society.

Quite false. A campus located in America which trains doctors and engineers and constitutional lawyers from another country may be very special indeed in determining the future of that society though it has absolutely no connection to it.

What makes campuses special is that anyone entering it has an opportunity to gain skills and qualifications which can give them a secure place in some wholly different socio-economic milieu or, indeed, a different country and community.

John Palfrey is head of school at Andover, and in his book Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education he says that “our campuses ought to be connected to the world from which students and faculty come and to which they will go.”

A Campus should function like a membrane, not a pipe. It should filter out certain things existing in the student's natal milieu and should absorb what is best from other epistemic communities which have no connection at all to the world from which students come and to which the vast majority of them will return.

It is precisely the coming and going that worries the free speech advocates. High school students leave their homes and their families and go to college. Four years later, after graduation, they fan out into the wider community, taking with them whatever attitudes they have become accustomed to on campus. What they learn about free speech at college determines what sorts of citizens they become and in the long run determines what free speech principles survive in society at large.

Sheer nonsense! People get jobs and conform to the 'free speech principles' set down by their employer or professional association. My contemporaries at Uni, who wore Che Guevara t-shirts and Punk badges and who affected a 'Mockney' accent, quickly turned into good little Thatcherite drones. Thus has it always been.

A number of the books I discuss here are quite insistent on this. Colleges are “both the mirror of American democracy and the window into its future,” writes Ben-Porath, a professor of education, philosophy, and political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

American Democracy was founded and burgeoned without any connection with its Colleges till the Morrill Acts enabled the creation of 'land grant' Universities which would concentrate on agricultural sciences, engineering and other such useful subjects.

Free speech simply did not exist on the vast majority of such campuses. Indeed, some were segregated. In the Fifties, McCarthyism forced many American Professors to emigrate. Yet America remained a Democracy.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, many American campuses presented a very different appearance. But, this wasn't a 'window into the country's future'. It was a wholly delusive appearance. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California for, among other things, promising to 'clean up the mess at Berkeley' (i.e. tackle anti-war protests on campuses). Reagan failed, but was still a two term Governor. When he lost the Republican ticket to Ford, a lot of people assumed that he was too old and too out of touch with the 'boomers' to have a chance at the White House. College enrolment had peaked during the Vietnam War and so, it was thought, Reagan would be anathema to larger and larger cohorts of new voters.

The reverse happened. Why? Part of the reason was because Campuses turned to shit save in STEM subjects- i.e. those that voters had wanted taught in land grant colleges.

Why did Campuses turn to shit? Part of the answer was that the Academy did not understand what freedom meant. They assumed it had something to do with saying stupid shite and bullying anyone who didn't immediately punch them in the face.

In a book that has the same title as hers, by two university administrators, Erwin Chemerinsky (the dean of Berkeley Law) and Howard Gillman (chancellor of the University of California at Irvine), we are told that “the generation now in college will soon be our society’s leaders.”

Only if they leave college and get proper jobs and don't talk worthless shite at every opportunity. Peter Thiel's dropouts are more likely to take leadership roles, as are certain celebrities who didn't go to College.

Everyone seems to believe that if we want leaders who will fight for free speech in the courts and in our political institutions, we have to teach them its value while they are on campus.

Nobody believes this at all. It is an absurd idea. We don't have to be taught to like eating food or to enjoy speaking our mind and telling those with power over us a few uncomfortable home truths.

On the other hand, if we wish to learn some arcane skill or acquire some difficult type of knowledge, we want 'free speech' to be suppressed for the duration of our instruction. I may not enjoy a Mathematics lecture- I may welcome an interruption by a gorgeous student who argues that the correct solution to every equation is 69- but, if I wish to make something of my life, I want this sort of 'parrhesia' to be suppressed.

To fulfil this mission, college needs to be a place where any idea can be expressed.

Nonsense! College needs to be a place where only those ideas which are useful to the students are expressed. It is perfectly proper to clamp down on bullying and name-calling and other such uncivilized behaviour even if the claim is made that some 'idea' is being thereby expressed.

If students learn to shout down speeches that, in the words of Sessions, “insufficiently conform with their views,” then heaven help us when they come out into the real world and have to deal with the radical diversity of opinion they will find in the streets and squares of our cities. That’s what is generating the panic.

Fuck off! When I am told that I'm a fat fuck and should trade in my levis for a mumu, I shout down the speaker with all my might. Shouting down abusive shitheads is a good idea.

The real world consists of spaces dedicated to specific purposes in which freedoms and immunities are drastically curtailed. I can say what I like within my own home. I can't do so at work. Campuses which are successful do in fact curtail freedoms and immunities in a systematic way. Otherwise they turn to shit and their graduates are unemployable.

People get awfully solemn in the United States about the civic function of our institutions of higher education. They talk about college as the nursery of democracy and the care that we must take with our young people. As educators, the future is in our hands.

Which people? Stupid ones clearly.

I believe it is worth puncturing this solemnity with some awkward questions.
Isn’t college supposed to be a place for the dedicated and intensive study of particular subjects rather than some vague ideal of civic education?

Some Colleges certainly had that declared purpose. But so did various other collectives. Most Colleges, however, are only valued for the manner in which they alter individual life chances. How they do it is irrelevant. What matters is the ratio of cost to benefit received.

Civics may be one of the functions of secondary education—there is an excellent discussion of how high school teachers can discuss controversial topics like the influence of human activity on climate change in Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson’s book, The Case for Contention—but it can’t be the point of college.

No- nor High School neither.

As Ben-Porath puts it, students come to college to learn, and classroom learning—in history or biology or science or French literature—requires “adherence to discipline-appropriate, scientific- and evidence-based practices.” There isn’t much debate about free speech in a chemistry lab. But Ben-Porath doesn’t quite stick to this, for she adds that even so, there’s always an element of civic education, so it is sensible to have some instructors in college who are preparing students for broader political engagement.

Sensible? Or convenient to the administrators?

Palfrey says something similar about college campuses: “We teach more than just mathematics, science, writing and reading, languages, the arts, and other academic topics in our schools. We also teach character and moral development.”

Employers inculcate character and motivate moral development because it is in their interest to do so. Colleges have no similar incentive which is why they fuck up in these two respects- unless they are linked to a specific Religion or cadre based Ideological party. But, in that case, free speech is either  off the table or the game has been rigged in advance.

Are we supposed to think that colleges should dedicate lectures or seminars to moral development? Probably not; the idea seems to be that civic character will emerge naturally from the way other subjects are taught. I wonder if this is a reasonable expectation. Why should we expect tolerance to be the virtue that emerges from intensive study of trigonometry? Why not skepticism or self-assurance, a sort of learned superiority or the expectation of privilege? You don’t need to go to college to be a good citizen. Might not the virtues we need in modern politics be better taught on the streets, at work, or in the family?

Finally, some common sense! But will the author stick to his guns? .

Perhaps the more convincing case for free speech on campus is that colleges and universities cannot work as institutions of higher learning unless there is a spirit of unfettered inquiry in the research they undertake.

Nonsense! "Unfettered inquiry'  means being allowed to conduct alchemical experiments with money from the Chemistry department.
It often happens that a senior savant becomes dictatorial and forbids work on anything save his pet projects. But this has nothing to do with free speech. It could happen in Stalin's Russia just as easily as in Reagan's America. So long as students can move from one College to another and so long as Colleges compete, the final outcome need not be too dire.
Historically, the university- in England- was a place where the Established Church jealously policed the views of those in statu pupillari. It was not till the franchise was broadened that Dissernters, Catholics and so forth, could set up their own Degree granting bodies.

Campuses cannot censor or punish the expression of ideas, or allow intimidation or disruption of those who are expressing ideas, without undermining their core function of promoting inquiry, discovery, and the dissemination of new knowledge.

History says otherwise. China and Singapore have already overtaken India's much older elite Colleges and Universities though the latter enjoy far more freedom for radical students to run amok.

Claims like this sound more convincing than they are. Is the free research of mathematicians or philosophers or physicists really in peril because of how one group of students responds to an invitation to Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos? Most of the free speech issues on campus have nothing to do with the lectures, laboratories, or seminars in which academic freedom is implicated.
Aside from commencement addresses, a college or a university rarely invites or hosts speakers itself. Academic departments sometimes do, but few of the incidents that people complain about have involved speakers invited as part of a classroom series. Mostly it’s students showing off and trying to provoke and annoy one another. So we have to ask: What’s the connection supposed to be between the rough-and-tumble of student politics and academic freedom in the disciplined research undertaken in the schools and departments of the university?

Once again, the author has had a brief flash of sanity. Can he keep it up? Let us see-

I ask this because sometimes the complaints about student protests are quite absurd. Here’s a report from January 2016 in The Guardian:

Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, has told students involved in the campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes that they must be prepared to embrace freedom of thought or “think about being educated elsewhere.” Patten accused students who had criticised Rhodes, who regarded the English as racially superior, of trying to shut down debate. He said that by failing to face up to historical facts which they did not like, students were not abiding by the values of a liberal, open society that “tolerates freedom of speech across the board.”
This is nonsense. The students weren’t trying to shut down debate; they were trying to open it up. A dreary statue of Cecil Rhodes on the front of Oriel College is hardly a focus of higher learning. (I don’t remember tutors taking their charges out onto the High Street to study it when I was at Oxford. If they had, why on earth wouldn’t a debate about Rhodes’s views on imperialism have been a perfectly appropriate learning experience?) It is typical of a moral panic to run together all the issues that make us uneasy. Patten’s comments here are an egregious instance of that. He is worried about students disrupting provocative political speeches and he is worried about students questioning the value of cherished memorials. He wants us to believe that the questioning and the disruption are the same thing, whereas they are more or less polar opposites.

Patten was right. He knew that the British voter would react to 'Rhodes must fall' by turning against the campaign for a better deal in terms of University Fees and Student Loan conditions. Clearly, the most problem young people have is with statues of dead dudes which pigeons shit upon. Screw them! The rest of us are struggling to pay off our mortgage and save enough for dental implants.

Rhodes gave money to his alma mater. If Rhodes's statue is taken down, donors will be less generous in future. After all, as Balzac said, at the root of every great fortune is a crime.

One person who should have heeded Patten's implied warning was Priyamvada Gopal. She has now shown her true, elitist, colours by picking a fight with the Kings College porters. Why? They are white and thus privileged and engaged in enslaving brown wimmin from JNU.  Almost immediately, 'Dr. Gopal' as she wishes the hoi polloi to address her, has created a backlash even amongst Black and Asian people against these worthless 'Culture Warriors'.

The truth is that if people like Dr. Gopal didn't exist, then the Daily Mail would be forced to invent them.

Maybe a college campus is special in a different way. Perhaps we should think about college students as vulnerable—young, apprehensive, away from home for the first time, finding their feet, and so on. Sigal Ben-Porath says that campus might be the most diverse environment that the young people who study there have yet encountered. Many come from suburbs and towns that in the age of “The Big Sort” are increasingly segregated by race, politics, economics, and cultural attitudes.1 And now suddenly they are face to face with attitudes quite unlike those they are familiar with. Is it a good thing for them to be thrown into the deep end of these currents to learn to swim? Yes. But we must expect that some of them—minority students, especially—will throw out a range of responses to the provocations and hostility of their peers.

We must also expect a lot of them to take drugs and bully and sexually assault each other.  It is important that we prevent this sort of behaviour spreading to the teaching and custodial staff.

Roderick Ferguson’s book We Demand: The University and Student Protests is an attempt to put campus activism in a radical historic context. Since the 1960s, official responses to student agitation have been conditioned not just by vague civic ideals but by the quite specific intentions that corporate America and the American state have had for university research. And those intentions have run up against the student aspiration for the enfranchisement of minorities and the transformation of the curriculum. We Demand is not an easy book to read, but it conveys how shallow most concerns about free speech on campus tend to be.
Certainly, in our assessment of student activism, we need to bear in mind the history of exclusion. Some of our students may feel a little shaky about their right to be on campus, or about others’ perceptions of their right to be there. In living memory, some of our colleges were explicitly race-restricted institutions. And that sort of history doesn’t just evaporate with the good intentions of highly paid administrators. Think about racist songs, “blackface” parties, and white supremacist processions and put that alongside images of crowds jostling and jeering young men and women like the Little Rock Nine coming into colleges and high schools to desegregate them in the 1950s. Those who dismiss the concerns of twenty-first-century minorities by calling them “snowflakes” and telling them to cultivate “thicker skins” should imagine being nineteen and living in a world that did not always seem fair or unthreatening.

Nobody is dismissing the concerns of minorities which have voting or money power. A supposed 'snowflake' on campus is likely to be positioning herself to leverage some of that voting or money power to advance her own career.

There is no point imagining what it is like to be something which does not exist.

When the Middlebury American Enterprise Institute Club invited Charles Murray to speak on campus in 2017, it could defend the invitation as part of an open and reasoned debate. (Chemerinsky and Gillman note that it was free criticism, back and forth, that led to the discrediting of The Bell Curve in the years after its publication.) The club no doubt relished the element of provocation as their liberal opponents rose to the bait of the invitation. But revulsion against speakers of this ilk is not just intolerance on the left. If we remember the history of inclusion and exclusion then, as Professor Ben-Porath observes, Charles Murray’s very presence on campus, even if to speak about matters unrelated to The Bell Curve, was seen as undermining the dignity of African-American students, robbing them of their standing as full and equal members of the campus community.

Seen by whom? Not the President of the University in question. Nor by any substantial section of the actual African-American community. Why does Professor Ben-Porath not mention African American custodial staff? Do they have no dignity comparable to that of students?

Civil rights law requires us to be alert to the danger of what is called “a hostile workplace environment.” Why not on campus as well? In 2016 Jay Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, wrote a letter to freshmen announcing that the university does not “condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.” But safe spaces on campus for minority groups are not incompatible with there also being places on campus—classrooms, for example—where the same people have no choice but to face up to views with which they disagree.

Students can choose what courses to take. They can also create their own social spaces. The reason they are interested in 'Social Justice' type movements is because in recent history Corporations needed to hire compliance officers familiar with relevant legislation regarding discriminatory practices.
The problem here is that the old fashioned 'incomplete contract' offered by Corporations has become too expensive. In a 'gig economy' there will be little demand for compliance officers. Universities too are pricing themselves into oblivion because of high administration costs.

This is a worthless debate which economic forces are already rendering irrelevant.

We don’t necessarily have to choose, although Chemerinsky and Gillman seem to believe that we do. They quote a bon mot of Clark Kerr, the famed administrator of the University of California: “The University is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.” But even if they are right, making students safe for ideas is not the same as pacifying them or requiring them to sit still in silence and just listen when hateful ideas are expressed. The stakes are high, and this is not a game. If civic engagement on campus is what we want—especially outside of the classroom—then we have to accept that it is going to be noisy.

What Universities have to accept is that, long run, only money matters. In the short run, they have the best of monopoly profits- a quiet life where meaningless shite can be discussed ad nauseam. Long term, they have to truckle to who ever it is that pays their bills.

Should hate speech be tolerated on campus? A neo-Nazi march across the quad, a racist song booming out from a fraternity?

The law tells us what we are obliged to tolerate. Currently, American courts are imposing a big financial burden on Universities. When Ben Schapiro spoke at Berkeley, the University had to spend 600,000 dollars on security. Had Steve Bannon spoken there, the cost would have been over a million.

Clearly, the law needs to change.

John Palfrey writes that “those who use hate speech often seek to press the limits of free expression purposely.” They are like children testing the rules their parents have set. The transgressive character of their speech is probably key to its attraction. And those who engage in it often give it a spurious justification by citing the First Amendment—as though freedom of speech itself gives one a reason for saying anything in particular.
Hate speech as such is not prohibited in the US, and hate speech prohibitions of the sort one finds in Canada, the UK, and almost all other advanced democracies are of doubtful constitutionality in this country and would probably be struck down by the courts.2 In the UK, what is regulated is speech that is intended or that is reasonably likely to stir up hatred against some racial or ethnic or religious group. Should we be comfortable with the stirring up of hatred on our campuses?

Clearly the thing is a nuisance which diverts resources from what is useful to students. Young people need to understand that politics is about wasting their money as well as their time.  They need to organise only on issues of genuine importance to themselves.