College classrooms have become one of the main battlegrounds of the culture wars over the past several years.
This article appears in the April 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
By Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth
Johns Hopkins University Press
For the last several years, American colleges and universities have been one of the principal culture war battlegrounds. We’ve all heard stories of how students, who lean to the left in most schools, have mobilized in various ways to confront their schools’ history of complicity with slavery, white supremacy, colonialism, or other atrocities. This sometimes takes the form of ostracizing faculty or guest speakers deemed to be offensive or insensitive. Conservative writers like Bari Weiss, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Ben Shapiro have seized on a handful of such events in which students demonized their opponents to craft a narrative in which “woke” college “snowflakes” are carrying out “cancel culture” instead of debating scholarly topics using facts and logic.
Even the most exaggerated version of these protests doesn’t bear comparison to what conservative state legislatures are doing to suppress discussion and research, however. Across the country, Republicans are proposing or passing sweeping legislation that attempts to prohibit teaching which examines the history of racism or sexism, or calls into question the nobility of the American founding, or promotes LGBT equality.
It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, a new book by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, offers new insights about academic freedom and free speech that are both incisive and broadly relevant to American society as a whole. Both authors are professors, the former at Pennsylvania State University and the latter at Portland State University.
Bérubé and Ruth were motivated by the Trump years and the George Floyd protests to reconsider their previous views on free speech and academic freedom. They carefully elaborate and rebut several unsatisfactory positions on these questions. One bad argument (often heard within the academy itself) is that the two things are identical—that tenured professors should be protected from any consequences of speech, no matter what they say. As they note, this view doesn’t survive contact with the case of James Tracy, a former communications professor at Florida Atlantic University who loudly promoted the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a false flag, and took to harassing the victims’ parents before he was finally canned.
Another argument, coming from Martha Nussbaum and others, is that academic freedom has nothing at all to do with free speech. By this view, academics should be protected when they are commenting on their area of specific expertise, and be treated as private citizens otherwise. This doesn’t work either—first, what counts as expertise is necessarily a subject of debate; second, scholars often develop real expertise outside their areas of explicit training (like Noam Chomsky); third, such a standard would mean scholars fearing for their jobs every time they said anything not strictly relevant to their field.
Instead, Bérubé and Ruth argue that the way to think about speech and academic freedom is by judging comments both inside and outside the classroom by whether they cast doubt on a professor’s fitness to participate in intellectual life. Academic freedom should protect professors’ ability to say controversial things and start hard discussions, but it comes with an equally important responsibility that those statements be grounded in serious thought and research—and in reality. The authors suggest the “purpose of institutions of higher education is not to ensure that all views be heard, but to determine, by careful and impartial review, which views merit a hearing and which serve no conceivable educational mission.”
So what does that mean in practice? The authors draw on the work of scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Charles Mills, who have showed many ways that racists have exploited ostensibly liberal norms to perpetuate bigotry. They combine that work with the critique of free speech from literature scholar Ulrich Baer, who argues that when free speech protects “speech that proposes that some humans are innately inferior to others, and thus undermines the baseline assumption of human equality … free speech degenerates into an exercise in domination.” Explicit racism, defending slavery or colonialism as good for the subjected peoples, arguing that homosexuality is a disease, or similar bigoted views thus have no place in the university.
Many liberals instinctively resist this idea. It sounds like censorship, and in a sense it is. But virtually no one actually believes schools should always consider every idea under the sun. Aside from Professor Sandy Hook Truther above, there are dozens of ideas that are de facto banned from the academy: flat earth theory, geocentrism, phlogiston, and so on. The authors provide a handy list of additional indefensible guest lecture topics, like “the Jews had it coming,” “vaccines cause autism,” “climate change is a hoax,” and “phrenology has much to teach us.” (For the latter lecture they offer to measure the skulls of audience members to determine “who among us is most likely to become a perpetrator of violent crime.”)
Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good.
Once one has admitted that certain beliefs are out of bounds in an academic setting, the only question is where and how the boundaries should be drawn. Critically, they argue that a thorough commitment to anti-racism is important in an academic context not because racism harms minorities (though it does do that), but because it leads to poor scholarship. For instance, for the majority of the 20th century, the historiography of the Reconstruction period was dominated by the Dunning School—a straightforward racist fraud. This school of thought, advanced by Columbia University’s William Dunning and his acolytes, advanced a white supremacist view of the period after the Civil War.
In reality, as is now fairly common knowledge, from about 1865 to 1876, Black men in the South were more or less full voting citizens—a status protected by federal power. This power was eventually withdrawn by Northern white elites, and Black citizenship in the South was then destroyed by white supremacist terrorism. That in turn set the stage for Jim Crow: an apartheid system enforced by a constant threat of psychotic violence to any Black person who stepped out of line (and many who didn’t).
White intellectuals then made up a bunch of comforting lies that Reconstruction was a mistake and a failure because the multiracial governments were corrupt, thanks to the influence of ignorant Black voters who didn’t deserve the franchise. This wasn’t a contestable interpretation, or a different angle on events, but a completely preposterous and baldly racist delusion invented to assuage the conscience and ego of white society.
One of the reasons that W.E.B. Du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction is so impressive is that he almost single-handedly took on an entire hegemonic historical consensus supported by dozens of academic departments and hundreds of practicing scholars, and eventually prevailed. But the fact that it took half a century, with his argument being reinforced by several brilliant white academics (most notably Eric Foner), for that victory to be consolidated, is also telling. It proves that an academic system can be set up on putatively open lines where anyone can advance any argument, and then total crackpot nonsense that doesn’t survive a moment’s hard scrutiny can be held up as consensus truth for 50 years.
In short, the truth will not out, at least not by itself, because of racism. An academy open to any question gives a golden opportunity for bigots to worm their way into the discourse and establish a false consensus through the use of power. Just consider the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Amy Wax, an open racist who also insists that her Black students get worse grades than her white ones. It’s not hard to imagine how this might have happened. The reason the Dunning School survived for so long is the same reason why it’s seemingly impossible to stomp out quack neo-phrenologist arguments from people like Charles Murray: racist bias.
The authors’ solution for how to approach academic freedom is typically academic: a faculty committee. This sounds a little ridiculous, but I was convinced that it’s the best possible approach. The foundation of the modern university is tenure and peer review—a collective process whereby one’s peers critically judge each other’s fitness and work, from a sternly anti-bigotry standpoint. As they write, “this is what differentiates academic freedom from free speech: this horizontal work of peers policing one another.”
No doubt there would be many problems with such committees in practice. But at the very least, they would be a huge improvement on the extant “diversity, equity, and inclusion” offices that exist in most schools on the administrative side. These simultaneously tend to be heavily influenced by the diversity consultant industry, whose borderline-abusive seminars have been shown to backfire in some studies, and subject to the cowardice of administrators who are a lot more concerned with money and reputation (and hence fear deep-pocketed white professors with political connections) than with academic freedom. And DEI doesn’t address, much less solve, the fraught question of which crackpot or racist views should be excluded.
This is relevant for lay readers for a few reasons. First, campus politics and the associated discourse about racism, free speech, and “wokeness” are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. As I was writing this piece, yet another New York Times op-ed about allegedly censorious campus leftists was published. In addition to providing a concrete, realistic way to process these questions, the authors deserve great credit for thoughtfulness and plain common sense throughout. In the social media age, it is entirely too easy for writers and scholars to fall into inflamed thinking and hysteria over events that are shorn of context, exaggerated, unrepresentative, or simply invented out of whole cloth. And a lot of events that spark huge controversy, like professors insisting on saying the N-word in class, could be avoided with some simple common courtesy.
What’s more, as the authors note, their points about speech are not limited to the academy. The most widely applicable part of the book is a more general consideration of free speech itself. Baer’s case against libertarian free speech dogmatism holding that any restrictions on speech whatsoever are prima facie illegitimate, and that more speech is always the best cure for hate speech, is highly relevant today. The Trump years and social media have proved that false beyond any question. If one doubts the power of propaganda, just consult the many websites dedicated to archiving the social media feeds of conservatives who post anti-vaccine Facebook memes and Fox News clips only to catch COVID and die in gruesome agony.
The increasing prominence of fascist and open neo-Nazi groups poses an even more stark challenge to free-speech absolutists. It is simply naïve to think that argument will convince people intent on leveraging liberal tolerance to seize power and murder their political opponents.
If I had to levy a criticism of Bérubé and Ruth, it would be here. On the question of whether there is any hope for even modest government action on speech, they throw up their hands. “There is, we are finding to our collective horror, a destructive and potentially murderous libertarianism baked into the country’s very foundation,” they write. But this is entirely too pessimistic. While it surely is hard to imagine any kind of speech regulation akin to the ban on publishing Holocaust denial or Nazi slogans in Germany (and several other nations) in the U.S., there are quite a few more modest measures that are much more consonant with American history. There are still considerable regulations on political spending, for instance, and the Supreme Court decision that gutted the previously more-strict regime is deeply unpopular.
Indeed, it’s quite plausible to argue that such regulations are necessary to ensure the American people actually enjoy the benefits of free speech. The idea that the best argument will naturally win out in the “free marketplace of ideas” is every bit as ridiculous as saying that financial deregulation will improve the efficiency of investment. Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good. Absent regulation, ruthless ultra-rich monopolists and their flat-earth allies will barge in and befoul the collective speech commons.
For instance, we might consider antitrust policy to break up vast social media or broadcasting empires as a sort of indirect speech regulation—not directly affecting individual speech, of course, but greatly limiting the propaganda reach of malevolent billionaires. Increased taxes on the rich would have the same effect.
Or we might consider reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and thus allowing people to sue large platforms for content posted on them by third parties, which would force them to radically scale down their operations or heavily moderate inflammatory content or both. As Josh Marshall has written, “Facebook is like a scofflaw nuclear power company that makes insane profits because it runs its reactor in the open and dumps the waste in the bog behind the local high school.”
At any rate, this is a minor quibble. Bérubé and Ruth have written a great book that does what conservatives say they want: take on a sacred cow of liberalism with facts and logic. I look forward to them being canceled by Fox News.
