3

Free Speech on Campus

There was no golden age. Free speech on American college campuses has always been controversial and contested. The proper boundaries of free speech have never been clear, and the basic commitment to the principle of free speech has rarely been unwavering. This is not a debate that began only recently, and the advocates of free speech have frequently changed sides. For over a hundred years, alumni, donors, and politicians have tried to stifle professors who challenged their economic interests or offended their moral or religious sensibilities. Student publications have always been treated as a thorn in the side of college administrators. In the 1950s, politicians and trustees sought to purge any whiff of “subversives” from campus, and in the 1960s they turned their sights on civil rights activists. In the 1950s, students complained of an overwhelmingly left-wing faculty, and conservative faculty members pointed to examples of foundations and deans trying to shape the composition of the faculty and curriculum to serve liberal causes. Students have periodically disrupted campus and shouted down speakers.

In the midst of all this conflict and divisiveness, the aspiration toward robust free speech on campus has grown. Universities struggled to gain more autonomy from legislatures and trustees, and to a significant degree succeeded. Professors battled to gain more protections for their ability to pursue ideas wherever they led and to teach students as they thought best, and to a significant degree succeeded. Students fought to gain more autonomy and resources for pursuing their own intellectual, political, and social interests, and to a significant degree succeeded. Supporting all these efforts to expand the scope of campus free speech was a maturing appreciation for the intimate connection between the central mission of the university to pursue the truth and free inquiry and debate as the only possible means for advancing that mission. All members of the campus community came to understand that the power to censor was a mighty temptation, but it was a power that could not be safely entrusted into anyone’s hands. Unbridled freedom of speech could be discomforting, baffling, and alarming, but the alternative would drain the universities of any real value and put them back onto the path of decline that threatened their very existence in the late nineteenth century.

Along the way, there have been important markers laid down calling on campus communities to identify and live up to these higher ideals. It was in Germany that the modern ideal of free speech on campus was first developed, and in doing so German universities established themselves as some of the finest institutions of higher education in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. The young scholars who returned to the United States after being exposed to those German universities brought with them a vision of a vibrant community of scholars unafraid to ask hard questions and to face up to hard answers. The German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen influentially sounded the call to arms. “For the academic teacher and his hearers there can be no prescribed truth and no proscribed thoughts. There is only one rule for instruction: to justify the truth of one’s teaching by reason and the facts.” With that freedom would undoubtedly come much that is “untenable, strange, and absurd,” and professors will often expound “foolish opinions,” but ultimately “the free presentation of individual thoughts … has more life in it and awakens more life than the prescribed presentation of transmitted thoughts.” Turning his attention to the emerging social sciences, Paulsen admitted that to the political parties who contested for control of the government, “science is but one of the means of keeping themselves in power by influencing public opinion. With the truth as such the parties have nothing whatever to do; if it is for us, very well, if it is against us, away with it!” But the “people cannot as such have an interest in the preservation of false conceptions”; the people need and benefit from “a proper knowledge of the actual conditions,” and as a consequence “can have no desire to place obstacles in the way of an honest search for truth.”1 Paulsen’s warning is prophetic. Partisans may always be inclined to value propaganda and dogma over inconvenient truths. Society as a whole, however, must be able to face facts, and universities are a crucial institution for revealing the truth. Universities can serve that critical public purpose only if they are not commandeered by partisans. Ideologues on both the left and the right would like to use universities as a mouthpiece, but the people themselves would benefit the most if universities were independent of any faction and were free to engage in critical inquiry.

The American Association of University Professors was founded in the early twentieth century to advance these principles in the United States. In the midst of World War I, the new organization under the leadership of the philosopher John Dewey tried to clarify what the mission of a university is, and what the responsibilities of boards of trustees and college administrators therefore were. While admittedly some “proprietary schools” might be founded for the “propagation of specific doctrines,” whether religious, social, political, or economic, most American universities did not fit this mold. They were instead “untrammeled institutions of learning.” Those institutions exercised a “public trust,” which could be fulfilled only if scholars were free to pursue their work with “disinterestedness and impartiality.” Against the “tyranny of public opinion,” the university should serve as an “intellectual experiment station, where new ideas may germinate and where their fruit, though still distasteful to the community as a whole, may be allowed to ripen until finally, perchance, it may become part of the accepted intellectual food of the nation or of the world.” At their best, universities could “help make public opinion more self-critical and more circumspect” and train democratic citizens to be more curious and more thoughtful.2

In the midst of the civil unrest of the 1960s, the commitment of universities to free speech was tested and reasserted. After a decade or more of repeated assaults on the freedom of scholarly inquiry on American campuses, faculty and students alike strove to reinstill the principles of free speech. When the students in the Yale Political Union invited the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace to campus in 1963, Yale’s president, fearing violent protests and overriding faculty objections, convinced the students to withdraw the invitation. A decade later, student protesters shouted down William Shockley, who had been invited by a student group to participate in a debate. A Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Shockley had become a vocal exponent of the genetic inferiority of blacks and frequently participated in campus debates with the psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing, who argued that white people’s racism derived from their own genetic inferiority. In the aftermath of the Shockley incident, a faculty committee led by the historian C. Vann Woodward produced a celebrated defense of “freedom of expression at Yale.” The report declared that “the history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” Universities had a particular responsibility to uphold a commitment to free expression, to provide “a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox,” and to serve as a bulwark against “authoritarianism,” including the authoritarianism of prevailing public opinion. Members of the campus community had an overriding duty to preserve and respect an untrammeled freedom of speech and had no right to obstruct others from exercising that freedom or from hearing the views of controversial speakers.3

As student protests roiled campuses across the country in 2014, the president of the University of Chicago formed a faculty committee to consider principles of free expression on campus. The committee, led by law professor Geoffrey Stone, issued a report advancing an expansive commitment to free inquiry within universities. “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” The university’s “fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” All members of the campus community are entitled to advance their own ideas, to hear the ideas of others, and to reach their own judgment about the validity and utility of those ideas. Likewise, every member of the campus community and the university itself had a “solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”4 The Chicago statement, like those that came before it, has met with some controversy. Even as faculty at other institutions, such as Princeton, have adopted its statement of principles as their own, some have pushed back. The conservative National Association of Scholars complained that the Chicago statement did not emphasize enough why free speech was valuable on a university campus.⁵ Meanwhile, a student editorial at the University of Chicago complained that the faculty report did not exclude “hate speech” from the scope of campus free speech, and argued that the “students’ mental well-being or safety” should take priority over free speech.⁶

Each generation must fight its own battles over free speech on campus, and universities must constantly renew their commitment to their central mission of advancing and communicating knowledge through free inquiry and debate. Those principles have not always been well understood or fully realized. Universities have frequently failed to uphold and defend their own ideals. If universities are to remain valuable institutions in the twenty-first century, however, the members of the campus community will need to preserve the college campus as a sanctuary for serious debate of unorthodox ideas and avoid succumbing to the temptation to make them echo chambers of orthodox creeds. Universities must attempt to organize themselves in a way that allows the campus community to advance the central mission of the production and dissemination of knowledge, and those organizational principles must necessarily include a basic commitment to a robust conception of free speech.

Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces

The language of trigger warnings and safe spaces has only recently appeared on American college campuses. The concepts are still a somewhat marginal phenomenon, but are rapidly entering the mainstream. Relative to the actual threat they pose to academic freedom, they have probably received out-sized attention. They have become something of a flashpoint to debates on free speech in universities, however, in part because they seem to represent a troubling intellectual orientation. It is worth thinking through a bit why these ideas have provoked such a strong reaction. Doing so might provide us with a useful starting point for considering the challenges to free speech on campus today.

I want to begin by suggesting that there is a reasonable core to both concepts, and that both advocates and critics of them would do well to bear that reasonable core in mind. Like many reasonable ideas, however, they can be abused. The difficulty comes from the abuse of the concepts rather than the concepts themselves. It has perhaps been these controversies as much as anything that have led critics to deride the current generation of college students as “snowflakes” who are incapable of handling the smallest adversity. The label obscures more than it reveals, and we should push past it to take seriously the ideas at issue in these debates.

Let us take up trigger warnings first. Trigger warnings are a form of content warning, with a twist. Content warnings are familiar from mass media. For example, television viewers are routinely warned that the material they are about to see might be suitable only for a “mature audience” owing to its explicit content, violent images, strong language, or adult themes. “Viewer discretion is advised,” the audience is warned so that those of a sensitive nature can turn away, or children can be shielded from what is about to appear. Content warnings are designed to address the fact that the mass media reaches a diverse audience, and that consumers should be able to choose the materials to which they will be exposed. More controversially, those same content warnings can be used to classify different materials and make some more difficult to access. Having been labeled as suitable only for a mature audience, an item can then be safely tucked away or removed from circulation so that it will not fall into the wrong hands. But in such cases, what should be objectionable is less the desire for the content warning itself than the use of the content warning to impose further forms of censorship such that even willing consumers are unable to readily access the objectionable material. Content warnings emphasized consumer choice and catered to parents who wanted to exercise control over the media diets of their children, but they could also be a tool for suppressing disfavored art.

Content warnings now have a somewhat antiquated feel. They were seriously fought over when potentially objectionable material was mass-produced and yet potentially capable of being confined. The comedian George Carlin’s famous routine on the “seven dirty words” that could not be said on television gave rise to government regulations and judicial decisions in the 1970s precisely because broadcast media seemed unusually intrusive and yet controllable. The parent might not know what was about to be said on the radio, and thus it was thought reasonable that some precautions should be put in place to warn listeners to turn the dial or to confine problematic material to times or channels that were understood to not be suitable for all audiences. But now the comedy routine—and its shocking language—is featured on Wikipedia, and Carlin’s performance can be readily found on the Internet to be viewed by anyone carrying a smartphone. Unsurprisingly, Carlin’s language no longer seems so shocking, as the culture has adjusted to the pervasive exposure to content that once had to be diligently sought out.

Trigger warnings originated on the Internet and served a comparable function to traditional content warnings. They warned web surfers that the material they were about to encounter might be objectionable to some, and thus urged readers to proceed with caution or turn away entirely. The categorization of content and its rationale were different from traditional content disclaimers. Rather than worrying about the effects on the immature or the decorous, trigger warnings appealed to a therapeutic concern for those who had suffered psychological damage. The rise of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought with it the recognition that exposure to “specific trigger stimuli” could exacerbate symptoms of the trauma, just as external stimuli can trigger the symptoms of various physical ailments from allergies to migraines.7 Those who suffered from the disorder could find that seemingly innocuous events could result in heightened stress, and patients were advised to identify and manage potential triggers accordingly. Indeed the very diagnosis of PTSD often involves an assessment of whether the patient has a tendency “to avoid situations that might trigger recollections of the traumatic experience.”⁸ From that specific medical context, the language of trigger warnings seeped into Internet communities that frequently included trauma survivors, such as self-help groups for victims of sexual assault. The trigger warning served as a useful precaution to a specific, but also specifically relevant, set of readers who feared that exposure to particular content might cause them psychological harm.

As sometimes happens, the concept and terminology soon migrated into an ever-wider environment and mutated as it did so. The warnings proliferated on the web and social media, and so a generation of students became familiar with them as ubiquitous features of socially conscious content providers. Having been socialized in an information environment in which trigger warnings were routine, many of those students expected the same familiar warnings to adorn the content they encountered as they entered college campuses. Most immediately, faculty were advised to include trigger warnings on classroom materials that might be deemed risky to some.

In its more restricted form, there is some utility to the idea of trigger warnings, and there are possible models for how to introduce them into the university environment. But even in their restricted form, they raise some difficulties. In the more expansive form in which they have mostly been deployed on college campuses, they become quite troubling.

In its most restricted form, the idea of a “trigger” exists within a medical framework. Those who have a severe allergy to peanuts might have their symptoms triggered by the presence of peanut dust. Those who have PTSD might have their symptoms triggered by something that reminds them of the original trauma. For students in either situation, it would be useful and appropriate to identify what might trigger their symptoms, and it would be appropriate to try to find accommodations that will minimize the risk of harm to them. Warnings of the presence of a potential trigger to the symptoms of their illness might reasonably be part of those accommodations. Campus cafeterias routinely identify common allergens that can be found in the food that they serve so that those with allergies can take appropriate precautions, and students suffering from PTSD could certainly be informed of what materials they could expect to encounter were they to enroll in a given class. Indeed, a standard syllabus lists the subject matter and learning materials of a course, and students should expect instructors to accurately describe the contents of a class.

There is an established model of medical accommodations for students in university classrooms that has become familiar on campuses since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Students with a range of learning disabilities are regularly assessed by specialized administrators and provided with a uniform set of accommodations that the university has determined is consistent with its own mission and adequate for the affected students to be able to do their work. Faculty members are informed of any necessary actions that they might need to take when those individual students register for their class. Those accommodations, from the use of a laptop on which to take notes during lecture to extra time on timed tests, are tailored so as to allow the student to take full advantage of the academic opportunity without damaging the integrity of the academic program designed by the faculty.

One could imagine that model being extended to include those suffering from PTSD. Individual students could be assessed and appropriate individual accommodations could be deployed with an eye toward both facilitating the student’s educational progress and preserving academic standards. Moreover, such a regimen of evaluation and accommodation would take seriously the underlying concern of the discourse of trigger warnings, the possibility that some students are living with mental health difficulties that could impact their ability to take full advantage of their educational opportunities. A modern university dedicated to its openness to a wide range of deserving students should be committed to helping those students manage the obstacles that they might face in navigating the demands of higher education. For many years now, universities have been rushing to commit more resources to providing mental health care for students, and the appropriate accommodation of those suffering from PTSD would fit naturally with those priorities.

Unfortunately, trigger warnings have taken on a much more expansive form on college campuses, and in doing so they have created problems of their own. It is not regarded as sufficient to identify the topics and materials to be discussed in a class; they must be labeled as either safe or hazardous. Third parties, notably students, have taken to calling for trigger warnings not on their own behalf but on behalf of unidentified others who might suffer an unspecified harm from encountering targeted course materials. As a free-floating worry about the psyche of fragile students, the advocacy of trigger warnings drives us toward labeling some course materials as dangerous and as a consequence in need of quarantine. Such readings are not deemed merely to be controversial or offensive, but to have the capacity to cause, or trigger, immediate psychological harm. In the absence of any specific PTSD diagnosis, however, there is no possibility of assessing the relative risks or harms that might be associated with any given text. The discussion is immediately biased toward minimizing the risk of harm rather than evaluating that risk and balancing it against other considerations, such as the intellectual or pedagogical value of the texts in question. Nor does the blanket use of trigger statements attempt to calibrate the accommodation that might be necessary to enable an affected student to fully participate in the course while preserving the integrity of the course as a whole and for other students, and respecting the freedom of faculty to design the courses that best serve their educational purpose.

Removed from the context of an actual diagnosed case of PTSD, the idea of a trigger swiftly loses any meaning. Classically, a PTSD trigger might be anything that happens to remind the particular individual of a specific past trauma. A date on the calendar, a smell, or a sound might all stir unpleasant memories. But once disassociated from any particular case of PTSD, the concept of a “trigger” simply becomes a generic reference to emotionally challenging subject matter. The mere reference to sexual assault, violence, harassment, or natural disaster is sufficient to raise the worry that it might be triggering. Ironically, campus trigger warnings lean into, rather than attempt to ameliorate, what might be clinically diagnosed as PTSD. The tendency of a patient to avoid perceived triggers is typically taken to be a symptom of the ailment. The treatment often involves working to overcome that psychological tendency, to engage and confront and ultimately surmount triggering stimuli rather than to avoid them. In keeping with its origins on Internet discussion boards, the insistence on trigger warnings becomes more about the performance of victimhood than a meaningful effort to help actual victims.

Disassociated from the specifics of a clinically diagnosed condition, the claim that something might be “triggering” becomes an all-purpose means for avoiding or silencing disfavored speech in the name of harm prevention. Literary texts from The Great Gatsby to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been called inappropriate for college-level reading and discussion because they might be traumatic to students who have experienced sexual assault or racism. Court cases and statutes relating to rape have been deemed too potentially disturbing for law students studying the criminal law to read.9 At Oberlin College, administrators announced a policy, eventually withdrawn in the face of faculty objections, that urged instructors to remove from their syllabi any text “that could be a trigger” for a wide range of “issues of privilege and oppression” unless it was simply “too important to avoid,” in which case the text should be made “optional” for those who wished to avoid reading it so that students would not have “to choose between their academic success and their own wellbeing.”¹⁰ At Occidental College, students complained that a Republican student group had created a display of American flags to memorialize the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, arguing that “the American flag is particularly triggering.”¹¹ The display was destroyed by unidentified students soon after it was erected. At Wellesley College, students petitioned the art museum to remove a sculpture of a sleepwalking man because it was a “source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault.”¹² It was eventually moved to a public park in New York City. With some success, a feminist student organization in Australia has lobbied universities to provide trigger warnings for class materials, and for its own activities insists that members provide trigger warnings before introducing discussions or materials mentioning such anodyne topics as food, spiders, pregnancy, sex, and “slimy things,” as well as more common topics such as rape and racism.¹³

In response to such campus controversies, the American Association of University Professors has issued a report critical of trigger warnings. The report anticipated that such warnings would be extended to the materials contained in university libraries, and libraries had long rejected placing “prejudicial labels” on materials for fear that such labels would tend to restrict access and discourage use of those materials. Even in the context of voluntary headings in course syllabi, however, the report objected to the tendency to make “comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement,” which would inevitably tend to drive controversial subject matter out of the college classroom. The proliferation of trigger warnings sidelined the genuine problem of getting adequate treatment for those affected by serious psychological ailments while empowering administrators and activist students to overrule faculty members on the appropriate content of a program of study in an academic discipline.14

In constructing courses, faculty must routinely consider how best to expose students to difficult material in order to advance their understanding of the subject at hand. Teachers of constitutional law, for example, must reach some determination of how much they need to expose students to the materials that the government has tried to ban and that courts have had to assess under the First Amendment. For some, it is sufficient to discuss those materials at a step removed, to deal with them in the abstract and to focus discussion on the larger principles at stake in such disputes. For others, however, it seems impossible for students to truly appreciate what is at stake in these disputes unless they are forced to grapple with the materials that were deemed so controversial. Experiencing the visceral impact of offensive materials might be essential to understanding the issues at play. When putting together a casebook on American constitutional law, I proposed including a photograph of a sheriff and a stagecoach robber who had been executed by hanging to illustrate a section on the death penalty. My coauthors, perhaps wisely, thought the image was too much, and we left it out.¹⁵ The social theorist Michel Foucault famously begins his book on the history of the penal system with a vivid description of the public execution of an eighteenth-century would-be assassin of the French king.16 Must one take an unflinching look at the results of state violence in order to fully examine the issues surrounding it? Experts in the field are likely to differ on that question, but trigger warnings would tend to drive such material out of college classrooms and encourage students to avoid difficult classes and topics.

The Africana studies program at Lehigh University recently launched an initiative for foreign study in Ghana, where students could confront remnants of the slave markets through which African slaves passed before being transported to the New World. As one student who participated in the program observed, “there are no trigger warnings that can prepare you for how you’re going to feel when you’re standing in a slave dungeon.” For those who organized the initiative, an invaluable and unique educational experience depended on “having a very emotional experience in that space.”¹⁷ Historians might well believe that students will not sufficiently understand the horrors of the slave experience or racial tyranny if they are not exposed to descriptions and images of the brutality faced by the enslaved or the results of lynchings. While it would seem unwise to toss students unprepared into such emotional maelstroms, it is at the heart of academic freedom that faculty be allowed the flexibility to determine whether and how to introduce such materials. Passing such critical decisions about course content to college administrators risks stifling innovation in teaching and restricting the scope of the educational experience.

The idea of safe spaces has a related but somewhat different origin story. In a therapeutic context, a session was framed as a safe space where patients could let down their guard and reveal their emotional turmoil. From that setting, the concept permeated the broader culture, as epitomized in the title of the best-selling self-help book from 1969 I’m OK, You’re OK.18 Although that cultural wave eventually crested and receded, it left a lasting imprint. Notably, it was integrated into the educational ethos of primary school teachers. The classroom, like the therapist’s office, was characterized as a safe space, placing a priority on affirming the self-esteem of students. The idea soon migrated into higher education, particularly in courses aimed at exposing students to the challenges surrounding diversity. As one early account of the introduction of a required college class on racism and sexism observed,

In a class such as this which deals with topics that students find difficult if not threatening, creating a safe space is critical. Students must feel secure that their comments will be treated with respect whether or not the faculty member or the class agrees with them. Students must have confidence that faculty members are in control of the discussion and will intervene, if necessary, to prevent personal expressions from provoking personal attacks by some who may find them offensive.¹⁹

As that author admitted, however, the need for a safe space had to be balanced with an instructor’s obligation “to see to it that blatantly false beliefs are subjected to mature and thoughtful criticism. Striking the correct balance is no easy task.”²⁰

In practice, striking the correct balance has proven exceedingly difficult. It probably did not help that such classes sometimes veered into mere advocacy and blurred the lines between personal identity, feelings, and ideas. As another instructor of such a course advised her colleagues, it was possible to turn “the class into a consciousness-raising session,” characterized by “the sharing of personal experience with others in order to understand the larger social context for the experience and to transform one’s intellectual or political understandings of it.”21 Success, from that perspective, could be measured by the degree to which the students embraced feminism and “made commitments to political activism.”²² The creation of a “safe space” made students “very comfortable, so I could express my feelings openly.”²³ Such workshops were pitched as simultaneously “nonjudgmental” and transformative, with the consequence that some students had their feelings validated and others tended to self-censor. Such classrooms were, above all, “a safe place [for students and instructors] to speak their ‘feminist truths,’” which has often meant making such classrooms quite unsafe for those who might criticize or doubt those “feminist truths.”²⁴

From those beginnings, the advocacy for safe spaces on the university campus has proliferated. Not only individual classrooms are to be designated safe spaces, but the entire campus. Along with the expansion of the physical and temporal space to be made safe came a stretching of the dangers from which the students needed to be protected. From a space in which students can feel comfortable sharing their experiences and expressing their feelings, the focus has shifted to an “identity-safe environment” in which students can feel accepted and welcomed for who they are and feel free from the perception that they might be judged on the basis of features of their self-identity.²⁵ As the possible threats to a student’s self-esteem multiply and grow increasingly subtle, the demands for actions to eliminate those threats grow apace. Social psychologists have been busily searching for things that might operate as identity threats, and have posited such wide-ranging threats as the presence of a racial group that shows better academic performance than your own, the presence of more men than women at a math workshop, and the presence of students from the school of an athletic rival.26 Given the extraordinary range of environmental factors that could be taken as a threat to a student’s sense of social identity, it is no surprise that the invitation to enforce a “safe space” can lead to a never-ending set of demands to increase the student’s comfort.

The point is not that such effects are not real or that educators should not strive to encourage students to fully participate in their own educational experience, nor that educators should not work to reduce unnecessary sources of stress. The point is simply that the endeavor to establish safe space becomes Sisyphean when expanded to this degree. Indeed, such an expansive conception of safety can easily become zero-sum. Rather than seeking to accommodate all within a general insistence that everyone be treated with equal concern and respect, the quest to root out all possible threats to psychological well-being for some can lead to a willingness to sacrifice the well-being of others.

Worse yet, the quest for such an all-encompassing safe space is damaging to other important values. When a Muslim student feels “unsafe” when other customers seem to cast hostile glances at her at the local grocery store, when other people discuss Islamic State terrorism near her, or when professors on her campus write politically charged Facebook posts about the Middle East, her demand for “safety” cannot readily be accommodated without restricting the legitimate freedom of others. If we identify “the problem” facing us as being that those with whom we disagree are “smart, engaging, and influential,” if “the biggest danger” confronting us is the possibility that a professor’s writings might find readers who will “listen and absorb” and even “be influenced by his words,” if we warn that faculty must “watch what they say” lest others in the community take exception to it, then we have given up on the mission of the university as a place to critically examine ideas.27 When students at Emory University feel the need to go the university president shouting, “We are in pain!” because someone had chalked pro–Donald Trump messages on university sidewalks in the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, a student organization feels inclined to issue a statement denouncing the act of electioneering as “cowardice” and “wrong,” and the university president feels obliged to respond with words of sympathy and comfort, then the university has lost sight of its core mission of exposing students to the wide range of perspectives to be found in the world around them.²⁸

We should come to an appreciation of both what the idea of a safe space has to offer and what its proper limits ought to be. If a “broader, more comprehensive notion of safety” were taken to mean the establishment of a space without the threat of imminent violence, a “contemplative, even monkish world of study,” and a “free space for serious conversation,” then there would be little disagreement. But when a “free space of serious conversation” is further defined as a university free from “violence, whether discursive or physical,” a university free from students and scholars having to engage “with obnoxious, cruel and broken-down ideas,” a university free from ideas that might be regarded as “backward or troubling,” a university free from “an unregulated exchange of ideas,” then the question is not merely whether such a university is “utopian” but whether such a university is still committed to seeking the truth.²⁹

There is nothing wrong with students and faculty wanting to learn in an environment that is welcoming and supportive. There is nothing wrong with students and faculty wanting to avoid pointless controversies and to prioritize the valuable engagement of ideas. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with students and faculty wanting the ability to disengage from intellectual battles and seek refuge among like-minded friends and colleagues. A university dedicated to the mission of advancing and disseminating knowledge need not be a “cold, Darwinian” place or “some sort of Thunderdome” in which every moment and every conversation is a struggle for survival.30 The call for affinity housing or a single-sex lounge should be no more troubling than the presence of a fraternity, political club, or Jewish center on campus. Such physical and metaphorical spaces can be invigorating in their own right, and allow students not only to explore new ideas in a particularly encouraging environment but also to choose to set ideas aside for a time and to emotionally recharge. It would be an emotionally exhausting environment indeed if it were not possible to break bread with other members of the community without being forced into argument.

We might distinguish between a thick version of the campus safe space and a thin version. Both are valuable and both have their place in the university, but they need to be properly situated. The thick version emphasizes comfort to community members’ social identity and provides emotional support among like-minded colleagues and friends. The thin version emphasizes civility, respect, and acceptance for all members of the community. Modern American universities are unusually all-encompassing institutions. They are not just workplaces or schoolhouses. They are communities whose members not only work and learn together but also live, eat, and socialize together. There are benefits to such communities, but there is always a challenge as to how best to make them liberating rather than stifling. Making the best of it will require recognizing both the diversity and the unity of the university community.

There is both physical and figurative room on campus for those thickly safe spaces. Study rooms, lounges, dining areas, housing, clubs, and even some classes are all appropriate and available options for providing students with opportunities to let down their guard and engage with others in a spirit of complete solidarity and minimal judgment. Such spaces have sometimes been portrayed, by both their proponents and their critics, as special privileges for marginalized members of the community, but they are better understood as a universal benefit. All students on campus deserve to have a place of respite from the stresses of university life, or indeed daily life.

But that does suggest that our approach to such spaces should be evenhanded. When students call for hospitable spaces for racial minorities, religious minorities, sexual identity minorities, and women, we should recognize the value that such space can provide, while at the same time recognizing that other students can find value in such spaces as well. If it is problematic for Michigan State University to convert the women’s study lounge in the student union into a common space, it is equally problematic for Harvard University to sanction students who join single-sex clubs. If we welcome George Washington University’s setting aside time at campus swimming pools for women only in order to accommodate Muslim students, we should question Bowdoin College’s decision to disband the evangelical Bowdoin Christian Fellowship because the club would not allow atheists to run the group.31 Finding ways to accommodate the needs of students to sometimes be apart from the bustle of the campus at large will sometimes raise tensions and will often require compromise, but those difficulties are best negotiated if we are able to think about such demands as reflecting a universal desire rather than a special interest, if we are able to treat them all with a spirit of generous accommodation, and if we are able to accept that such spaces for nurturing thick bonds of solidarity with like-minded fellows cannot become the primary orientation of the university as a whole.

The university as a whole must be committed to fostering a campus climate that is civil, respectful, and tolerant of all. That common ground of respect and tolerance is essential so that all members of the university community can gather together and engage in their shared project of learning. The campus as a whole must be open to the great diversity of students and faculty who come to American universities, a population that hails not only from all corners of the United States but from all corners of the world. In throwing the gates of the university open to all those who wish to enter and learn, the university must demand that those entering the campus accept that invitation in the spirit in which it was given. When African American students at the Air Force Academy’s preparatory school were targeted with anonymous, racial slurs, the superintendent gathered the cadets to deliver a simple message: “If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect, then you need to get out.”32 Universities are safe places for expressing often profound disagreements to the extent that they insist that members of the campus community tolerate such disagreements and recognize the right of even those very different from themselves to equally enjoy the benefits of the campus.

The university strives to shelter the campus from the “real world” so that it can be a sanctuary for the free exchange of ideas and can hear from and learn from all those who have something to contribute. The insistence on tolerance for all members of the campus community should include a tolerance for those segregated safe spaces of thick fellowship as well as those integrated safe spaces of sharp contestation and debate. The thin requirement of safety for the university as a whole must include a respect for disagreement, a tolerance for wrong-headedness, and an openness to challenge. The university as a whole is inclusive precisely in order to be open to the exploration of unsettling ideas. The university is a safe environment for the provocative and the outrageous to the degree that the members of the community generally understand that the purpose of introducing the provocation is to advance our understanding of the world and enrich the intellectual environment of the campus, and not to shut down debate or cast out some portion of the community. At British universities, atheist student groups have been repeatedly censored for satirical efforts deemed potentially offensive to religious students. If a religious student might feel some discomfort at seeing a mock-up of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam with the Flying Spaghetti Monster substituted in for God, or a T-shirt featuring the title characters from the comic strip Jesus & Mo, then university administrators have been quick to threaten to have the offending students physically removed from the premises.33 A student leader in Britain declared that “there’s a place for that discussion [of controversial topics], but the question of whether it should happen in people’s homes is a difficult one.” The “home” is a “safe space,” free from things that the residents might find “offensive.” The “home” in question, however, is the entire university campus. Defining the primary mission of the university as providing students with a “home” full of “comfort” and free from “anything controversial” strips the university of any real purpose at all.³⁴ Students who make such demands want to sit in a Starbucks, not learn on a college campus.

The therapeutic ethos invoked by the language of safe spaces and trigger warnings has helped make them flashpoints in the larger debate about the mission of the university and the contours of free speech within it. Where advocates of this “revolutionary” new ethos see it as a rejection of a heartless, cold, Darwinian world in favor of a more idyllic space, critics see an unrealistic and undesirable aspiration to “a place without stress.”35 The worry is that

the “safe space” metaphor drains from classroom life every impulse toward critical reflection. It’s one thing to say that students should not be laughed at for posing a question or for offering a wrong answer. It’s another to say that students must never be conscious of their ignorance. It’s one thing to say that students should not be belittled for a personal preference or harassed because of an unpopular opinion. It’s another to say that students must never be asked why their preferences and opinions are different from those of others. It’s one thing to say that students should be capable of self-revelation. It’s another to say that they must always like what they see revealed.³⁶

If the desire to create a safe space that can enhance an inclusive educational environment results in a tendency “to censor critical thinking,” then something important will have been lost. The challenge is to “manage conflict, not prohibit it.”³⁷

For many, the broadening demands to make campus a safe space betray a misunderstanding of what students should expect to encounter on a college campus. The debate over the terminology itself can be a bit of a distraction, posing a false choice between inclusivity and free inquiry. Those who are welcomed to campus must also understand what occurs there. At Duke University, some incoming students objected to a summer reading assignment of a graphic novel that grappled with sexuality for fear that reading it would “compromise [our] personal Christian moral beliefs.”³⁸ In the summer after the towers of the World Trade Center fell and US troops were sent to Afghanistan, the University of North Carolina assigned a book of commentary on the Koran as the summer reading for incoming students. The conservative Family Policy Network objected, arguing that the assignment of materials on an Islamic religious text infringed on the religious freedom of Christian students.39 A decade earlier, faculty members were the ones who objected when a student was able to persuade a committee at Connecticut College to include an “anti-feminist” book on a summer reading list.⁴⁰ Even more disconcerting, some legislators in South Carolina threatened to cut the funding of state universities giving summer reading assignments that touched on homosexual themes. A college, in their view, “has to be reasonable and sensible to the feelings and beliefs of their students.” “Their stance is ‘Even if you don’t want to read it, we’ll shove it down your throat.’”⁴¹ Although there are certainly debates to be had over what books are recommended for incoming students, the controversies that have arisen over such assignments have too often suggested that many incoming college students expect to be sheltered from difficult ideas rather than exposed to them, and hope to tailor their studies so as to insulate themselves from new ideas rather than to challenge themselves by grappling with them. It is this misunderstanding of the university that must be resisted if higher education is to respect its own core values.

Diversity is going to bring with it disagreement, and we should welcome those disagreements for the reasons that Mill emphasized. If we are to take seriously the injunction that a more diverse academic community is a benefit because, in part, it adds to “the diversity of perspectives that are voiced in class” and creates a “better learning environment,” then we cannot expect a diversity of people and experiences to mingle on a campus without jarring, sometimes heated, and sometimes deep disagreements.42 The AAUP report on trigger warnings emphasized that the goal of a university education “is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered, and, more generally, expand their horizons so as to become informed and responsible democratic citizens.” Such an education is expected to be “uncomfortable” in a very profound sense and filled with “difficult discussions.”⁴³ The model of unconstrained intellectual exploration that Socrates practiced in ancient Greece and that modern universities try to implement today is often unsettling and thus resisted by those who would prefer to remain set in their ways. Students frequently find their very identities and most cherished beliefs questioned in a university environment. We should want to retain that, and students should understand what they will encounter when they enter the scholarly community. Respecting all the members of that academic community means both embracing their right to be present and to participate and taking their ideas and beliefs with the seriousness that they deserve. Respect is best demonstrated by active engagement, and inclusion is best realized by the appreciation of what unites us and by the tolerance of what divides us.

Hate Speech

In recent years, many have argued that “hate speech” is an exception to general free speech principles. Ultimately, those advocates of a more restrictive freedom of speech would like to see a reformulation of American constitutional law, which might in fact bring American judicial doctrine closer to the constitutional principles accepted in many other countries. More immediately, they have encouraged universities to break out on their own and adopt a more restrictive approach to what speech will be allowed or tolerated on college campuses. They have won some institutional victories and lost some legal battles, but they are no doubt shaping campus debates and influencing the college culture regarding free speech. “The idea of freedom of speech,” we have been told, “does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks.” Rather, the “parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn” to exclude some speakers and some ideas from the university campus.44

It is commonplace to hear assertions that “hate speech” is not a protected form of free expression. Former presidential candidate and Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean defended excluding conservative speakers from college campuses on the grounds that “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”⁴⁵ The mayor of Portland, Oregon, asserted the same when trying to prohibit disfavored political rallies in the city.⁴⁶ The former legal correspondent for ABC News suggested that if Americans were to “read” the Constitution, they would see that “hate speech is excluded from protection.”⁴⁷ Protesters who have physically assaulted other protesters have justified their actions by declaring that hate speech is unprotected.⁴⁸ Many college students are inclined to agree.⁴⁹

As a description of American constitutional law, this is quite wrong. The term “hate speech” itself does not refer to a legally recognized category of expression, and proponents of the view that hate speech is or should be unprotected have difficulty agreeing on what the concept is supposed to include. The category of “hate speech” is sometimes framed narrowly to focus on threats, harassment, and personal insults, but often it is framed very broadly to include arguments with unpleasant conclusions. The US Supreme Court recently emphasized that university student groups “may express any viewpoint they wish—including a discriminatory one,” for the court was committed to “protect[ing] the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”50 In striking down a law banning symbols arousing anger or resentment on the basis of race, religion, or gender, the court unanimously insisted that the government could not regulate expression “based on hostility—or favoritism—towards the underlying message expressed.”⁵¹ The court has been willing to carve out a narrow category of hate speech that crosses over into being a “true threat,” but has insisted that government officials must distinguish a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals” or “intimidation” designed to create a reasonable “fear of bodily harm or death,” which can be regulated, from mere “political hyperbole,” which cannot.⁵² Americans may troll and curse each other and throw out racial slurs, because ultimately “giving offense is a viewpoint” and the First Amendment allows Americans to express any viewpoint they wish.⁵³ Americans are not allowed to threaten each other with impunity, but they are free to express hatred toward one another.

American constitutional law has long recognized that various types of expression are not protected by the general right to free speech and free press, though the scope of those exceptions has been in steady decline for a century. Until the early twentieth century, the courts held that speech, like most other conduct, was subject to myriad restrictions. As the US Supreme Court explained when upholding a conviction of a Communist Labor Party organizer in 1927, “the freedom of speech which is secured by the Constitution does not confer an absolute right to speak, without responsibility, whatever one may choose, or an unrestricted and unbridled license giving immunity for every possible use of language and preventing the punishment of those who abuse this freedom; and … a State in the exercise of its police powers may punish those who abuse this freedom by utterances inimical to the public welfare, tending to incite to crime, disturb the public peace, or endanger the foundations of organized government.”54 Howard Dean would have been right if he had said a hundred years ago that “hate speech is not free speech,” and political majorities and government officials routinely used the power of the state to punish anyone who wrote or said things that they found particularly hateful. At the dawn of the twentieth century, arrests for disturbing the peace did indeed follow Prohibition activist Carrie Nation wherever she went across the country, precisely because the police regularly arrested her whenever “she became boisterous.”⁵⁵ When the wives of striking Pennsylvania mine workers yelled at those crossing the picket line and called them “scabs” in 1903, the women were likewise arrested for disturbing the peace.⁵⁶ Whether such “hate speech” was to be punished was a matter of political discretion. Progressives scored a great victory when this constitutional standard was abandoned and the court began a steady march toward extending constitutional protection to a wide range of political dissenters, social activists, religious agitators, and artists (not to mention the occasional pornographer).

The old constitutional standard that judges enforced over the course of the nineteenth century fairly easily accommodated laws regulating hate speech. Government officials and the police were often enthusiastic about shutting down speech that they found offensive, hateful, or dangerous. On the eve of World War II, for example, the police in Rochester, New Hampshire, were quick to whisk away Walter Chaplinsky, who had riled up a crowd on a public sidewalk with his proselytization for the Jehovah’s Witnesses and his condemnation of Catholics. When Chaplinsky then told the police officers that they were “damned Fascists” for suppressing his sidewalk preaching, they promptly arrested him and charged him with the crime of calling someone an “offensive or derisive name” and acting so as to “deride, offend or annoy.” At that point in its history, the court was willing to allow the state to prosecute someone for “insulting or ‘fighting’ words—those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” As the justices observed, “such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.”57

Within just a few years, the court was having second thoughts. Not long after the end of the war, the disgraced Catholic priest Arthur Terminiello was arrested for disturbing the peace at a raucous public meeting in Chicago. Terminiello was a controversial figure—a fierce critic of President Franklin Roosevelt, an opponent of American entry into the war, a proponent of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and his speech attracted a “surging, howling mob” of protesters who broke windows, threw bottles, and assaulted police officers guarding the meeting room. In upholding his conviction for inciting a riot, the state court concluded that Terminiello was a “professional agitator” who was making “an appeal to fury” by baiting what he termed the “slimy scum” and “skunks of Jews” who protested his talk.⁵⁸ The US Supreme Court reversed that conviction as unconstitutional, asserting that “a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute,” stir “people to anger,” and “have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.”59 The justices did not question whether Terminiello’s words were hurtful or enraging, but they insisted that every citizen had a duty to refrain from violence regardless of such provocations. Those guilty of disturbing the peace were the ones breaking windows and throwing punches, not those giving speeches. The court has charted a liberalizing course on free speech ever since, emphasizing that the state cannot silence or punish citizens because their words or actions were offensive, generated raw emotions, were abusive to particular groups, or advocated policies that the government or popular majorities thought positively evil.

When American colleges began to adopt new policies regulating “hate speech” on campus in the 1980s, they ran into legal objections based on the court’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Unsurprisingly, the college administrators who initiated and drafted the new policies were less concerned about protecting free speech than with avoiding the bad publicity that might come from a racially charged incident on campus. The claim generally was that such policies were not “speech codes” at all and did not restrict the expression of ideas, but were instead codes of “civility” that aimed only at deterring “bad behavior.”⁶⁰ Meanwhile, an emerging generation of legal activists began to build arguments that hate speech should not be protected by the US Constitution. “Racist speech is best treated as a sui generis category,” one that is “so tied to violence and degradation” that it should be uniquely subject to prohibition.⁶¹ Hate speech should be regarded as a form of “discursive violence” rather than a form of expression.⁶² Judges have not yet been persuaded.

The shifting decisions of the US Supreme Court have immediate consequences for state universities, but they can also help illuminate the broader issues that ought to be of interest to anyone thinking about the appropriate principles of free speech on a college campus. It is first worth setting aside some potential rationales for protecting hate speech before considering why a hate speech exception might still not be the best course of action.

First, the resistance to a specific hate speech exception to the general commitment to free speech need not suggest that such speech is harmless. The traditional regulation of all kinds of speech was based on the assumption that speech could be dangerous, hurtful, and damaging, and that the state was empowered to suppress anything that was harmful, including speech. The civil libertarians who argued for greater protection for speech did not contend that such speech is really harmless. They argued that speech should be protected even though it is harmful. Critics of campus speech codes often invoke the familiar rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” but this is rarely persuasive. Both the crying child and the comforting parent know that words do in fact hurt. The rhyme is not meant to be descriptive; it is meant to be aspirational. The parent does not deny the pain, but rather urges the child to overcome the pain and not let those emotional wounds define her. Similarly, advocates of free speech should not deny the harm that can be caused by words or dismiss the reality that speech can be dangerous. While metaphorical flights of fancy (such as the rhetoric of “discursive violence”) can attribute to hate speech a potency that seems unwarranted, we should be cautious not to lean too far the other way and assert that the harm caused by hate speech is fanciful.

We should pause for a moment to acknowledge the role that metaphors have played in the rhetoric of hate speech. It is now routine for words to be characterized as doing “violence” to the listener, or even to those far removed from the speech. The social theorist Michel Foucault argued that there was “violence” inherent in speech and ideas because we use them to impose our will upon the world around us.63 It has become fashionable in some circles to talk of the sin of “intellectual violence,” which can include, for example, holding a negative view of the left-wing philosopher Jacques Derrida without having thoroughly read his oeuvre.⁶⁴ From a different angle, the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has emphasized that there is a “symbiotic relationship linking actions and speech,” between “racist and sexist ideas [and] violence.” This is no doubt true, but it obscures more than it illuminates to collapse the difference between speech and action and to simply refer to “verbal violence.”⁶⁵

Once words are taken to be equivalent to violence, then the call for censorship quickly follows. It should be no surprise that the rhetoric of discursive violence has proliferated and been embraced by all sides. Thus a student has argued that since “words are actions,” the difference between “a racist pamphlet” and murder “can be only of degree.”⁶⁶ A professor at the University of Illinois derided the chancellor of the university because her call for “civility” on campus should be understood as “a prime example of violent language—all the more violent because of its calm, rational, removed tone.”⁶⁷ Gay rights activists denounce street preachers as engaging in “verbal violence.”⁶⁸ An education theorist asserts that those who criticize campus activists are engaged in “intellectual violence.”⁶⁹ Exposing a sociologist’s plagiarism is “a form of intellectual violence wrapped in objective scholarship.”⁷⁰ A psychologist calls out her brethren in the African American community for committing “heinous act[s] of violence against one another” by the “use of unloving and unsafe language.”⁷¹ Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is described as “endless acts of public verbal violence” that “numbs people’s senses to the point that they no longer fully register the horror of what they are living through.”72 When a conservative student group was chastised for engaging in offensive satire, it responded by denouncing its critics for their “violent and hateful rhetoric.”⁷³ A white Canadian artist’s paintings are removed from a gallery because she is engaged in “cultural genocide” by painting in the style of a famed Indigenous artist.⁷⁴ Such rhetorical turns of phrase are certainly vivid and for some purposes might even be useful. These metaphors would be worthy of little notice if not for the fact that they are now used as justifications for censorship. If we elide the real distinctions between speech and actual physical violence, however, we open the door not only to widespread censorship of disfavored ideas but to the use of actual violence against unpopular speakers in the name of “self-defense.” The suggestion that speakers should be suppressed if their words might inspire, encourage, justify, or contribute to acts of physical violence would lead as easily to the censorship of socialist icon Emma Goldman or civil rights leader Malcolm X as to that of current right-wing writers Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos. We significantly shrink the scope of political and social debate if we conflate the proper effort to punish and deter acts of physical violence and the more dubious effort to suppress speech that might potentially lead to violence.

Second, hate speech need not be regarded as particularly valuable. It is an easy temptation to exclude some forms of expression from the realm of protected speech by deeming such categories of speech to be literally worthless. Some of the justices on the US Supreme Court, for example, have suggested that books could be banned only if they were “utterly without redeeming social value,”75 or words could be punished only when they are “by definition worthless and undeserving of constitutional protection.”⁷⁶ One legal scholar has described this as a “two-level theory” of free speech in which some speech is “worthy enough” to deserve protection while other speech is “apparently so worthless” that it can be banned completely.⁷⁷ Such a test has invited efforts to argue that almost any speech has some sort of value, even if it is only primarily valuable to the speaker. These efforts are often rather strained and generally come down to a claim that such speech is a form of authentic self-expression. As society has become more tolerant of diversity, dissent, and the unconventional, judges have become less willing to toss aside outrageous forms of expression as wholly without value. “One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”⁷⁸

The more immediate question for universities is whether such speech contributes to the mission of a university, and for that purpose the value of hate speech (at least as narrowly defined) seems quite limited. Universities are committed to the search for truth, and the value of speech to a community of scholars lies in whether it can help us advance or communicate knowledge. Speech can be expressive without being particularly productive. The liberal tradition of tolerating dissent, approaching offensive ideas with an open mind, and treating one’s own convictions with a healthy dose of skepticism gives no reason for seeking out hate speech. Free scholarly inquiry and the rigorous testing of ideas are not likely to suffer if personal invectives or racial slurs are excluded from campus. Hate speech of that limited sort is not a valuable component of the academic enterprise.

If hate speech is neither harmless nor valuable, then why should it be tolerated? Or, more to the point, why would the principles of free speech that ought to guide a campus community counsel caution in suppressing hate speech? Here we should recall the Jeffersonian lessons regarding speech restrictions. In the years after the American Revolution, many in the founding generation thought that it was both essential and possible to suppress bad speech in order to protect the republic. They soon discovered that it was an impossible task to preserve freedom and censor speech. Once an official has been empowered to suppress speech, it is inevitable that good speech will be suppressed along with the bad, that the tools forged to punish worthless speech will be used to silence valuable speech as well.

The idea that a hate speech exception would be applied strictly and stay limited flies in the face of our historical experience. When charged with the duty to suppress harmful speech, officials have repeatedly understood that duty as a mandate to suppress unpopular speech and speech that they personally find offensive and unpalatable. When Puritan leaders claimed the right to suppress false and dangerous speech, they drove religious dissenters into the wilderness. When the Federalists empowered judges to suppress false and dangerous speech, those Federalist judges promptly jailed Jeffersonian newspaper editors. When slave owners claimed the right to suppress false and dangerous speech, they burned abolitionist publishers to the ground. When the legal establishment embraced the right to suppress false and dangerous speech at the turn of the twentieth century, they jailed socialists and anarchists. When university administrators have been asked to suppress speech harmful to the campus community, they have been as likely to prohibit civil rights activists and Communist professors as white supremacists. The gradual loosening of the bonds of censorship in the United States over the past century has come about through the repeated recognition that exceptions to free speech are exploited by those in power to suppress speech that they find threatening. Civil libertarians have responded not by insisting on an absolute right to free speech but by eliminating and narrowing exceptions to free speech as much as possible.

We need not turn to the broader history of censorship of harmful speech to see how exceptions, once created, are expanded to suit the immediate interests of those exercising power. The brief history of hate speech policies has already provided evidence in abundance of that same dynamic.

The adoption of university speech codes quickly led to litigation, which in turn revealed the extent to which such policies were overly broad in the speech and conduct that they attempted to suppress, and often arbitrary in how they were enforced. The very category of “hate speech” has no clear definition and no obvious boundaries. The University of Michigan, for example, swept up in its student conduct policy not only express or implied threats directed to other students but also any speech that “stigmatizes or victimizes an individual” on the basis of a long list of characteristics. The university’s own guidelines for how the policy was to be enforced gave examples that ranged from racist threats to neglecting to invite a student to a party or arguing in class that “women just aren’t as good in this field as men.” In practice, a social work student was disciplined for arguing in class for the benefits of conversion therapy for homosexuals, and a dentistry student was disciplined for complaining to another student that he had heard that minority students were treated unfairly in a particular class. Reviewing the record, a federal judge determined that Michigan’s policy indiscriminately encompassed both constitutionally protected speech and unprotected threats, and employed language so vague that it “was simply impossible to discern any limitation on its scope or any conceptual distinction between protected and unprotected conduct.”79 Courts reviewing policies at other colleges and universities reached similar conclusions. In an effort to draft policies that were flexible enough to cover all possible incidents that might arise on campus, college administrators tended to adopt rules that gave them great discretion to punish all sorts of speech and gave students little guidance as to how to avoid charges being filed against them. Rather than adopting narrow policies that targeted true threats, college administrators regularly favored policies that prohibited anything they found demeaning or offensive. Rather than restricting themselves to intervening in student affairs when someone had been threatened with violence, college administrators routinely policed the tone and content of student arguments and even classroom discussions. Rather than relying on faculty to teach and correct students who made weak or misguided but inflammatory arguments, they authorized administrators to discipline those students.

One approach to trying to confine the scope of hate speech regulations is to argue that racist speech is uniquely threatening. A prominent advocate of campus hate speech regulation, Mari Matsuda, early on contended that “in order to respect first amendment values, a narrow definition of actionable racist speech is required. Racist speech is best treated as a sui generis category.” Racist speech should be treated as “qualitatively different” from all other speech, and as a result uniquely subject to regulation and prohibition.⁸⁰ In practice, however, hate speech codes have never been limited in that way. The University of Michigan policy, for example, listed no fewer than twelve distinct categories of victimization that were subject to special protection, including speech that was thought to demean someone based on age, marital status, or Vietnam-era veteran status. A hate-speech policy at the University of Wisconsin, struck down as unconstitutional not long after the Michigan policy, punished speech that demeaned individuals on the basis of ten possible categories. In keeping with a more recent wave of policymaking, the private Dickinson College adopted a “bias incident protocol” to “respond to an expression that may be offensive or inflammatory to some,” regardless of “whether the act or expression was intentional or unintentional,” and that might give offense “based on but not limited to” a list of ten protected categories.81 Speech that unintentionally gives offense to someone on the basis of a characteristic not previously identified by school policy can make a student subject to administrative actions by campus officials.

The ongoing development and implementation of such policies—in some cases even after they have been struck down as unconstitutional—lends no support to the hope that racist speech might be treated as unique. Instead, concerns about racist speech have been treated as an opening wedge for far more wide-ranging policies designed to empower college officials to police campus speech that some might regard as offensive. Such policies have been embraced to an even greater degree outside the United States. King’s College London, for example, requires that outside speakers have the text of their speech vetted by campus officials before it can be delivered, and University College London prohibits speech that might be regarded as “offensive or provocative.”⁸² University College London banned the Nietzsche Club because the German philosopher was also admired by associates of Adolf Hitler.⁸³ The London School of Economics found itself backpedaling after students in an atheist club were harassed by school officials for wearing T-shirts with a cartoon image of Muhammad, but such efforts to censor religious images that “may cause distress and insult to others” have been a frequent point of contention on British campuses.84 A Scottish university student association banned a pro-life group because the “students largely do not want anything to do with a group that promotes the removal of rights over bodily autonomy for over half the student population that attend this university.”⁸⁵

One might at least hope that the regulation of hate speech could be narrowly tailored so as to just restrict such low-value utterances as slurs, obscenities, and invectives aimed at particular individuals (though that too would raise constitutional problems), but from its beginnings the movement to regulate hate speech was aimed at the suppression of disfavored arguments and ideas. That was certainly true in practice, as when Michigan disciplined the social work student for a classroom argument in favor of conversion therapy, but it was embedded in the theory of hate speech regulation as well. When Matsuda argued that racist speech should be treated as uniquely deserving of censorship, the claim was not limited to racial slurs but was directed explicitly to “racist messages.” On this view, political and social ideas should be suppressed once they pass some threshold of having been “collectively and internationally considered and rejected.”⁸⁶ The argument for restricting hate speech rests on the claim that some ideas are simply more deserving than others, and thus only some ideas are worthy of being heard. By their nature, the authorities empowered to determine what ideas are worthy of being heard are not faculty members teaching their classes or advancing their scholarship, but campus administrators imposing sanctions on members of the campus community. Messages that “further justice, equality, and social contentment” should be heard. Messages that work against social justice should be suppressed. Speech should be suppressed not when it incites violence but when it “elicit[s] fears about historical outgroups” and promotes ideologies that we would prefer not to see prevail.87 Some ideas should be designated by university administrators as “false,” and those holding such ideas should not merely be educated by faculty engaging with them; they are to be censored so that they may not speak those ideas.⁸⁸

Unsurprisingly, the argument that hate speech should not be tolerated on college campuses has been used not merely to discipline students who use a racial slur during a heated argument or leave threatening messages on a dorm room door. It has been used to justify shutting down campus speakers who want to advocate for Donald Trump, contend that immigration should be restricted, criticize the Black Lives Matter movement and its policy proposals, argue against progressive sexual mores, or posit that those accused of sexual assault on campus should be given a fair hearing. Such expansive applications of the hate speech exception to free speech are the natural and predictable result of adopting the view that only politically desirable speech should be protected. Anything that does not further justice, as conceived and understood by college administrators, should be classified as hate speech and suppressed. The logic of restricting exposure to such hateful speech does not suggest a stopping point with speakers. If students should not be exposed to Ann Coulter or Charles Murray in a campus auditorium, there seems to be no more reason why they should be exposed to their books in the library or permitted to access their work on campus computer networks. If “keeping watch over the soul of our republic” means “redefining the rules of what counts as public speech,” then some ideas will be labeled as simply too dangerous to be allowed onto a college campus.⁸⁹ Universities will be distinguished not by their willingness to boldly explore new ideas and subject conventional wisdom to close scrutiny, but by their unwillingness to grapple with the very ideas that occupy the public sphere, and that can be found at the corner bookstore or on the cable news show.

College campuses do have an alternative that addresses the core concern of hate speech regulations while preserving a robust commitment to free speech. The label of “hate speech” has always covered a vague and disparate set of offenses, opening the door to selective and abusive enforcement against controversial speakers and ideas at the whim of campus officials. The defensible kernel of the hate speech exception, however, is limited to personal threats and harassment. Campus administrators have a responsibility to secure a safe environment for students to learn, and thus a responsibility to discipline those who seek, for any reason, to harass or threaten members of the campus community. Instructors leading a classroom discussion have a duty to correct students who make baseless or misguided arguments. The very goal of instruction and research is to expose flawed arguments for what they are. Part of the process of teaching students is to guide them in how to develop and state arguments so that ideas can be constructively considered and ill-considered expressions of opinion or emotional outbursts can be minimized.

The faculty members and staff of a university have an obligation to socialize and train students to engage in civil but passionate debate about important, controversial, and sometimes offensive subjects, and to be able to critically examine arguments and ideas that they find attractive as well as those they find repulsive. Colleges and universities will have failed in their educational mission if they produce graduates who are incapable of facing up to and judiciously engaging difficult ideas. Preparing students for a lifetime of responsible citizenship and enabling the campus community to fearlessly investigate the strength of competing ideas requires cultivating not an environment in which students and scholars are sheltered from disreputable ideas, but one in which those ideas can be respectfully and forcefully confronted. Arguments and ideas that some might find hateful might well be deeply flawed and widely rejected. We gain the most for good ideas, however, if we demonstrate why bad ideas are mistaken rather than treat them as taboo. Moreover, even in vanquishing bad ideas, we may strengthen and improve our own. In an institution of teaching and learning, we expect students to learn how to identify flawed arguments and set aside bad ideas rather than simply be told that some conclusions should be taken on faith and some ideas are too dangerous and enticing to be contemplated. We advance truth not by burning the books of the wicked but by winning converts through the force of persuasion.

Forms of Protest

There are many calls to restrict free speech on college campuses in the name of other values, but sometimes the impairment of free speech comes dressed as the expansion of free speech. Some have suggested that “when you simply have two people talking at once, civil libertarians don’t necessarily have a clear way to choose between them.”90 This is simply wrong. Although it should rarely be the case that the exercise of free speech by some actually interferes with the exercise of free speech by others, it should be recognized that free speech can thrive only under conditions of appropriate regulation. The best environment for the productive exchange of ideas is not the mosh pit. Anytime there are large groups of people with something to say, some orderly procedures need to be put in place if individuals are going to be able to make themselves heard and an actual collective conversation can take place. Classroom discussions are managed by an instructor. Faculty meetings follow Robert’s Rules of Order. Similarly, vigorous debate in the campus equivalent of the public square requires some ground rules.

The US Supreme Court has long adhered to a useful framework for thinking about how government regulations that affect speech should be viewed under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The court is particularly open to so-called time, place, and manner regulations that try to channel free speech in productive ways and coordinate the many activities in which citizens are engaged in the shared public space, while being much more skeptical of regulations that restrict the content of speech or unnecessarily limit the ability of a speaker to reach an audience. This is not merely a matter of preventing governmental suppression of speech, or imposing a social order that tolerates only those who “speak decorously.” This is a matter of maintaining social spaces that allow for both vigorous protest and critical dialogue, that allow for both the expression of grievances and argumentation, that allow for both inclusive participation and the productive exchange of ideas. Such principles aim for the realization of a freedom of speech that does not depend on the forbearance of either the mob or the censor.

Bearing such a distinction in mind is useful for thinking about forms of protest as well, and for thinking about when appropriate expressions of dissent cross a line and become damaging to the ability of others to enjoy their own freedoms in the campus community. Thinking through how best to manage the vigorous exchange of ideas by passionate advocates is important in part because we should recognize the value of protest and dissent. Over the past several decades, the story of the development of constitutional law in this area has to a significant degree been the story of expanding protections for a widening array of protest activities. Our constitutional law has recognized that in order to effectively exercise their right to free speech, dissenters must be able to choose not only their message but its form of delivery. Dissenters need the freedom to grab the attention of the public, to dramatize their concerns, and to convey their message in a way that makes sense and is accessible to both themselves and their intended audience. The growing appreciation for that basic principle has led judges to push government officials to accommodate the expression of dissent, whether that dissent takes the form of a march or a demonstration, a sit-in or a silent vigil, a stump speech or a burning flag, a reasoned argument or a passionate obscenity. The starting point for an appreciation of the value of free speech on campus should be an appreciation of the many forms of protest and the need to make space for them.

Protests can be invigorating and rousing to an audience, but they can also be discomforting and intimidating. Here too we must remind ourselves that discomfort is to be expected and does not in itself provide a reason for shutting down dissent. A group of students at Princeton University made the point clearly when defending some of their own protest activities. Along with students at many universities across the United States in the fall of 2015, a group known as the Black Justice League mounted increasingly visible demonstrations calling for a wide variety of changes on the Princeton campus. The protests at Princeton, as on many other campuses, were often enthusiastic and turbulent and were designed to maximize the attention to their particular cause. Some observers reacted rather critically, complaining about both tone and tactics. Setting aside for the moment the details of those tactics, I want to call attention to a general point made by the Black Justice League in responding to those complaints. They dismissed such complaints as “an attempt to tone-police and silence those whose voices have historically been repressed.” While it no doubt goes too far to say that the call for “civil discourse” is necessarily an attempt to “silence” the repressed, the underlying point is an important one. It is stifling to dissent to insist that the dissenters “present their concerns in a way that is most palatable to those who are responsible for addressing their grievances.” The students were particularly concerned that such a rhetorical move had the effect of “placing the burden back on those marginalized to prove themselves worthy of being heard.”91 They correctly rejected the implication that dissenters have an obligation to approach others with hat in hand and in a tone of submission, or that some students were not due the respect of a hearing unless they adopted the manner of speech favored by others. We each have the right to determine not only what we want to say but also how we say it, and we must always be open to engaging with those who choose to express themselves differently than we would ourselves.

The demand for respect is, however, a two-way street. Demands for “civility” and “good order” can become tools to censor and suppress, but they are also important values in society in general and in a university in particular. We should strive to address each other with civility, and we should recognize that passion can often get in the way of reason. The ultimate goal of a university community is to foster an environment in which competing perspectives can be laid bare, heard, and assessed. Recognizing the equal dignity of each member of the community entails a willingness to listen, but also a willingness to engage in dialogue. We should all strive to be charitable and generous in tolerating those occasions when passion gets the better of us and our words are not chosen as carefully as they should have been. It is inevitable that when ideas are taken seriously and held with conviction, they will sometimes be expressed strongly, and even too strongly. Just as the listener should strive to be forgiving when the speaker oversteps the bounds of civility, so the speaker should strive to be diligent in observing the bounds of civility and trying to stay within them. Being uncivil does not make one unworthy of being heard, but it might make one less likely to be listened to. We try to be civil to each other not because we need to demonstrate that we are worthy of being heard, but because civility breeds dialogue, mutual respect, and ultimately the productive exchange of ideas.

Mill’s search for the truth advances not through shouting matches, but through reasoned deliberation. He wanted all sides to be able to make their best arguments with conviction, but the entire point of the exercise is to make the arguments available for others to evaluate. The members of the university community have the right to have their arguments heard. They have the right to expect that others in the community will be open to persuasion. They do not have the right to insist that others in fact find the arguments persuasive, nor to expel from the community those who disagree. Respecting each member of the community requires respecting the right of each to be present and to make up his or her own mind.

The marketplace of ideas is crowded. One challenge of participating in that marketplace is simply to gain attention. One point of protest activities is to try to increase the chance of being heard, to demand attention. Universities provide myriad venues through which the exchange of ideas can occur, from classrooms to academic journals, from conferences to public meetings, from newspapers to flyers, from the Internet to social media. Protests are designed to cut through the clutter and draw an immediate audience to hear the protester’s chosen message. Universities should make space for that as well and allow dissenters to get their message out as best they can, so long as they do not unduly interfere with the ability of others to pursue their own separate goals on the shared campus.

Let us recall that the purpose and value of free speech within a university is its truth-seeking function. The free exchange of ideas, spirited argumentation, and careful evaluation of those arguments all contribute to the university’s mission of advancing and disseminating knowledge. Protests can further that process by calling attention to a neglected set of concerns and ideas. Once you have my attention, however, what are you going to do with it? The protester has a responsibility to transition from actions geared primarily toward gaining publicity to the development and articulation of arguments to be evaluated by the assembled community of scholars. If protests never make that turn, if they never get to the point of entering into reasoned debate, then they contribute little to the intellectual life and ultimate mission of a university.

The energetic effort to get attention for one’s cause can be taken too far. Here I want to consider two closely related types of difficulties that are frequently encountered and the principles that should help guide us in identifying the boundaries of appropriate protest activities on campus. The first we might characterize as the problem of disruption, and the second we might characterize as obstruction or the classic problem of the “heckler’s veto.” In both cases, the activity of protesting no longer serves as an adjunct to the free exchange of ideas. Rather than fostering debate, disruption and obstruction make the exchange of ideas more difficult. Rather than pursuing the goal of persuasion through reasoned argument, disruption and obstruction seek simply to coerce in order to win compliance. There is no contribution to advancing knowledge; there is only an effort to compel others to obey.

Disruption takes many forms, but they all aim to impede the normal functioning of the university. A poster hung by the activist group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) at the University of California at Berkeley is exemplary of the tactic. In 1996, the voters of the state of California approved Proposition 209, which prohibited public institutions from discriminating on the basis of race. Most immediately, it banned certain forms of affirmative action in state universities. BAMN mobilized to protest the adoption and implementation of Prop 209 on the Berkeley campus, declaring,

We must force Chancellor Tien to publicly state that the Berkeley campus will defy 209! We must continue and expand the mass actions such as the Campanile occupation and marches through buildings on campus. We must demonstrate that the campus will be ungovernable unless Tien accept our demands.92

Mass action, direct action, occupation, sit-in, disruption, civil disobedience. They have all become commonplace tactics on college campuses. So common, in fact, that we should introduce a distinction between actual disruptions and what we might call staged disruptions.

Many protest activities are designed less to be a disruption than to give the appearance of disruption. They create temporary impediments that are soon cleared away so that normal activity can resume. The point of such a tactic is not so much to disrupt as to call attention to the cause. Frequently the ground rules for these sorts of protests are carefully negotiated among campus administrators, campus security, and the protesting students. The staging of the disruption itself is a Kabuki theater of choreographed moves by which the protesters are allowed to make their point and everyone else is able to continue their activities after a brief interruption. Such staged disruptions can simply be built in to ordinary event planning, with everyone understanding that the scheduled speaker, for example, will actually begin a few minutes later than what is announced in the program, or that the individual heckler will soon be ushered from the auditorium so that a presentation can continue unimpeded for those who wish to see it.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes hard for administrators to know whether a given protest is intended to be an actual disruption or a staged disruption, and such misunderstandings can create unnecessary tensions. In the fall of 2015, one group of demonstrators marched in the Homecoming Parade at the University of Missouri with signs declaring their support for minority students at the university. A second group of demonstrators, calling themselves Concerned Student 1950, chose to occupy the parade route and block the car carrying the University of Missouri system president Tim Wolfe. Since the demonstration was not coordinated ahead of time, it was not immediately clear whether the protesters would soon move out of the way or would instead try to continue to disrupt the parade. As one supporter of Concerned Student 1950 later explained, “They have to do something to be noticed.”93 From that perspective, the blockade was a staged disruption, and as it happens the protesters soon dispersed after a fifteen-minute delay of the parade. In the meantime, however, the uncertainty as to what was happening led to some unnecessary pushing and shoving. From the perspective of the goals of free speech on campus, there is nothing wrong with staged disruptions. They are simply another device for calling attention to a particular cause, for getting noticed.

Actual disruptions are different. They are not designed to be temporary events to attract attention. They are rather designed to make the university, as BAMN put it, “ungovernable.” They are intended to “force” university officials to comply with a set of “demands” if the disruption is to come to an end and the university is to return to normal. In effect, protesters engaged in actual disruption seek to take other members of the campus hostage, demanding concessions in exchange for their freedom.

This is the language of coercion, not persuasion. Indeed, such tactics are often justified precisely because efforts at persuasion seem to have failed. Other members of the campus community either refuse to pay sufficient attention to protesters’ favored cause, or they refuse to come to the conclusion that the protesters desire. But, of course, in a free and equal community of scholars, all individuals are at liberty to focus their attention on the issues of greatest concern to them and to reach conclusions about those issues that make the most sense to them. The advancement of knowledge comes through the testing of ideas and the drawing of conclusions about their merits, not through the forced acceptance of ideas. Forced compliance with favored doctrine is precisely what the liberal tradition was born rejecting, and the modern university is premised on the belief that such indoctrination is inconsistent with the pursuit of truth and greater understanding of the world in which we live. Disruptive actions designed to prevent other members of the community from pursuing the basic mission of the university and to force compliance with a set of demands are antithetical to the very purpose of a university. This is no longer the exercise of free speech, but the opposite.

Efforts aimed at impeding the normal rhythm of university life subvert rather than realize the mission of a university. There are, of course, degrees of disruption, and some are more tolerable than others. Prudent toleration should not be confused with principled endorsement, however. In the spring of 2016, the members of a student group called Reclaim Harvard Law occupied a lounge in the student center at the Harvard Law School. The students christened the lounge “Belinda Hall” in honor of a slave held by one of the early benefactors of the law school, and issued a list of demands for improving race relations in the law school. During the course of the occupation, the protesting students argued both that they were taking direct action to create a “safe space” for minority students within the law school and that they were engaging in an occupation of part of a university building with a list of demands to be satisfied before they would vacate.94 In that case, university officials decided to accommodate the occupation, eventually insisting only that the students allow the room to be cleaned and not engage in violent confrontations with other students. Although the activists eventually began to openly ponder “redrawing our lines” and occupying more of the law school since their demands were not being met to their satisfaction, the school’s decision to tolerate the occupation was ultimately a prudential calculation that the disruption caused by use of one room within the student center did not impede the general operation of the law school and the ability of faculty and students to engage in their primary pursuits. By contrast, when a coalition of several groups of students at Ohio State University occupied the central administration building during that same spring because they were frustrated that university officials had not acted on their various demands, the university promptly warned the students that they would be arrested and expelled from the university if they did not end the occupation within hours of its start. The students quickly vacated the premises.95 At both Ohio State and Harvard, the disruption was in clear violation of university policies and student codes of conduct. The question of whether to enforce those rules became a prudential one about which officials might differ depending on the particular circumstances. But in neither case was there a question of student free speech. Although both groups of students integrated some argumentative efforts into their protests (teach-ins at Harvard, an open mic at Ohio State), the primary purpose of the activity was to disrupt the lives of other members of the university community and force compliance with the activists’ own objectives. The ability of the campus community to pursue its central mission was impeded rather than advanced by their efforts. The decision to put an end to the disruption ultimately works to uphold the conditions for the free exchange of ideas at the university.

This is not to say that such occupations and mass actions may not be justifiable. If they are justified, however, it is not because the activists are engaged in the exercise of free speech in pursuit of the truth-seeking mission of the university. Rather they would have to be justified as appropriate instances of civil disobedience. In this spirit, the students in Princeton’s Black Justice League invoked the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and the history of civil disobedience in order to bring about justice. As they observed, there are certainly conditions of injustice that would justify the disruption of the civil order. But note that this is no longer a claim about the university as such, the free exchange of ideas, or the goal of advancing knowledge. The protesters are not taking action as students or as members of a scholarly community. They are taking political action as concerned citizens seeking redress for societal wrongs. In responding to critics of his tactics of “non-violent direct action,” King posited that there were circumstances that justified breaking “an unjust law” but one “must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” If the situation is dire enough, students might risk expulsion “in order to arouse the conscience of the community,” but presumably such situations should be rare.96 Given their concerns, the students in Berkeley’s BAMN could have mounted their disruptive protest of the new state constitutional amendment anywhere, from the state capitol building to the local firehouse, and it was mere happenstance that BAMN’s membership included some students. The university was simply a convenient, and perhaps unusually tolerant, site for trying to affect state politics.

The claim of such disruptive protests is not that the participants are engaged in a debate in order to seek the truth about social justice. The claim is that they already know the truth about social justice. The disruptive protest is an effort to implement that knowledge, not to critically examine it or offer it to others for their critical examination. In doing so, they echo the famed declaration of 1960s Berkeley student leader Mario Savio, who called upon activists not to engage in a debate but to simply impede. “There is a time,” he said, “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part.… You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”⁹⁷ When the time for action has arrived, the time for talking has come to an end. The question to be asked about any given disruptive protest is whether the disruption to social order is justified from the general perspective of a liberal democratic society, not whether the protest falls within the ambit of the free speech that is essential to the mission of a university. Perhaps the act of coercion is justifiable as part of the process of bringing about justice, but it is not an example of free speech or behavior designed to advance the pursuit of truth. Perhaps universities should be forgiving of such coercive tactics on their campuses, but forbearance in the face of the disruption of campus activities is hard to justify if the injustice being protested is not grave and the disturbance is not slight. Administrators might be patient with students occupying a student lounge or study room, but unforgiving with students occupying a classroom or an administrative office.

The second and related form of protest activity is obstruction. In the case of disruption, the goal is to impede university life and to impose costs on members of the community in the hopes that they will concede to demands in order to alleviate the pressure. In the case of obstruction, the goal is more particular. Obstruction is intended to prevent disfavored speech from taking place or from being heard. There is no broader set of demands to be met. The “injustice” to be prevented is the speech being obstructed. If that is accomplished, then the obstruction is successful. Obstructions are about enforcing limits on the ideas that can be peacefully communicated on campus and shrinking the scope of intellectual inquiry. Disruption is a means to an end, but obstruction is the end to be achieved in itself.

Obstruction can take myriad forms, some posing more serious threats to the intellectual life on campus than others, but all working against free speech and open inquiry. Just as the means for the communication of ideas on campus are various, so too are the means for obstructing communication varied. During the Reclaim Harvard Law occupation of the student center lounge, students on each side of the dispute vandalized and destroyed each other’s posters. Signs announcing events and publications left in newsstands on campus are easy targets and are often destroyed by those who object to the message being communicated. The physical space hosting a speech or a conference can be occupied and disrupted to such a degree that opponents are prevented from speaking. The examples of such obstructions are numerous. Infamously, at Middlebury College in the spring of 2017, activists occupied the auditorium in which the conservative social scientist Charles Murray was to speak. Their mere presence displaced interested listeners who were not able to join the audience to hear the talk. If protesters occupy every seat or almost every seat of a venue but then stand in silent protest of the speech, they are still obstructing the speech by preventing those who actually want to listen to it from being able to occupy those seats. At Middle-bury, however, the students were not content with a silent protest. Instead, they engaged in a lengthy round of chanting, singing, clapping, and shouting so that it was impossible to speak over them, and in such large numbers that it was not easy to remove them. Eventually university officials gave up, canceled the lecture, and moved Murray to another room to engage in a webcast conversation with a member of the faculty. The protesters followed Murray to the new building, making noise and setting off fire alarms in the hopes of obstructing the webcast as well. When Murray finished the webcast, a mob of protesters accosted him and the faculty member as they tried to exit the building, injuring the professor and giving her a concussion. Later that evening, Murray and his party were forced to flee the restaurant where they were eating because protesters had discovered their location and were following them there.98

Because of the injury to Middlebury professor Allison Stanger, the episode received far more attention and condemnation than might otherwise have been the case. But the fact is that such obstructions of campus speech are all too frequent. Shortly before the Murray talk at Middlebury, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was prevented from speaking at Berkeley by a violent mob that did extensive property damage, and the conservative comedian Gavin McInnes was prevented from speaking by a raucous group of protesters at New York University.99 Shortly after the Middlebury incident, the left-wing philosopher Peter Singer was prevented from speaking at the University of Victoria in Australia by a group of disability rights protesters, and the director of the film Boys Don’t Cry was nearly prevented by transgender activists from speaking at a screening of her film at Reed College.¹⁰⁰ At Claremont McKenna College, protesters declaring that they “CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform” blocked the entrance to an auditorium where the writer Heather Mac Donald was to give a talk in support of modern policing.¹⁰¹ At the University of California at Irvine, police had to be called to clear protesters from the Students for Justice in Palestine, who had blocked the entrances to an auditorium in which Students Supporting Israel were to show a film about the Israeli Defense Force.¹⁰² At the University of California at Santa Barbara, a feminist studies professor led a chant of “Tear down the sign” (the sign displayed a photo of an aborted fetus) at a pro-life rally on campus before eventually grabbing and destroying the sign, explaining that as a teacher of reproductive freedom she had been “triggered” by the pro-life rally and was trying to set a good example for her students by obstructing it.¹⁰³ At Northwestern University, activists burst into an undergraduate sociology class and forced its cancellation so that a representative of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was prevented from speaking to the students. The student protesters issued a statement declaring, “We do not engage in conversations with ICE in any way, shape, or form, regardless of their position,” and denounced the instructor as “irresponsible” for trying to engage in a dialogue with “state actors of violence.”104 At the College of William & Mary, students identifying themselves with Black Lives Matter prevented a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union from giving a talk on the constitutional rights of protesters.¹⁰⁵ At Columbia University, student protesters “stormed” a class being taught by a professor of law because they objected to the role she had played in campus sexual assault investigations.¹⁰⁶

The rallying cry of “stop fascists from speaking” has a long history dating from the early twentieth century in the international Left, often directed toward representatives of actual fascist political parties in European countries, but it has been a new arrival on American college campuses. Without many examples of actual fascists to obstruct, the familiar tactic has been turned against any speakers who might articulate conservative views. The gradual spread of the “no platform for fascists” approach has been apparent for quite some time. In the 1940s, British socialists shouted down and threw stones at the leaders of the British Union of Fascists so that they could not give their speeches. By the 1960s, socialists in Britain had turned the same tactics on any members of the Conservative Party who came to campus, and by the 1970s had extended the prohibition to include Jewish speakers and supporters of Israel.¹⁰⁷ When the feminist author Germaine Greer was scheduled to speak at Cardiff University, some students tried to have her banned for her views on transgenderism. Opponents argued both that her views “have no place in feminism and society” and that allowing her to speak on the university campus effectively “endorses her views.”¹⁰⁸ It is hardly surprising that by the time the tactic had made its way to American campuses, the targets included a vast range of mainstream political speakers. The list of incidents of both successful and unsuccessful attempts to suppress disfavored speech and publications on American campuses in recent years is a long one.

Although it is true that such obstructionist tactics sometimes incidentally involve speech, they are not appropriately understood as the exercise of the right of free speech. It happens that the disability rights advocates at the University of Victoria used megaphones to drown out Singer’s talk, but they also unplugged the projector that was broadcasting his talk (he was appearing by Skype). Before they rushed the event itself, they had lobbied the group that was sponsoring Singer’s talk to drop him and then had lobbied the university’s student association to revoke the group’s permission to host the event on campus. It is true that the Middlebury protesters used chants to prevent Murray from talking, but they also pulled fire alarms to drive him from the building. At Reed College, the protesting students screamed obscenities at the director in an effort to shut down the talk, but they had also destroyed the posters advertising the event. In the weeks after the Yiannopoulos riot, students at Berkeley destroyed and vandalized yard signs supporting the Donald Trump presidential campaign and sandwich boards advertising the existence of the Berkeley College Republicans. At McMaster University in Canada, protesters used drums, noisemakers, and whistles to drown out a talk by University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson, who had stirred controversy earlier in the year by criticizing the extension of civil rights protections to include gender identity (other speakers who were supposed to be part of a panel discussion withdrew after being threatened when the program was announced).109 At Goldsmiths, University of London, protesters shouted at and threatened a speaker discussing blasphemy and Islam.¹¹⁰ The underlying purpose of all those activities was the same, to use any means necessary to prevent the speaker from talking and the audience from hearing.

Nonetheless, obstructionist protests are sometimes confused with the exercise of free speech. A subsequent defender of the Middlebury mob argued simply that the students “have every right to shout him down,” presumably because shouting was just “communication whose tone is disagreeable.”111 Students defended their actions as just an exercise of their right of “talking back.”¹¹² When the police were called to remove the protesters at the Singer event, they declined to do so in deference to the rights to free speech of the protesters. Police at Berkeley were ordered to stand down rather than arrest the rioters at the Yiannopoulos event, in part in the name of protecting the free speech of the protesters. There are certainly pragmatic decisions to be made about how best to control an unruly mob (the Berkeley police also worried that attempting to arrest the rioters would only wind up escalating the violence), but that should not be confused with the question of whether obstructionist protesters are themselves exercising a protected right to free speech. They are not.

Students have a right to ignore speech that they find appalling and unpersuasive, or to take up the challenge to counter such speech with arguments of their own. The students at Middlebury are surely right that they are not obliged to engage with “debates on settled topics” or to “reopen discussions long ago resolved.”¹¹³ They should feel free to spend the ninety minutes scheduled for an event doing something else that they find more productive. Students routinely stay away in droves from my lectures. What they do not have the privilege to do is to insist that no one else be allowed to engage in that debate, attend that presentation, or treat those questions as unsettled or unresolved. Free speech includes the right to choose the topic to be discussed, even if no one chooses to listen. Advancements in knowledge often come through our willingness to see old debates with fresh eyes and to reconsider received wisdom. Protesters have an appropriate right to organize their own events to offer contrary arguments, to publish their own views and circulate them on campus, to take advantage of question-and-answer sessions at public lectures to challenge the views of the speaker, and to rally outside the venue of a speech to make clear to the audience that there are dissenters from the perspective being represented inside the venue. Such protest activities are consistent with tumultuous debate and the introduction into the community of a variety of competing arguments and ideas. What protesters do not have the right to do is to prevent others from speaking to a willing audience, whether the means deployed to obstruct the speech involves shouting, blowing a horn, or setting off a smoke bomb.

Constitutional law has long recognized the problem of obstructionist protests, and judges have been clear that accepting a “heckler’s veto” is inconsistent with the principles of free speech. The problem was apparent to those attending the Singer event. As one reporter at the event noted, “What began as two conflicting defenses of free speech soon hindered discussion of any kind, as the Effective Altruists and protesters battled with the volume to deafening proportions.”114 Allowing obstructionist tactics to shut down speech inhibits rather than facilitates the free exchange of ideas. Rather than engaging in debate, marshaling argument, and appealing to reasoned consideration, obstructionist tactics reduce the public sphere to a set of shouting matches. In a more honest moment, defenders of such tactics admit that the protesters just “don’t want to have a conversation.”¹¹⁵ Of course, by exercising the heckler’s veto they did not merely withdraw from a conversation in which they did not want to engage; they forcibly prevented anyone else from engaging in that conversation either.

The law has come to recognize that the right to free speech can be stifled as effectively by a mob as by a censor. Not only does the government have the obligation to refrain from silencing dissenters itself; the government cannot stand idly by and allow a mob to silence the dissenter instead. The sheriff cannot shut down an unpopular speaker, but neither can the sheriff collude with the mob to shut down the speech. If speakers are acting within their rights in speaking, others have a positive duty not to interfere with the exercise of those rights. By the exact same token, if writers are within their rights to publish a newspaper or print a flyer, others have a positive duty not to destroy that property and prevent interested readers from receiving it. There is a long history in the United States of rule by mob. In the slave states prior to the Civil War, mobs routinely attacked antislavery speakers, destroyed abolitionist presses, and stole abolitionist mail.116 The mob was no doubt expressing its own views on the slavery debate, but they were hardly within their rights to engage in such actions, and a sheriff who stood aside to allow the mob to have its way was complicit in the suppression of free speech as surely as if he were to have obstructed the abolitionists himself. We have generally counted it as progress that as a liberal democracy we have rejected such episodes of mob rule as wrong and not to be emulated. One of the great postwar First Amendment scholars, Thomas Emerson, wrote,

Up to a point heckling or other interruption of the speaker may be part of the dialogue. But conduct that obstructs or seriously impedes the utterance of another, even though verbal in form, cannot be classified as expression. Rather it is the equivalent of sheer noise. It has the same effect, in preventing or disrupting communication, as acts of physical force.… The speaker is entitled to protection from this form of interference as from any other physical obstruction.117

Judicial protection of speakers from the heckler’s veto has been crucial to the expression of dissenting opinions. It is the most marginal, most unpopular members of society who are most in need of protection from mob rule. In the earliest cases of this sort that reached the US Supreme Court, it was the police who arrested speakers who the government feared would incite a hostile crowd to violence. The threat of obstructionist protest and possible violence, for example by segregationist audience members, created the justification for the police to shut down unpopular speakers like civil rights activists. It was in part from observing the civil rights movement and the efforts of segregationists to oppose them that American judges were led to develop more robust protections of free speech. Once police got the message that they could not stifle a speaker in order to preempt an angry mob, it became necessary for the courts to further point out that neither could the police stand passively by and allow speakers to be overwhelmed by a hostile crowd. Institutions that care about preserving the right to free speech must take the actions necessary to ensure that the right can in fact be exercised.

The court has emphasized that it is precisely when the speaker is unpopular and the crowd hostile that the principle of free speech needs to be invoked and defended. In a case protecting the speech rights of a group of protesters critical of President Richard Nixon, a federal circuit court summarized,

The purpose of the First Amendment is to encourage discussion, and it is intended to protect the expression of unpopular as well as popular ideas. Accordingly, hostile public reaction does not cause the forfeiture of the constitutional protection afforded a speaker’s message so long as the speaker does not go beyond mere persuasion and advocacy of ideas and attempts to incite to riot.118

If members of the audience can shout down a speaker, destroy a newspaper, or vandalize a sign, then the free exchange of ideas is at an end just as surely as it would be if government officials had arrested the speaker or confiscated the publication. The “alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.”¹¹⁹

If the mission of the university is to foster vigorous debate in order to advance our understanding of what might be true about the world, then universities must endeavor to preserve the conditions under which a genuine exchange of views can take place. If members of the scholarly community are committed to intellectual inquiry and learning, then they must at the very least be committed to refraining from silencing those with whom they disagree. In an institution of higher education such as Yale University, one would hope that students would at least have the self-discipline to refrain from spitting on the attendees at a conference on free speech that included a sitting US senator and a former member of the Federal Election Commission.¹²⁰ Mill would have hoped that in our best moments we would ourselves be willing to engage with and learn from those with whom we disagree most strongly, but he insisted that even in our worst moments we must allow others to engage with and learn from those with whom we disagree. Abandoning that most basic principle of liberal tolerance condemns society to ignorance and rule by naked force. Protesters who claim the right to physically prevent speakers from speaking to a willing audience have simply invited us to settle our differences through street brawls and riots rather than through discussion and deliberation. Rather than holding up ideas for critical scrutiny, they insist that those who are more numerous or more violent are empowered to silence those who are powerless and force their obeisance. Pursuing such tactics is antithetical to the most basic commitments of a university.

Student Groups and Outside Speakers

Universities are complicated organizations, and many of the most visible disputes about free speech on campus have involved relatively marginal features of those institutions. This is not to say that those disputes are themselves unimportant, but they should be put in perspective and we should appreciate how they relate to the larger university culture and mission.

Some of the most visible recent disputes about free speech on college campuses have focused on outside speakers. The core of the learning environment at a university can be found in the classroom, faculty offices, and the library. It is in those spaces that new research is produced and students are taught. But those do not exhaust the intellectual opportunities on a college campus. The intellectual environment on a college campus would be significantly impoverished if it were reduced to its core of formal teaching and research.

Universities routinely host myriad speakers and events on their campuses. The purposes and intended audiences for these vary greatly, as do the ways by which they are selected. Some are primarily for entertainment. Some are largely ceremonial. Some are aimed at wide audiences, and others emerge from more narrow constituencies. Together they enrich the intellectual life of the campus, though the marginal value of any given event might be relatively small.

The sheer variety of visitors can place those concerned about free speech on campus in a bit of a bind. As a practical matter, some of the visitors of greatest interest to university officials and students make the smallest contribution to the intellectual climate of the university. Administrators routinely brag to parents and prospective students about the high-profile celebrities, from politicians to newscasters to movie stars, who have recently graced the campus. In the spring, higher education news outlets are filled with announcements of planned commencement speakers. Often enticed to campus by large speaker fees and promises of honorary degrees, such figures can generally be counted on to give inoffensive and mostly content-free remarks. At best, such talks can be entertaining. The celebrity of the speaker might help draw a larger audience, which might serve to stir some institutional pride and perhaps plant a seed for future thought in the heads of some of the attendees. At worst, an apparent public relations coup can turn into a public relations embarrassment. In light of a series of sexual assault charges, the honorary degrees conferred on the comedian Bill Cosby and the commencement addresses he delivered now seem tarnished.121 Revelations of the expense associated with bringing to campus such prominent figures as future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, presidential offspring Donald Trump Jr., reality show notable Snooki, or movie actor Matthew McConaughey have cast a pall over what were intended to be feel-good events.¹²² Protests over the selection of such speakers as President Barack Obama, Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have marred what were intended to be celebratory events.123 Seeking to avoid such missteps, some campuses have decided to cut back on speaker invitations, only to encounter complaints that universities were not doing enough to celebrate and entertain the students.¹²⁴ The controversies surrounding such speakers have become so routine that journalists now offer their readers a “definitive guide to totally unobjectionable commencement speaker picks” and previews as “disinvitation season begins.”¹²⁵ In many cases, such controversies have led colleges to switch to more anodyne speakers, which might sometimes mean less intellectually engaging but generally has meant less conservative.¹²⁶

Such controversies have put universities in a no-win situation while putting on public display the embarrassing failure of universities to sustain their core values. From the perspective of advancing and disseminating knowledge, it matters little whether former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or rocker Steven Van Zandt delivers the commencement address at Rutgers University.¹²⁷ It matters not at all whether rapper Big Sean performs at a spring bacchanalia at Princeton University.¹²⁸ The fact that such people have passed through campus can add a bit of luster to a glossy brochure to be mailed to prospective students, but the community of scholars who reside on campus will find their work wholly unaffected by the presence or absence of such visitors. For committees charged with the unenviable task of filling such slots on the university calendar, the aim is to seek to identify candidates who are interesting but not too interesting, well-known but not contentious, stimulating but not actually provocative. Preferably, such performers will make students feel engaged and important without actually engaging them or distracting them from other business.

Unfortunately, no matter how banal the anticipated remarks of a commencement speaker might be, they are now likely to be regarded as more than merely ceremonial adornments or occasions of uncustomary excitement. For at least some on campus, speakers will be assessed on the degree of their conformity to an ideological litmus test. The president of the United States is never to be regarded simply as a high government official and prestigious national figure. He or she is always a policymaker and politician, whose record is to be evaluated against a preferred scorecard and, more often than not, found wanting on some dimension or another.

By itself, this is not so troubling; it could even be encouraging. Far better for students to be thoughtful participants in events on campus than idle spectators, and a robust culture of free speech on campus should give ample space to students to voice their discontent and disagreement with campus speakers. But the movement against commencement speakers is rarely limited to expressions of disagreement. Instead, they too often take the form of threats of disruption or demands for disinvitation. An announcement of a commencement speaker deemed controversial is not an occasion for debate, but is instead an occasion for muscle flexing.

The difficulty assuredly lies with campus administrators and campus speakers who are too gun-shy about controversy, as well as with students who are keen to insist that they not be confronted with disagreement. There is, no doubt, something to be said for the desire to avoid unnecessary confrontations over speakers for celebratory events like the annual commencement. But once a speaker has been selected, it does not speak well for a campus community if the response is an insistence that an invitation to a speaker be revoked. All too rare is the example of President Jonathan Veitch of Occidental College. In 2016, he selected the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, a leading scholar of race and criminal justice, to serve as the commencement speaker. Kennedy had recently become embroiled in debates over the procedures by which colleges investigate charges of sexual assault by students and mete out discipline. Some faculty members and students denounced the choice as a “slap in the face,” while the president defended Kennedy’s selection as particularly apt in a period of activism over questions of racial justice on college campuses. Veitch insisted, however, that “calls to withdraw the invitation to Professor Kennedy reflect a disturbing trend in our national life and on college campuses—which President Obama himself has commented on—in which we are no longer willing to engage with ideas with which we disagree.”129 A local student activist group, the Coalition at Oxy for Diversity and Equity, responded that graduating seniors were being asked to “walk across the stage in the shadow of pernicious violence, cast not only by our esteemed speaker, but also by you.”¹³⁰ Rather than revoking the invitation to Kennedy, Occidental instead expanded his time on campus to facilitate more conversations between Kennedy and the campus community. At Haverford College in 2014, Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, withdrew from his planned delivery of the commencement address after students objected to his invitation given how he had dealt with protests on the Berkeley campus.¹³¹ William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, volunteered to take Birgeneau’s place and used the occasion of his commencement address to deliver a stinging rebuke to the student activists for their intolerance and immaturity.¹³² A large group of students at Bethune-Cookman University embarrassed their campus by loudly booing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos throughout her commencement address, forcing the university president to threaten ending the event early if the dissenting students could not maintain some decorum during the ceremony. Some students were removed from the event because of their disruption. Earlier in the day, DeVos had participated in a roundtable discussion with students on education issues.133 Far better was the example of the Notre Dame students who staged a silent walkout from their commencement when Vice President Mike Pence took the podium, which allowed the students to express their dissent without disrupting the event.¹³⁴ The campus free speech watchdog group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has tracked a steady rise since the onset of the twenty-first century in the number of “disinvited” campus speakers and an even faster rise in the number of activist efforts to try to force the disinvitation of speakers.¹³⁵ For many colleges across the country, the commencement address is the sole opportunity they have to attract a prominent figure to campus. The choice of speakers has also become a test for how open a campus culture actually is.

The commencement address is an unusual feature of campus life. The event itself is supposed to be ceremonial and designed to honor the graduates. The purpose of the speaker is to offer a few words of wisdom to inspire and recognize the students. Such events are not debates. They offer no ready vehicle for dialogue or contestation. The students and their parents are a captive audience in the sense that they are not there to hear the commencement address but to participate in a graduation ceremony. When speakers are particularly interesting or controversial, universities can add to the intellectual life of campus by taking advantage of their presence on campus to have supplemental events where a genuine exchange of views and substantive conversation are possible. But universities further and unnecessarily complicate the commencement by handing out honorary degrees (as Notre Dame did with Vice President Pence). As a result, the speaker chosen to deliver the commencement address is often him- or herself being honored during the event. Suddenly students are in a particular bind of becoming participants in an event to honor a speaker with whom they might disagree. A silent walkout or nearby protest of the awarding of an honorary degree to an individual deemed unworthy of being honored is a valuable expression of dissent. On the other hand, a walkout on a mere speech sends a less appealing signal that students are unwilling to even be in the presence of, let alone listen to the remarks of, someone with whom they disagree. University administrators should be more accepting of expressions of dissent, even when parents are in town, but they might also rethink the business of awarding honorary degrees. Students might likewise consider exactly what message they are sending by protesting not the content of the commencement speech but the identity of the speaker.

Such formal campus-wide events as commencement addresses are highly visible but ultimately and by design somewhat bland. More meaningful features of the intellectual life of a college campus come in less ceremonial and more targeted events. It is in those venues that speakers are invited to be provocative and develop serious arguments. The attendees at such events are expected to be interested and engaged. The events are routinely organized so as to allow an exchange of ideas, with rebuttal speakers or question-and-answer sessions. Visitors are brought to campus in order to supplement and shake up the routines of local intellectual life. Students and faculty are given the opportunity to engage with someone new and to hear a speaker bring to life arguments and perspectives that they might otherwise see only in the pages of a book or on a television screen. Many such events are likely to be largely invisible, as visitors are brought to campus to speak to individual classes or faculty workshops. Those invisible events are also closest to the scholarly mission of the university, pressing the boundaries of knowledge with a specialized audience. More public events are further removed from the realm of scholarship, but they seek to engage members of the campus community at large with issues of general concern. A thriving intellectual community makes space for a diverse array of such events.

Many of the more recent controversies over speakers on campus have involved these sorts of more focused groups, often student groups. The university faculty has an interest in bringing to campus scholars who are working on the frontiers of knowledge, and who, it is hoped, can convey some of that knowledge to a broader audience. Unsurprisingly, students are somewhat less interested in the cutting edge of academic research. This does not necessarily mean that they are uninterested in ideas or in learning, but their appetite is more likely to be whetted by the kinds of topics, issues, and arguments that occupy the public sphere than by those that occupy the pages of academic journals. Of course, classroom conversations often take the same form. The excitement of undergraduate teaching generally comes from introducing students to ideas that are novel to them but familiar to experts in the field. College offers students an opportunity to explore a range of ideas, to trace the course of intellectual debates, and to learn how to critically examine the claims that they encounter and to keep an open mind when they come across the unexpected.

The modern college campus has long sought to provide a venue for public debate as well as scholarly disputes. The US Supreme Court has noted the constitutional significance of this decision for state universities, but the core point has broader application for any university that cares about free speech. When thinking about free speech on government property, the court has often asked what kind of “forum” the government property is as a practical matter. Some government property, like a public park, is a traditional public forum where free speech is relatively unrestricted. Some property, like a Social Security administrative office, is not a public forum at all, and the government is free to restrict access to it. Some property that might not traditionally be regarded as a public forum could nonetheless become a designated public forum. As a consequence such property is made available to the public for assembly and debate, and the government must respect robust protections for free speech. In particular, the government is obliged to be “content neutral” in how it regulates speech in such public spaces. The university can help coordinate how campus space and resources are used, and can prevent student activities from interfering with the operation of the university, but a college cannot bar student speech simply because university officials do not approve of it, nor can they impose restrictions on that speech that render it ineffective and pointless.

State college campuses are generally recognized as designated public fora. A college might restrict the use of its buildings to students, for example, but it cannot favor some instances of student speech over others or place onerous restrictions on how students might make use of the space. Universities routinely require student groups to be officially recognized in order to reserve campus space, distribute publications and flyers on campus, or access funds for activities, but they are required to recognize groups in an evenhanded fashion. Once recognized, all student groups must be treated the same and allowed to equally enjoy the benefits associated with being a recognized student group. When the president of Central Connecticut State College refused to allow students to create a local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, a prominent New Left activist group at the center of many disruptive protests in the 1960s, the US Supreme Court emphasized the importance of giving a wide scope to student-led debate on campus. College officials could not burden or ban a student group because it espoused “repugnant” views or preached “doing away with any or all campus regulations.” A college could discipline students if and when they violate “reasonable campus rules, interrupt classes, or substantially interfere with the opportunity of other students to obtain an education,” but it could not prevent them from engaging in advocacy.136 Similarly, when the University of Virginia denied access to a generally available student activities fund to a student group that wanted to publish a campus magazine offering a “Christian perspective” on campus life, the court emphasized that the university could not play favorites in providing resources to student groups. Having made funds available to student groups to create campus publications, the university may not engage in “viewpoint discrimination” and place unequal burdens on the speech of some students because of the “specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker.”¹³⁷ When Oregon State University confiscated the distribution bins of the conservative student paper that had been placed next to the bins of the official school paper and other independent papers, a federal circuit court curtly observed, “We have little trouble finding constitutional violations” in the university’s actions.¹³⁸ When Texas A&M University refused to recognize Gay Student Services as a student group, and the University of Southern Mississippi refused to recognize a chapter of the Mississippi Civil Liberties Union, a federal circuit court emphasized that once a university has opened its campus to a wide range of student groups, it cannot prohibit groups offering a competing message, even when that message is unpopular, offensive in the eyes of university administrators or alumni, or at odds with the government’s own laws then on the books.139 Even private universities have opened themselves up to litigation by adopting a similar commitment to equal freedom of inquiry and advocacy but then failing to live up to it, as Fordham University has done in denying recognition to a local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine because the club would lead to “polarization” on campus.¹⁴⁰

The records of legal cases amply demonstrate that administrators at public colleges have often tried to stifle student groups of which they disapprove. Officials at private colleges have been no less assiduous in their efforts to shut down disfavored speakers and students, but they do not face the same constitutional limitations on their actions and so do not as often come under judicial scrutiny. These cases illustrate why the evenhanded treatment of student activities is a necessary implication of free speech principles. In the years after the civil rights movement, judges found it hard to ignore the extent to which students had political opinions of their own and sought to express them. Once the court recognized that students had rights, the arbitrary denigration of those rights by school officials was unsustainable.

Just as important, judges came to appreciate how the college campus had become a significant site for vigorous debate over the social issues of the day. Classroom discussions under faculty supervision are not the only vehicle for learning. The “marketplace of ideas” includes student-led activities where new ideas could be explored, tested, discarded, and embraced. When the University of Mississippi tried to close down a student-run literary magazine in the early 1970s because its “tasteless and inappropriate” language was offensive to the community and threatened to embarrass the school in the eyes of the public and the legislature, a federal circuit court reminded school officials that they could no more censor a student literary journal for publishing offensive poetry or short stories than they could censor a law review for publishing controversial articles on abortion or desegregation. Censorious campus officials were in danger of sacrificing “the historical role of the University in expressing opinions which may well not make favor with the majority of society and in serving in the vanguard in the fight for freedom and expression and opinion.”141 To the officials at the Virginia Commonwealth University who wanted to ban the Gay Alliance of Students for promoting “abhorrent, even sickening” ideas and behavior, a circuit court pointed out that “student associations devoted to advocacy of political, social, legal and other objectives are part of higher education and useful in preparation for later life.” While individual university officials, campus chaplains, instructors, and students could forcefully advocate for their own preferred values, those arguments must compete in the marketplace of ideas, and students were free to choose whether or not to accept them. University administrators dedicated to liberal education and democratic ideals must tolerate the presence of “associations devoted to peaceful advocacy of decriminalization or social acceptance of sadism, euthanasia, masochism, murder, genocide, segregation, master-race theories, gambling, voodoo, and the abolishment of higher education” even if those ideas were as offensive to them as advocacy of tolerance of homosexuality.¹⁴² When the legislature of the state of Alabama prohibited any student group from having access to public funds or facilities if it “fosters or promotes a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws,” a federal court observed that the statute unconstitutionally impaired the activities of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Alliance at the University of South Alabama in the same ways that hate speech laws interfered with student advocacy.143

Student-led groups and their associated activities have become vital components of the educational mission of the modern university. They are not asked to meet the disciplinary standards expected of members of the faculty and courses incorporated into the curriculum, but they supplement those more scholarly features of the university and serve as a bridge between the university community and the larger social and political world. It is conceivable that a university could decide to forgo such groups entirely and restrict campus activities to faculty-led events, but something important would be lost in the process. The intellectual life of the campus would be significantly narrowed, student interests would be neglected, and important debates within the larger public sphere would be inadequately vetted on campus.

At the same time, we should recognize what student groups contribute to a campus and what they do not. The faculty hired to teach and research at a university are evaluated by their peers for the quality of their understanding of their disciplinary subject. We think the pursuit of truth can be advanced through the rigorous evaluation of scholarly work and would-be scholars, and the certification of those that can pass through those fires and demonstrate their worth. We do not expect the same from student groups and campus speakers. We would hope that a student gets better, and not just different, information from taking a course in the sociology department than from attending a speaker series sponsored by the College Republicans. That does not mean that the latter is not worthwhile, but it should be taken for what it is. If the university were to close down the student group’s speaker series, asserting that students should not get mixed messages by having their course content challenged by outside speakers, then we would rightfully worry about whether the university has the courage of its convictions.

Having embraced the vision of the college campus as an open forum of debate, university officials cannot be selective in what arguments and perspectives they are willing to let in. It would be extraordinarily shortsighted to imagine that university officials would always align themselves with the forces of progress if given free rein to skew that debate. Armed with the power to censor, university administrators have proven themselves very willing to suppress viewpoints and forms of expression that they find immoral, embarrassing, offensive, indecent, misguided, or simply unpopular and inconvenient. Of course, university officials are rarely willing to say explicitly that they want to exclude some ideas from campus. Instead they have relied on vague standards that give them ample discretion to single out particular student groups as inconsistent with campus values, while continuing to maintain that the campus is open to free inquiry. When it has been too embarrassing for university administrators themselves to suppress disfavored groups, they have delegated the task to others, such as members of the student government. But whether the decision of which groups to recognize or how to distribute student activity funds is made by an assistant dean, the president of the student government, or a vote of the student body, the effect of stifling dissenting views and closing off debate is the same. When the Wichita State University student president declared that the members of the student government must “do what they see as best for the institution,” including refusing to recognize a chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty, if the majority “feel that an organization can be detrimental to Wichita State University,” he simply echoed the sentiments of the president of Virginia Commonwealth University when he refused to recognize the Gay Alliance of Students a generation earlier.144 Both, no doubt, hoped to spare their university controversy, but they did so by sacrificing the ideal of free inquiry and debate on which the modern university is founded (as well as violating the requirements of the US Constitution).

The effort to squash student-led groups that introduce controversial ideas to campus is hardly a thing of the past. In the 1960s and 1970s, university administrators were frequently inclined to try to drive out advocates of black civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and socialism. More recently, advocates of conservative causes from evangelical Christians to economic libertarians have been more likely to provoke the ire of university officials. It is often these groups that challenge campus orthodoxy and encourage campus debate over political and social causes, and their opponents have responded by trying to deny them official recognition, access to campus facilities, and opportunities to make use of common funds. At the extreme, opponents of such groups have tried not only to disband and silence them but even to expel their members from the university. In doing so, they admit that they would prefer not to have their own beliefs challenged and tested, and would prefer that other members of the campus community not be exposed to dissenting perspectives. They prefer “dead dogma” to “living truth.”

There are, however, important questions to be asked about how scarce resources are actually expended. While all students should be equally free to take advantage of campus resources to publicize and investigate ideas and issues of interest to them, this does not mean that students do not have a responsibility of their own to make a productive contribution to the search for knowledge. If the value of free speech for the university community is its ability to help us make progress toward better understanding the world and sharing that understanding with others, then we make the best use of free speech when we contribute toward those goals. As a tolerant liberal and democratic society, we make space for speech simply as self-expression, or self-indulgence, and the First Amendment has been interpreted to secure that space. The university community is not a democracy, however. It is a community forged for a particular purpose, to facilitate learning, and free speech is valuable to that community and for that purpose because of its connection to the search for truth. If we abandon that search, then free speech becomes mostly pointless within the specific context of a university.

There is a temptation to press up against the boundaries of free speech just for the sake of pushing boundaries. There are sometimes benefits to doing so, but often such activities just stir controversy with little promise of compensating gain. No doubt stirring controversy can sometimes be fun, and it can certainly attract an audience, perhaps disproportionately from the college-age demographic. Many have taken advantage of that fact over time, and some have provided more insight while doing so than others. Comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Andrew Dice Clay, “shock jocks” like Howard Stern, performance artists like Karen Finley, professional provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, pornographers like Larry Flynt, satirists like the artists and writers for Mad magazine and Charlie Hebdo have entertained and excited their fans by being self-consciously offensive. By defying conventions of polite society and holding sacred cows up for ridicule, they make a point and tear down barriers, but such efforts often come at a cost. Civil libertarians often find themselves defending such provocative figures in order to hold the line on a zone of permissible free speech and to disempower the censor, but it would be a mistake to celebrate them as heroes. Free speech is not defended for the benefit of provocateurs; they are parasitic on free speech. When free speech principles are challenged, they must be defended, but it would be a mistake to reduce free speech to a defense of provocateurs. Though it might be tempting to provoke free speech battles by inviting shocking figures to campus, there is in general little reason for doing so. Those are cheap thrills. If free speech battles are to be had, they are better fought for prizes worth taking. The payoff for insisting that a university respect the equal right of all students to organize, advocate, and explore ideas should be something more substantively valuable than a campus visit by Milo Yiannopoulos.

Similarly, student groups should consider the depth of intellectual content that can be gained by a particular event or speaker. In organizing events, students generally are not putting together a philosophy seminar. They are, as the circuit court in the Virginia Commonwealth University case noted, concerned with advocacy on the issues that are current in public life, and with preparing for life outside the university. Moreover, they are competing for the attention of their fellow students, who have on offer not only study time in the library but also party time in the fraternity. As such, they cannot be expected to shy away from public figures and popular issues. The Young Americans for Liberty should not be expected to invite in the same speakers as the Department of Political Science. But within that context, groups should consider what the available speakers have to offer. Without a doubt, the white nationalist Richard Spencer and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke are a part of the world, and students might gain some insights from being exposed to their arguments, but they are, to be generous, marginal figures in American politics and not particularly insightful critics of civil rights liberalism. By giving such figures a platform, students give them a prominence that they have not earned. By focusing limited resources and attention on minor celebrities, students are missing an opportunity to grapple with more serious thinkers and more challenging ideas.

Even Richard Spencer and Ann Coulter have an absolute right to be heard in American society. They do not necessarily need or deserve a space on a college campus to advance their arguments. Given a range of options, they should not be the first choice for those seeking to hear from thoughtful advocates of the contesting positions on the issues of the day. John Stuart Mill counseled that we should seek out the strongest arguments of our opponents, as well as of our friends, for they will be most helpful in guiding us to the opinions that we should adopt as our own, and in challenging us to develop the best supports for those opinions. When we are making decisions about whom to invite to campus to speak, the goal should be neither to stack the deck with our closest allies nor to sprinkle in the most extreme provocateurs. The goal should be to make available to the campus community thoughtful representatives of serious ideas. Certainly those ideas that are well within the mainstream of contemporary American life should be amply represented, but a university community benefits as well from considering ideas that are currently on the margins but have the potential to be of significant consequence in the future. Universities are centrally concerned with considering alternatives to the status quo. Assessing the merits of those alternatives, however, requires grappling with them not as caricatures but in their strongest form.

It would be an unfortunate situation, but a remediable one, if controversies over campus speakers were limited to provocateurs and fringe celebrities. Such is not the case. Instead faculty and student activists have taken to objecting to even mainstream, substantive speakers who do not fit within the narrow confines of their preferred orthodoxy. An open letter by a group of Pomona College students defended the obstructionist protest of conservative writer Heather Mac Donald at nearby Claremont McKenna College. Mac Donald’s views are certainly controversial, but she is an influential writer at a mainstream conservative think tank who develops serious arguments. Her presence at a congressional hearing, on a national newspaper’s editorial page, on a PBS talk show, or in a public library speaker series would hardly raise an eyebrow, and yet she is regarded as beyond the pale on some college campuses. The Pomona students explained their objections to Mac Donald’s presence on campus by arguing that free speech “has recently become a tool appropriated by hegemonic institutions.” It is one thing for “students from marginalized backgrounds” to use it “to voice their qualms and criticize aspects of the institution,” but it is quite another for it to be used by “those who seek to perpetuate systems of domination.” Mac Donald is a “white supremacist fascist supporter of the police state,” and allowing her to disseminate her “toxic and deadly illogic” is tantamount to “condoning violence against Black people.” Engaging with her in the name of free inquiry, indeed the “the idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search,” is “an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”145 In response to a speech delivered on campus by Laura Kipnis, a group of Wellesley College faculty issued a statement calling for the end of such controversial speakers. That view was quickly endorsed by the student newspaper. Kipnis is a well-known “pro-sex feminist” and professor of media studies at Northwestern University, who produced a trade book with a major publishing house on debates over campus policies relating to sexual conduct, including a controversial case in which Kipnis became entangled on her own campus. This was the topic of her talk at Wellesley. In response, the faculty statement decried such speakers who “impose on the liberty of students, staff, and faculty at Wellesley.” Members of the Wellesley community experienced “distress as a result of a speaker’s words” and felt compelled to “invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments.” The members of the faculty Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity called for all future potential speaker invitations to be vetted by them first.146 In the wake of public reaction to the faculty letter, the Wellesley student newspaper editorialized that only “viable discourse” should be allowed on campus, and free speech existed only “to protect the disenfranchised and … the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable.” The students admitted that sometimes “mistakes will happen and controversial statements will be said,” but insisted that if community members making such mistakes “refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted,” and they should be held “accountable.” Outsiders like “paid professional lecturers and politicians” did not even deserve the opportunity to mend their ways or to be heard; they deserved only “beration.”¹⁴⁷

A campus that seeks to plug its ears against the possibility of hearing “controversial statements” has abandoned the scholarly enterprise. It is seeking to withdraw from the world not in order to create a safe space for free inquiry but in order to create an alternative reality free from disagreements over important aspects of the human condition. Such reactions to controversial speakers epitomize the “free speech for me, but not for thee” attitude held by political and religious authorities throughout much of human history, an attitude that the liberal tradition sought to displace. John Milton, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill well understood that the only effective way to secure free speech for “the suppressed” was to insist that free speech should be available to everyone. Would the Wellesley faculty Commission for Ethnicity, Race, and Equity be equally comfortable if all potential speakers had to be vetted by the local conservative professor before being invited to campus? Should a conservative professor likewise be empowered to reject all those potential speakers who he or she thought were likely to advance shopworn, politically dangerous, or ill-conceived ideas? Undoubtedly, the symmetrical application of such restrictive speech policies would soon become grating for those who currently advocate for them. As has always been the case, it is only those who plan to monopolize the power to censor who find censorship to be an attractive idea. Those who are genuinely powerless or marginal in a given community have always preferred that the freedom of critical inquiry be uncompromised. We have managed to make progress, intellectually and politically, when the powerful have been made to respect the freedom of the powerless and to let their voices be heard as well.

One of the odd features of the Wellesley faculty statement in response to the Kipnis speech is how it blurred the difference between outside speakers and members of the faculty. The statement raises the question of who “is actually qualified for the platform granted by an invitation to Wellesley.” As I have noted, it is important to think through the value added to campus discussion of any potential speaker before an invitation is extended (once the invitation has been extended, free speech principles indicate that it should be honored except in the most extraordinary circumstances). But the Wellesley statement frames that issue as one of qualifications and is even more particularly concerned with “whether the presenter has standing in his/her/their discipline.” The expressed concern is that the college should avoid inviting speakers who peddle in “pseudoscience,” though the implication seems to really be that disfavored substantive arguments should be excluded.148

Are there qualifications to be an outside speaker on a college campus? It seems implausible, beyond the general requirement of being substantively interesting and being able to contribute to the community’s understanding of public events. The Wellesley statement was reacting specifically to the visit by Laura Kipnis, though it refrained from referencing her directly. Kipnis is a tenured professor in the School of Communications at Northwestern University who has built her career around the study of the cultural politics of sex. If the Wellesley statement meant to deny that Professor Kipnis had adequate standing to critique the politics of sex on college campuses, then the attack seems misdirected. But laying aside the specific case of Kipnis, do we or should we require that visiting speakers on campus have appropriate “standing” within their discipline? If so, the frequent college appearances by Noam Chomsky, a distinguished linguist but a popular speaker on American foreign policy, or Robert Reich, a former labor secretary and frequent public commentator on economics but uncredentialed in the dismal science, would seem to be suspect. Or consider the case of Donald Trump’s international trade adviser, University of California at Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro. He has carved out a successful public career as a polemicist on trade issues, but is unlikely to be sought out for a faculty appointment as a trade economist. It would be foolish, however, to conclude that there is nothing to be gained from hearing a public lecture by a man who has the ear of the president, even if the audience will have to wade through a great deal of error in the process. If students wished to hear from Dr. Mehmet Oz—a distinguished heart surgeon who has won fame and fortune as a television celebrity dispensing dubious medical advice that might generously be labeled pseudoscience—it seems unlikely that the Wellesley faculty would object. Michael Albert is an advocate of a radical “participatory economy” and a favored thinker associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but would be unlikely to get much of a hearing from the faculty of a college economics department. Thomas Sowell is a trained economist and one of the most prominent black conservative intellectuals of the 1980s, but he made his living in think tanks and op-ed pages rather than academic departments. Should students be prohibited from inviting such speakers to campus because some on campus might feel the need to rebut their arguments, or should only Sowell be prohibited because the particular “systems of domination” that he has dedicated his career to dismantling are not the ones the Pomona students had in mind?

Universities have used a variety of procedures to regulate the speakers that are brought to campus. Preferably, those procedures are designed to accomplish the admirable purpose of making effective and efficient use of university resources and providing all students with fair and equitable access to those resources. Unfortunately, sometimes those procedures are used to obstruct rather than facilitate the exchange of ideas. Some colleges require that student groups secure faculty advisers. Sometimes they require that members of the faculty agree before any invitations are extended to outside speakers. Such requirements can be sensible and useful, but they become problematic if they serve as a backdoor means of filtering out some potential student groups and their visitors. Similarly, bureaucratic red tape can be used to selectively silence groups that don’t meet with the favor of campus administrators. Admittedly, students can sometimes be neglectful in satisfying bureaucratic procedures. But if administrators selectively seize on such oversights as a pretext for squashing activities that they find potentially controversial or undesirable, then the university will have turned away from its primary mission. The president of Texas Southern University rushed to the law school to shut down an event sponsored by the conservative Federalist Society—an event that had been approved by the law school administration but was being obstructed by student protesters—and American University’s administrators canceled at the last minute a libertarian student group’s panel of speakers: such incidents raise doubts about whether campus administrators are always acting faithfully to promote a diverse range of free speech on campus.149 Regrettably, the disruptive activities of protesters have led to quite exorbitant security costs for some campus speakers.¹⁵⁰ Universities committed to free speech have an obligation to provide adequate security to ensure that such speech can take place. Imposing the security costs on the speaker or on those issuing the invitation has the effect of empowering protesters to effectively block such speakers from campus, but colleges can themselves become overwhelmed if those costs become too high. Universities might find themselves in the unenviable position of reducing access to campus in order to manage such costs. The resulting reduction of speech on campus must be laid at the feet of those who by their disruptive actions make such security necessary. The university’s responsibility will be to ration available resources in a neutral and equitable manner.

Some outside speakers also come to campus uninvited. That is to a certain degree unavoidable because college campuses open themselves to the general public. Outsiders take advantage of that openness. Street preachers and small activist groups have long traveled to college campuses to get their message out to curious onlookers. Over time, colleges have acted to restrict the access of outsiders so that they are not unduly disruptive to the normal operations of the university. Recently, outside groups have more systematically targeted American university campuses, with unsettling results. After white supremacists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia (and a woman was killed during riots the next day in the town of Charlottesville) in the summer of 2017, administrators were forced to reevaluate their rules regarding the access of outsiders to university grounds and reasonably sought to take steps to keep mass protesters away from the living quarters of students.151 Other campuses have discovered the downside of offering their campus facilities for public rental as white supremacists have begun to take advantage of such accommodations to insert themselves into campus uninvited.¹⁵² Excluding such speakers would, in some cases, require colleges to significantly alter their relationship to the general public and pull in their welcome mat to outsiders in general. Universities have generally benefited from maintaining a relatively open attitude toward outsiders who seek to engage with members of the campus community, even though such outsiders can sometimes be a nuisance and a distraction. That calculus could change, however, if the openness of college campuses is systematically exploited by outsiders who care little about the mission of the university or the degree to which its operations are disrupted.153

Faculty and Academic Freedom

Outside speakers add to the vibrancy of intellectual life on a college campus, but at the scholarly center of a university is its own faculty. The notion of academic freedom was developed over the course of the twentieth century to protect this vital core of the modern university. Academic freedom is a specialized application of general free speech principles, and incorporates an important set of both rights and duties that should be respected by the campus community. Those rights and duties are designed to foster the productive exchange of ideas, the careful scrutinizing of claims, and the development of the expertise needed both to teach students and to convey what has been learned to the broader world.

Universities strive to recruit and hire faculty who are experts in their chosen fields of study and who are capable of making meaningful contributions to the advancement of knowledge in that field and competently teaching students the store of knowledge that field encompasses. The principles of academic freedom are designed to guarantee the ability of members of the faculty to engage in those tasks. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure adopted by the American Association of University Professors is a canonical expression of the concept. The statement declared that professors should have “full freedom in research and in the publication of results” and “freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject,” and should be “free from institutional censorship or discipline” when acting as citizens in the public sphere. Alongside the assertion of those freedoms was the recognition that members of a university faculty had a professional obligation “not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject,” and to strive when acting in the public sphere to be accurate, to “exercise appropriate restraint,” to respect others, and to be clear that they do not speak for the institution.154

In short, the concept of academic freedom asserts that professors should be free to pursue the production and communication of their expert knowledge in accord with professional standards as set forth and evaluated by their professional peers. Faculty members are not to be punished by university administrators or trustees for the research questions that they choose to pursue or the conclusions that they reach. They are not to be directed on what to teach or how to teach it. They are not to be disciplined for speaking out about internal matters of university policy and governance or external matters of public concern.

The underlying rationale for these principles is that they are necessary to preserve the conditions for free inquiry and the pursuit of truth within the university setting. They emerged out of struggle by education reformers at the turn of the twentieth century to commit universities to the unbridled search for knowledge. Edward A. Ross was one of the founding figures of the modern discipline of sociology and a vocal advocate of immigration restrictions (a policy thought damaging to the railroad empire that produced the wealth that helped endow Stanford University). In 1900, Jane Stanford wrote to the president of the university, “I am weary of Professor Ross,” and directed that his employment be terminated at the end of the semester. Ross was sent packing. In 1915, the trustees of the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania overrode the recommendation of the faculty and fired Scott Nearing, whose writing and teaching on socialism were “entirely inconsistent with Mr. Wharton’s well-known views and in defiance of the conservative opinions of men of affairs.” In 1929, the curators of the University of Missouri terminated Howard DeGraff for conducting a study of the sexual attitudes of college undergraduates, declaring that they had a responsibility to preserve the university as “a place to which parents may send their children with full confidence that the surrounding moral atmosphere will be sane and wholesome.”155 Such cases became notorious, and university presidents and faculty successfully pushed trustees to the sidelines in order to make the college campus a safe space for vigorous debate and scientific advancement. The quality and value of scholarly work was to be judged by other scholars with expertise in the field, not by the donors and alumni. The office of professor was to be held in public trust in order to enhance human knowledge, and not at the discretionary will of university paymasters. The principles and protective institutions of academic freedom are built on the faith that society as a whole will benefit from free inquiry and experimentation, even when particular instances of those pursuits create discomfort or seem misguided.

Within that framework of academic freedom, faculty members have a responsibility to maintain and enforce professional discipline. The faculty is indeed expected to weed out pseudo-science from within its ranks. The teaching and writing of professors like Ross, Nearing, and DeGraff were controversial. In hindsight, they might even appear to have been mistaken. But within the context of their time, they were not unprofessional. Those men were deploying the tools of their disciplines to push the boundaries of what was known within their respective fields of study, and the fruits of their efforts were of public interest and relevant not only to nearby scholars but also to policymakers and activists. If Nearing’s arguments about socialism were to be found wanting, it should be because they had been scrutinized and tested by the economics profession, not because they ran afoul of the personal views and financial interest of mining magnate Joseph Wharton.

Academic freedom secures for faculty members a carefully constrained freedom of speech. They have earned the “platform” of the post of professor at a university not by gaining some notoriety in the public sphere but by demonstrating the qualifications of expertise and by making careful, measured contributions to their field of study. In order to keep it, they have a professional responsibility not to abuse it. If their writings and arguments do not meet professional standards of quality, the scholarly world has an obligation to refrain from providing venues for communicating that work. Scholarly journals and presses should refuse to publish their writings. Universities and professional conferences should decline to invite them to give presentations to the scholarly community. They have a responsibility not to use their time in the classroom to proselytize to students on subjects irrelevant to the course, and not to mislead their students on the accepted knowledge of the field. The university is under no obligation to shelter in its geography department someone who believes the earth is flat, or provide space in its astronomy department for someone who believes the sun revolves around the earth. A geologist who insisted on teaching students that the earth is less than ten thousand years old—as a substantial percentage of the American population believes but that the geology profession uniformly rejects—would be engaged in professional misconduct. A chemist who dedicates substantial class time to opining on presidential elections is in breach of her professional responsibilities. Perhaps a student group would have reason to invite an advocate of Young Earth theory to give a presentation on campus in order to hear such views elaborated and defended, but the faculty of the university would have little reason to sponsor such an event. Perhaps the students would be entertained by a lecture by a self-proclaimed expert on Bigfoot, but the biology department would be unlikely to foot the bill. The local student chapter of the Socialist Alternative might find it enlightening to hear from an advocate for workers’ collectives, but the economics department is likely to think its time and resources are better spent elsewhere. The College Republicans might be excited to hear from Ann Coulter; the faculty members of the political science department would not be. At the scholarly core of the university, the faculty is expected to exercise discretion over what speech to facilitate and to engage in so as to use limited resources as efficiently as possible in order to make progress in the scholarly enterprise.

At the same time, members of the faculty have a right to be evaluated based on the performance of their professional duties and not on their privately held opinions. University officials and students should expect the professor of computer science both to refrain from teaching Christian theology in the introductory programming class and to offer competent instruction in the subject at hand. Universities have an obligation to correct professors who stray from that professional task. If a professor of electrical engineering spends his private time dallying in Holocaust denial, however, the university has an obligation only to ensure that such activity does not affect how he conducts his teaching or scholarly research.156 Such a professor no doubt hampers rather than helps our understanding of the Holocaust, and his arguments should be vigorously exposed as erroneous, but universities should refuse to get into the business of policing the private political and social views of their faculty. If there is evidence that a professor, for whatever reason, treats students unfairly or introduces irrelevant or flagrantly wrong material into the classroom, then action should be taken to uphold appropriate professional standards. But if, regardless of the quality of their scholarship and teaching, members of the faculty can be driven from campus because they write a blog that some find vile and offensive, or belong to an unpopular religious or political group, then administrators will be empowered to hound the unorthodox and faculty will be discouraged from exploring heretical ideas. Authorizing administrators to sanction and suppress whenever a member of the faculty “goes too far” will inevitably invest them with a license to root out those who are merely out of step. Empowering university deans and presidents to purge campuses of professors who they happen to think “poison the well in the market-place of ideas” leaves the intellectual freedom on campus vulnerable to the personal predilections and wisdom of whoever happens to be in charge at the moment.157 Tolerating a diversity of opinions will necessarily mean tolerating some deeply mistaken opinions, but a culture of conformity is antithetical to the vigorous pursuit of the truth.

Happily, the academic freedom of faculty members is better secured now than it was even in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, threats to academic freedom have not gone away and can still be found from sources both within and outside the university. Notably, one of the key structural supports for the freedom of faculty to execute their professional responsibilities in their teaching and research is the tenure system. The 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles conjoined a commitment to academic freedom to tenure. The requirement that faculty members be “terminated only for adequate cause” was designed to make it harder for college presidents to do as Stanford’s did with Edward Ross in 1900: remove them from campus when their arguments become inconvenient to the economic or cultural commitments of influential donors. Tenured faculty members could still be removed for neglect or abuse of their position, but they could not be let go simply because they had become disagreeable or offensive.

In the early twenty-first century, tenure-line faculty make up an ever-shrinking proportion of the instructional staff at American universities. Contingent or adjunct instructors make an important contribution to college campuses. They can provide flexibility in addressing sudden fluctuations in student demand for curricular subjects, and they can bring the practical know-how of working professionals into college classrooms. But university administrators have also relied on contingent faculty to cut costs, undermine faculty governance, and reorganize the curriculum. This growing army of contingent faculty enjoy none of the procedural protections of academic freedom that the tenure system provides, and often have little access to the time and resources they would need to conduct research and make advancements in knowledge. It is a simple matter for university administrators to decline, without explanation, to renew the semester-by-semester contract of an adjunct instructor, even when the motivation for the dismissal is that the instructor is holding students to a higher academic standard than a dean would prefer, or assigning course readings that an assistant dean finds provocative, or has published a scholarly paper that an administrator deems to be controversial or counter to the economic interests of a prospective donor. Meanwhile, on many campuses, administrators have taken over significant swaths of the undergraduate curriculum and staffed those classes with contingent faculty outside the purview of disciplinary departments. The increasing reliance on contingent faculty on college campuses shrinks the protected sphere of academic freedom and undermines the willingness and ability of professors to produce and disseminate knowledge in accord with professional disciplinary standards.

While tenure helps protect faculty from outside pressure to conform and shade their teaching and research to fit the political needs of the university, it is not by itself sufficient to secure academic freedom. On the one hand, some members of the faculty invite attacks on the autonomy of the academic sphere by abusing their position and ignoring the type of responsibilities that the AAUP statement highlighted, such as the need to refrain from using the classroom to proselytize on unrelated subjects, or to exercise restraint and respect when speaking out as citizens with extramural speech. Academic freedom is not a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card that excuses bad behavior by professors. On the other hand, there are many both inside and outside the university who evidence little respect for the basic principles of academic freedom and instead try to influence research and teaching or punish faculty for stepping outside the bounds of approved opinions. The basic university mission of the pursuit of truth is compromised when faculty members are told that they must shy away from saying what they think is correct.

Unfortunately, students often display little understanding of these basic principles. A Harvard op-ed writer decried the “liberal obsession with ‘academic freedom’” and called on universities to censor and fire faculty members, such as the conservative Harvard political science professor Harvey Mansfield, who insisted on publishing “offensive” views that were contrary to the student’s sense of “social justice.”158 At Oberlin College, hundreds of students signed on to a list of “demands” that included dropping academic requirements, altering course content, immediately promoting to tenure named faculty members, and firing other tenured faculty members.159 At Pomona College, sociology students denounced the “undemocratic, covert hiring processes” that the department used to fill faculty positions; demanded that the visiting professorship of Alice Goffman be rescinded because her ethnographic work on young men in the Philadelphia inner city represented a white woman “theoriz[ing] about and profit[ing] from Black lives”; and insisted that undergraduate students be at the “forefront of all current and future hiring decisions” in order to guarantee that the department would hire only “authentic mentors.”¹⁶⁰ At Yale University, students made headlines when a video appeared of them screaming at Professor Nicholas Christakis for comments his wife had made encouraging students to resolve their own disagreements over offensive Halloween costumes. As Christakis tried to talk to the students about the issue, students yelled, “He doesn’t deserve to be listened to!”; “Who the fuck hired you? You should step down!”; and “You are disgusting!” The students subsequently rallied for the dismissal of the Christakis couple.¹⁶¹

Most regrettable are those instances when those who have the experience to know better try to intervene in what professors teach and research, and punish them for their opinions. It is perhaps reassuring that the pressure for such interventions often comes from those outside the campus community, but too often university officials and faculty aid and abet those efforts to subvert the freedom of the faculty to pursue their professional responsibilities. The historian Alice Dreger resigned from her position at Northwestern University after the dean of the medical school censored a bioethics journal she edited for fear that an article about sex and the disabled might be embarrassing to the institution. When other faculty members objected, the dean relented on the particular article but subsequently created an oversight board that included a member of the public-relations staff to approve future issues of the journal.162 State legislators have threatened to withhold state funds from colleges that continued to teach controversial courses on race or social justice.¹⁶³ The University of North Carolina has found itself in an ongoing brawl with the Republican political leadership in the state. The politically appointed board of governors resolved to close several research centers on campus that were seen as hostile to the political and policy interests of the legislative majority, including most notably an antipoverty center in the law school, a decision the dean denounced as an attack on all those “who believe that free speech and open inquiry are indispensable tools in addressing society’s greatest problems.” Two years later, the board adopted a prohibition on centers in the law school, notably its civil rights center, from filing legal claims or motions. Board members argued that such litigation “does not provide the best means or a necessary means for educating law students,” while faculty members argued that such hands-on litigation experience and legal advocacy work are an essential part of the law school’s mission and integral to effective legal training.¹⁶⁴ In Virginia, the state attorney general joined in efforts to harass the atmospheric scientist Michael Mann for his research on climate change, leading to extended litigation that eventually resulted in the state high court rejecting the attorney general’s investigation.¹⁶⁵

In the middle of the twentieth century, university faculty members were frequently threatened with censure and dismissal for what is sometimes characterized as their “extramural” speech. What they said in the public sphere, whether on campus, at political rallies, or in newspaper op-eds, became the basis for sanctioning them when they became too controversial in the eyes of the university administration, donors, alumni, or politicians. Such public speech often does not fall under the rubric of academic freedom, since it is not concerned with advancing and communicating the scholarship of the faculty member. It is better viewed as an example of professors exercising their rights to free speech as private citizens. Even so, universities generally have a stake in accepting the notion that professors will sometimes play a visible role in the public sphere.

Early on, the AAUP objected that disciplining faculty members for the arguments that they made in the public sphere could easily become the backdoor means for punishing them for their core professional duties as teachers and researchers. Moreover, if university officials were to patrol extramural speech and punish faculty members who stepped out of line, then it would effectively say to members of the faculty that they “cannot afford the luxury of ranging thought and bold speech. Our campuses would then lose the stimulus of clashing opinions and would become havens of cautious mediocrity.”166 A campus that shunned members of its faculty for what and how they communicated to the general public was a campus that would become dedicated to breeding only orthodoxy and conformity. While professors have a responsibility to uphold professional standards when testifying at a legislative hearing or writing in a newspaper on matters within their scholarly expertise, just as they do when publishing an academic monograph or lecturing to a classroom, they should have the freedom to speak their mind in the civic sphere. A campus that could not tolerate differences of opinion on political, religious, or social questions could hardly be expected to create an environment in which scholars could unflinchingly pursue the truth and hold up accepted wisdom to skeptical scrutiny.

The extramural speech of professors is perhaps more visible than it has ever been before. Public speeches might be recorded and made visible to a vastly wider audience on You-Tube. An op-ed need not be offered to a newspaper editor when it can be posted on a blog. A conversation that might once have been restricted to the back table in a local bar can now be reduced to 140 characters and posted online. An online “watchlist” of controversial professors can assemble information that might previously have been widely dispersed, and bring it to an audience that is motivated to care and respond to it, even if they had no previous interest in or knowledge of the professors in question, their work, or their home institutions.

The basic principle that faculty members should be free to be engaged citizens and that campuses should be sanctuaries for heterodox views remains true, but the furor that can be ignited by extramural speech has only intensified. The Kansas Board of Regents amply illustrated the dangers in 2014 when it adopted a policy authorizing university presidents to terminate tenured faculty members for “improper use of social media,” which was understood to include communications that university administrators deemed “contrary to the best interests of the University.” The new policy was adopted after the regents grew frustrated that it was not possible to fire a tenured journalism professor who posted a tweet saying that “blood is on the hands” of the National Rifle Association after a civilian contractor shot a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard. Indeed, the dean of the Kansas journalism school had already suspended the journalism professor, arguing that his First Amendment rights to free speech “must be balanced with the rights of others,” while Kansas political leaders and the National Rifle Association called for him to be fired. Unsurprisingly, academics thought the new social media policy was deeply at odds with the principles of free speech on campus. As one political scientist noted, it would be easy to imagine that a blog post about her current research on same-sex marriage could be regarded as “contrary to the best interests of the University” by regents who had at that time been appointed by a Kansas governor who was leading the charge against same-sex marriage.167 There is no clear divide between extramural speech and the core scholarly work of academics, and policies designed to restrict the former will inevitably affect the latter.

Professors are hardly unique in being exposed to the ill humors of Internet mobs or discovering that an incautious post on social media has angered their employers. Professors are more distinctive in the role that they occupy within universities. Where a corporation might be quick to cut ties with an employee involved in a scandal that might damage the corporation’s own public image or cost it business, the central commitment of the idea of academic freedom is that the relationship between universities and their faculty does not mirror the usual relationship between employer and employee. It should be understood that individual faculty members do not speak for or represent the institution. Rather, the institution houses dozens or hundreds of diverse and conflicting faculty members. The “brand” to be protected in the case of the university should be the one reflected in its institutional mission of facilitating the pursuit of knowledge through vigorous debate and open inquiry. The presence of unorthodox, controversial, and even wild-eyed professors on the faculty should be regarded as a sign of institutional health. The far larger threat to the reputation of a university should be the stifling docility of “cautious mediocrity” or the unimaginative regimentation of ideological conformity.

In recent years, there has been a steady parade of professors getting into hot water because of extramural speech. Sometimes, institutions have stood up for the freedom of individual faculty members to say and do controversial, offensive, and wrongheaded things, but they not infrequently fail to respect or defend basic commitments to academic freedom. The pressure to cave in to demands that the university excise a scandalous member of the faculty is often intense. A necessary step toward resisting such demands is an appreciation of what the mission of a university is, and how a robust commitment to freedom of speech is necessary to that mission.

On occasion, those principles are reaffirmed by universities that find themselves embroiled in public scandal. The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada has entered into a collective bargaining agreement with its faculty that recognizes that the two “essential functions” of the university are the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that includes a robust recognition of the principles of academic freedom. In 2015, a business school professor of leadership studies, Jennifer Berdahl, published a blog post commenting on the resignation of UBC president Arvind Gupta as an example of the struggle faced by minorities in leadership positions. She soon received a phone call from the chairman of the governing board of UBC taking her to task for the public post, which was followed by business school officials chastising her for irritating a major donor to the school and discouraging her from publicly expressing any further views about UBC leadership. She instead publicized the effort to silence her. To its credit, the university community rallied around Berdahl, and financier John Montalbano resigned from his position as chairman of the UBC board of governors.168 Montalbano took the view that professors, as employees of the institution, had a responsibility to refrain from stirring up controversy about the internal workings of the university or criticizing the decisions of its leadership. Such a view is radically at odds with the understanding of the role of the faculty in a university that had been developed over the course of the twentieth century. When the chairman of the board of governors failed to appreciate and defend those principles of academic freedom, his role within the university became untenable.

Universities do not always rise to the challenge when their core principles are tested. The year before the events at UBC, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faced an even more high-profile and protracted crisis and did not behave so well. The university extended a tenured offer to Steven Salaita, who was then teaching in the English department at Virginia Tech University, to join the faculty of the American Indian studies program at Illinois. Given that much of his research focused on the contemporary experience of Palestinians and Arabs in the Middle East and the United States, and he was politically outspoken on related issues, he had already generated some controversy at Virginia Tech. A large number of faculty members objected when Virginia Tech issued a statement strongly distancing “the greater university community” from Salaita’s opinions, even while acknowledging that he had the right to express them. The faculty thought the episode reflected the fact that Virginia Tech was “not a hospitable climate for difference.”¹⁶⁹ Shortly before Salaita was to begin his new teaching duties at Illinois, Chancellor Phyllis Wise withdrew the offer in light of a new controversy that had emerged over his Twitter postings, some of which were deemed offensive and potentially anti-Semitic.¹⁷⁰ Wise issued a statement defending her actions, arguing that the university cannot tolerate “personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them,” and that faculty had a responsibility in all circumstances to discuss their opinions “in a scholarly, civil and productive manner.” Salaita’s tweets raised the possibility that some students might not believe that “every instructor recognizes and values that student as a human being.” The board of trustees chaired by Christopher Kennedy issued its own statement, declaring that the university “values civility as much as scholarship,” and that “disrespectful and demeaning” speech had “no place … in our democracy, and therefore, there will be no place for it in our university.”171

The Salaita affair at the University of Illinois soon became a national controversy in academic circles. There was legal sparring over whether Salaita had been fired or had merely had a “conditional offer” of employment withdrawn before it was ever finalized, but there was no question about the issue of free speech raised by the university’s actions. Cary Nelson—proud 1990s “tenured radical,” national president of the AAUP in the early 2000s, and chaired professor in the English department at Illinois—became a leading faculty supporter of Wise’s action. Nelson tried to toe an artful line between the university administration and its critics by arguing that Salaita’s tweets were “loathsome,” “inflammatory,” “sophomoric and irresponsible,” “low comedy,” “anti-Semitism,” almost maybe incitements to violence, and the “sordid underbelly, the more frank and revealing counterpart” to his scholarly work critiquing Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, but not actually covered by academic freedom because Salaita’s employment contract had not yet been finalized.¹⁷² Critics responded that Nelson was sacrificing long-standing commitments to academic freedom because of his history of disagreement with Salaita over Israeli-Palestinian relations and the appropriate response to that conflict (Salaita is an advocate of American academics boycotting Israeli academic conferences and severing ties with Israeli academics, and Nelson is an opponent of that movement). Even if it were true that Salaita’s employment status with the University of Illinois had not yet been finalized, it was contrary to the principles of academic freedom for the university to seek to exclude from its community those who might make “intemperate expressions of opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”173 When the university was forced to divulge its emails relating to the Salaita case, it was evident that the chancellor had initially tried to defend Salaita on academic freedom grounds but reversed course under pressure from donors and the board of trustees, who threatened to cut off support of the university if it did not sever ties with a professor with whom they “vehemently disagree.” The chancellor reassured donors that she was busily learning “about Steven Salaita’s background, beyond his academic history,” and consulted almost exclusively with donors and her public relations and fund-raising staff before deciding to “rescind” Salaita’s employment contract.¹⁷⁴ In the face of widespread academic boycotts of the University of Illinois and a series of adverse court rulings, Wise resigned as chancellor and the board of trustees paid Salaita to drop his lawsuit.

The Salaita case attracted extraordinary public attention, but it was only a single skirmish in a long-running battle over the freedom of faculty members to engage in controversial speech. Social media has often been at the center of those battles. No doubt, the very nature of social media platforms like Twitter has a tendency to draw out ill-considered and crudely expressed comments and put them on permanent public display. From there, offhand and out-of-context remarks have the potential to reach vast unintended audiences, who can be motivated to shine an unwelcome spotlight on an institution. Professors sometimes say foolish things (and, admittedly, “sometimes” might be an understatement), but the consequences of such missteps can be much greater now than they once were. Offensiveness can readily become the trigger for the enforcement of ideological and political boundaries on campus. Sometimes, the offended parties are inside the university, as was the case with a tenured Marquette University political scientist who published a blog post critical of how a graduate teaching assistant in the philosophy department had treated an undergraduate in her class over the student’s remarks about same-sex marriage. His dean swiftly informed him that he would be stripped of tenure and fired because the blog post constituted “dishonorable, irresponsible, or incompetent conduct” that had significantly reduced the faculty member’s “value” to the university. The professor was eventually offered the opportunity to apologize for the blog post, but he refused and so remained suspended from his duties.175 At other times, the offended parties are outside the university, as was the case with a tenured Drexel University political scientist who posted tweets fantasizing about “white genocide” and expressing the desire to “vomit” at the sight of fellow travelers thanking a uniformed American soldier for his service. After his tweets were picked up by the national media, his provost informed him that his position at the university was “under review” because his “provocative tweets” had caused “serious damage” to the university’s brand and become a “serious distraction” owing to the “nearly unmanageable number of venomous calls” to university officials and the fact that “at least two potential significant donors to the university have withheld previously promised donations.”¹⁷⁶ In the eyes of some senior university administrators, academic freedom is all to the good, until it starts affecting fund-raising.

There is no question that in many such cases, the faculty members who find themselves mired in controversy could have behaved better. Scholars who are concerned with improving our understanding of the world have a responsibility to try to shed light on difficult topics, not turn up the heat on emotional brawls. Even so, such missteps should not become the opportunity for administrators to purge universities of quarrelsome faculty. Doing so simply deters other professors from entering public debates, and as a consequence denies the public the benefit of potentially helpful scholarly insights. Moreover, the instances of professors who find themselves engulfed in public firestorms through no fault of their own emphasize the importance of universities tolerating and standing up for their own faculty. Tenured philosophy professor Tommy Curry at Texas A&M University found himself under fire when some conservative publications used out-of-context snippets of a podcast interview in which he discussed race in American history and the recent film Django Unchained to portray him as an advocate of racial violence. The university president intervened to denounce Curry’s comments as “disturbing” and contrary to “Aggie core values.” Meanwhile, the professor was subjected to death threats and vile racial slurs. Only days later did A&M’s president begin to backpedal and point out that Curry’s views had been misrepresented in the press, and that scholars have a duty to explore difficult arguments even when their work “can be oversimplified and distorted” by outsiders working through sound bites.177 The point of academic freedom is not to insulate professors from deserved public criticism, but it should protect faculty from reprisals for voicing unpopular opinions. Even more fundamentally, a healthy liberal society in a liberal republic should be capable of tolerating dissenters without subjecting them to anonymous death threats, hateful email, and calls for personal financial ruin.

Securing the conditions under which scholars can freely examine important matters of public concern and reach unpopular conclusions about them requires that leaders in higher education defend the principles of intellectual freedom against those both on and off campus who would seek to curtail such inquiries and insist that academic research only confirm the conventional wisdom. This is a familiar problem of free speech. Even those who have a general commitment to the ideal of free speech can have difficulty adhering to that ideal when confronted with particular examples of speech that they find disturbing or offensive. Elected politicians often find themselves catering to the sensitivities of the voters when faced with unpopular speech, and one of the virtues of a politically insulated judiciary is that judges are more likely to defend for the general principles of free speech and evenhandedly apply them to dissenters. University leaders are not as insulated as judges, but they have a similar responsibility to safeguard the general principles of free speech even when particular instances of speech are distasteful. In protecting the freedom of intellectual inquiry in those shocking instances, universities secure the conditions for probing scholarly investigations more generally.