A Way Forward for Free Speech on Campus?
Do we really have to kill free speech to protect it on college campuses? (photo by Felicia Buitenwerf via Unsplash)
As students return to American universities this week, there’s a whole lot of talking about free speech — federal legislation, state legislation, op-eds, news shows. (It’s been a busy year – see my earlier piece here).
If you listen to some on the right, American college campuses are indoctrination factories, shutting down conservative thinking and points of view in the classroom, in dorms and in public forums. To save free speech, politicians argue they need to require more conservative speech. That means prohibiting some courses they see as liberal, hiring more conservative professors and invite more conservative speakers to campus.
Others on the right are giving up on free speech. A recent New York Times article this week quotes Chris Ruth, an appointee of Florida Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, as saying, essentially, that free speech is overrated: “The goal of a university is not free inquiry.” Other attorneys for the DeSantis administration have said that “academic freedom” does not apply to faculty in public universities, because they are government employees. Faculty speech, therefore, is “government speech,” which politicians should be able to control.
Meanwhile, on the left, students, faculty and administrators are providing both anecdotes and data to help politicians and thinktankers on the right make their case.
· There are stories of faculty creating atmospheres in their classrooms where students believe there are “required opinions” on open questions.
· Administrators on campus are less likely to invite prominent conservative speakers to campus for fear of potentially offending faculty or students, and are more likely to issue institutional statements on issues that have little to do with academic freedom.
· Conservative students report that they regularly “self-censor” opinions on campus, not sharing what they believe for fear of ostracism. A Knight Foundation survey last year found that just 27% of students who identify as Republican believe their free speech rights are secure (the percentage of Democrats saying the same was much higher, but still only 61%).
· Faculty, a majority of them conservative, say they’ve seen a significant increase in “punishment” in recent years for expressing their opinions publicly.
Neither of these approaches bodes well for free speech. If either side “wins” this debate, we will destroy one of the defining virtues of university campuses: A deep commitment to the exploration of ideas.
That’s why it’s interesting to see a group coming together to head off an impending disaster. Two weeks ago, after months of discussion, a group of 15 concerned scholars and writers from across the country issued a statement called the “Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry.” In many ways, it’s an update of an earlier statement called the “Chicago Principles,” issued in 2014, which seeks to address some of the specific challenges to free speech that have come up over the past decade.
From its beginning, the new statement makes clear that challenges to free speech are coming from both inside and outside of the university:
“Many of our nation’s colleges and universities are failing to maintain cultures of free and vigorous inquiry. Faculty and university leaders of these institutions should soberly evaluate and revitalize their institutional cultures. In cases where trustees or other non-faculty members engage in reform efforts, they must intervene in good faith by supporting a university’s efforts to fulfill its core mission. Universities should not be made into political or ideological battlegrounds.”
It is the faculty’s responsibility, the introduction says, to “maintain a climate of intellectual freedom,” but “shirking these responsibilities invites non-faculty entities to assume them.”
Not so much to ask, but the details are tricky….
The statement then goes on to issue a series of commonsense guidelines, all built on the principle of protecting academic freedom. Here’s a summary (the words in quotes are directly from the statement):
In the classroom:
Professors should have classrooms where they are free to share their own opinions, even if “controversial,”, on relevant subjects.But there should be “no required opinions” – students must know they are free to disagree without penalty, and that their work will be judged “by its substantive merits only.”
At public presentations:
Universities should take steps to protect “lawful” speakers appearing on campus, and should “sanction” students, faculty and others who shout them down during their presentation using the so-called “heckler’s veto.”
External intervention in university work:
University administrators and faculty, trustees and regents “have a right – indeed a duty – to defend themselves against external and internal pressures that compromise academic freedom, including coercion to express support for or opposition to political ideologies.” They should oppose government attempts to impede university freedom of inquiry, and those efforts should not be attempts to “achieve a partisan goal.” When universities fail to protect free speech, as a “last resort,” governments should step in to stop such university policies. As long as there is a reasonable “intellectual or pedagogical reason,” government entities should be free to fund specific programs to “enhance intellectual diversity.”
Sharing opinions or statements publicly:
Faculty and students should be able to say what they want in public, but should not portray that opinion as that of the university. University administrations should not take stances on “moral, political, constitutional or legal questions on which society is divided,” unless those issues touch on the university’s freedom of inquiry. Universities should not require students to sign “loyalty oaths”– there should be “no compelled speech.”
Does any of that sound unreasonable to you?
Unlike the “Chicago Principles,” now adopted by 84 universities nationally, the “Princeton Principles” are too new to carry any force right now. But they represent a potential way of reshaping a debate that is getting ugly. Free speech shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Can we start talking about it?
-Leslie
References:
FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) keeps a running list of state legislative action related to free speech on campus here: https://www.thefire.org/defending-your-rights/legislative-policy-reform/enacted-campus-free-speech-statutes
DeSantis advisors on academic freedom: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/politics/ron-desantis-takeaways.html#:~:text=Educated%20at%20Yale%20and%20Harvard,could%20be%20useful%20to%20him.
Self censorship on campus: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/evidence-conservative-students-really-do-self-censor/606559/
Survey on perception of free speech on campus by political party: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/01/26/fewer-students-see-freedom-speech-secure
Punishment for free speech among scholars: https://unherd.com/thepost/conservative-academics-more-likely-to-self-censor/
Chicago Principles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_principles
Princeton Principles: https://jmp.princeton.edu/princeton-principles-campus-culture-free-inquiry