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By now, most people who read this blog have seen the letter that the Dean of Students of the University of Chicago sent to incoming students this week:<\/p>\n
The crucial paragraph of the letter was the third:<\/p>\n
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called \u201ctrigger warnings,\u201d we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual \u201csafe spaces\u201d where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot to say, and a lot that\u2019s been said, about this passage\u2014Jeet Heer wrote a short piece<\/a> at the\u00a0New Republic (using some of my tweets as a jumping-off point) arguing that\u00a0it was an attack on academic freedom, for instance, while the former president of the U of C student government unleashed a devastating tweetstorm addressing the various ways in which the college\u2019s administration had, during his time on campus, ducked its obligations to engage in open and constructive dialogue<\/a>. (Link is to his Twitter feed. Scroll back.)<\/p>\n What I want to talk about today, though, is an essay by Jesse Singal of New York magazine<\/a>, a writer whose views on campus issues I often share.<\/p>\n Singal is no huge fan of the letter\u2019s framing, it\u2019s important to note. Many of the criticisms I\u2019ll be raising\u00a0here\u00a0are ones that\u00a0he himself makes. But his core premise is that while the letter\u00a0was perhaps over-aggressive and over-simplified, it was nonetheless a useful and justified intervention\u00a0because it addressed a real problem on the contemporary campus\u2014attacks on\u00a0free speech.<\/p>\n Free speech is under threat\u00a0on campus, he believes, and so, in taking a forthrightly pro-free-speech, pro-academic-freedom stand, the letter \u201ccould be a useful nudge to help get other, more timorous university administrators to stand up and do their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Singal is right that there\u2019s a real culture clash happening in American higher ed right now, but he\u2019s wrong to portray it as a clash between supporters and opponents of free expression. To understand why, let\u2019s\u00a0examine\u00a0the letter\u2019s core positions\u00a0one at a time.<\/p>\n \u201cOur commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called \u2018trigger warnings\u2026’\u201d<\/p>\n The college has already had to walk this one back<\/a>\u00a0a bit, because of course one may support trigger warnings and also be committed to academic freedom. Indeed, as\u00a0a college professor who uses trigger warnings in my own classes<\/a>, I\u2019d interpret\u00a0a statement like this from administrators at my college\u00a0as a denigration of my pedagogical choices, and perhaps even a not-too-subtle suggestion that I revise my syllabi.<\/p>\n A\u00a0university truly committed to academic freedom will allow its professors to decide for themselves whether to use trigger warnings, and will foster open and unfettered discussion as to whether they should\u00a0so. It will also recognize that students who choose to agitate for the adoption of such warnings are themselves engaging in acts of free speech and deserving of the protections afforded by the principles of academic freedom.<\/p>\n The letter, sadly, acknowledges none of this.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Here too\u00a0the letter reduces a complex, multifaceted question to a fatuous soundbite.\u00a0Are there many people\u00a0really\u00a0arguing that a university should \u201ccancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial\u201d? Not in my experience, and I pay quite a bit of attention to this stuff. No, the letter is here\u00a0misrepresenting the position it argues against, and in so doing it\u00a0papers over\u00a0the most\u00a0interesting questions it raises.<\/p>\n Here are some of those more interesting questions:<\/p>\n Should a university invite speakers who are bigots? If so, under what circumstances? Who should decide who is invited to speak\u00a0on campus, and who should determine how\u00a0student money is allocated\u00a0to bring such speakers? Does a student club have an obligation to go forward with an invitation it has extended if it later comes to regret it? What are the proper limits of dissent and protest and disruption when an obnoxious speaker appears?<\/p>\n These are all questions on which people committed to free speech can vigorously disagree. (They\u2019re all questions on which I\u2019d happily argue one of several contradictory positions, for starters, if you\u2019re buying the beer.) But there\u2019s no hint of that vitality and complexity here.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026and we do not condone the creation of intellectual \u2018safe spaces\u2019 where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.\u201d<\/p>\n Again the letter elides the most\u00a0interesting, and most\u00a0important, issues at hand. Should a campus Atheist Club be required to accept\u00a0a fundamentalist Christian as a vocal participant in its meetings, and vice versa? Must a Women\u2019s Center open its discussion group for\u00a0sexual assault survivors to men? Are all spaces on campus sites of perpetual intellectual combat, open to all comers, or might\u00a0students reasonably choose to affiliate only with like-minded friends and allies on occasion? The letter presupposes one answer\u00a0to each of those questions, and to any other that could be asked from similar premises. But there is a strong civil libertarian case to be made for the opposite stance on each.<\/p>\n In fact, on\u00a0each of the topics mooted in the letter\u2014trigger warnings, campus speakers, and safe spaces\u2014it could be argued that the principles of free speech and academic freedom demand the opposite conclusion from the one the letter reaches. Both the\u00a0professor guarding her\u00a0freedom to use\u00a0trigger warnings and her colleague who opposes them may be civil libertarians, as may\u00a0the reviled speaker and the student protesting at their talk and the atheist who demands a voice and the Christian who asserts her right to converse with those she chooses.<\/p>\n Again: There\u00a0is no single\u00a0pro-free-speech position on on any of these questions.<\/p>\n And so while Singal is right that there are major divisions\u00a0on the contemporary American campus around issues of freedom of speech and academic freedom, he fails\u00a0to recognize\u00a0that\u00a0those divisions are so deep and so contentious in large part\u00a0because each side in each of those the debates can legitimately lay claim to the mantle of free expression.<\/p>\n The positions that the letter takes are\u00a0not more civil libertarian than the ones that I, for instance\u2014a supporter of trigger warnings and agitation against obnoxious speakers and safe spaces\u2014take. In fact they are,\u00a0I\u2019d argue, in each case a less<\/em> civil libertarian position.<\/p>\n And that is why we will never, despite what the University of Chicago might hope, and despite what Singal suggests, resolve these disputes\u00a0via\u00a0appeals to first principles.<\/p>\n Now maybe\u00a0I\u2019m wrong. Maybe my views on one or more of these questions is unsustainable from a civil libertarian\u00a0perspective. But if so, we\u2019ll figure\u00a0that out not by fiat, but through\u00a0robust, unfettered debate and by real-world experimentation. That\u00a0debate is necessary, and it\u00a0is not advanced be pre-emptive deployment of \u201cwe do not supports\u201d and \u201cwe do not condones.\u201d (Particularly when many members of the campus community emphatically do<\/em> support and do<\/em> condone precisely the positions that are repudiated by the dean\u2019s letter.)<\/p>\n I stand\u00a0with Singal in his advocacy for freedom of expression on campus, and I share some (though not all) of his concerns about contemporary campus climate. But the authors of the University of Chicago letter are not my allies in that fight, and I suspect that they\u2019re mostly not Singal\u2019s, either.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n