Why colleges and universities live or die by free speech
Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, as critics on and off campus challenge the value of freewheeling debate. In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage vigorous free speech because it goes to the heart of their mission to foster freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance. Examining hot-button issues such as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, and the use of social media by faculty, Speak Freely describes the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy. It explains why universities must make space for voices from both the Left and Right. And it points out how better understanding why the university lives or dies by free speech can help guide students, faculty, administrators, and alumni when faced with unpopular, hateful, or dangerous speech. Timely and vitally important, Speak Freely shows why universities can succeed only by fostering more free speech, more free thought—and a greater tolerance for both.
Why colleges and universities live or die by free speech
Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, as critics on and off campus challenge the value of freewheeling debate. In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage vigorous free speech because it goes to the heart of their mission to foster freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance. Examining hot-button issues such as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, and the use of social media by faculty, Speak Freely describes the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy. It explains why universities must make space for voices from both the Left and Right. And it points out how better understanding why the university lives or dies by free speech can help guide students, faculty, administrators, and alumni when faced with unpopular, hateful, or dangerous speech. Timely and vitally important, Speak Freely shows why universities can succeed only by fostering more free speech, more free thought—and a greater tolerance for both.
Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech
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Overview
Why colleges and universities live or die by free speech
Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, as critics on and off campus challenge the value of freewheeling debate. In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage vigorous free speech because it goes to the heart of their mission to foster freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance. Examining hot-button issues such as trigger warnings, safe spaces, hate speech, disruptive protests, speaker disinvitations, and the use of social media by faculty, Speak Freely describes the dangers of empowering campus censors to limit speech and enforce orthodoxy. It explains why universities must make space for voices from both the Left and Right. And it points out how better understanding why the university lives or dies by free speech can help guide students, faculty, administrators, and alumni when faced with unpopular, hateful, or dangerous speech. Timely and vitally important, Speak Freely shows why universities can succeed only by fostering more free speech, more free thought—and a greater tolerance for both.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691193595 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2019 |
| Series: | New Forum Books , #63 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 510 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Mission of a University
Let me begin with a basic but potentially controversial proposition: the modern university is one of the great achievements of American civilization. We do not often, at least anymore, speak of an "American civilization." Perhaps that is appropriate in a commercial republic such as our own. As a nation, we have always celebrated the practical and the popular. We elevate as heroes inventors and businessmen like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, social activists like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. and statesmen like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The art forms we most celebrate are those produced for a mass audience — television, film, pop music. The "ivory tower" is a pejorative, dismissing those who are not sufficiently rooted in the practical strivings of the day-to-day. The historian Richard Hofstadter once called our attention to the anti-intellectual tradition in American life and the frequency with which public figures have had recourse to the denigration of expertise and specialized knowledge, preferring a more populist "horse sense" to the opinions of elite "eggheads."
But there is an American civilization nonetheless, and universities occupy an important place within it. Commentators have sometimes struggled to capture an "American mind" that is both uniquely American and also elevated. The Victorian English writer Samuel Butler observed that "America will have her geniuses … but I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius," a view that was shared by many of his American contemporaries. Boston's Henry Adams looked across the Mason-Dixon line and concluded that "the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament." The essayist Paul Elmer More returned the favor, dismissing the "half-civilization" that New England had pilfered from old England. The conservative literary scholar Richard Weaver bemoaned returning in the fall of 1939 to the campus of Texas A&M University and its "rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life." Such conservative critics of the American scene as Adams and More could be too pessimistic, even as that scene appeared in the early twentieth century. But over the course of the twentieth century, cultural institutions have flourished in America, creating new homes for the exploration of ideas and values, and universities have been among the most important and successful of those institutions.
This is not to suggest that the modern university does not have problems or confront challenges. Universities are expensive. Although the economic value of a degree remains substantial, the traditional educational model is costly to maintain, and universities have taken on many more expenses in an effort to serve their various constituencies and to entice students to enroll. Those difficulties are exacerbated by public disinvestment from many institutions of higher education. Both the value and the cost of education give rise to worries about student access. Making the benefits of universities available to an ever-increasing number of students raises not only questions of cost, however, but also difficult issues of adequate student preparation for what universities have to offer. The traditional role of faculty in guiding university decisions has been threatened by the rise of professional administrators and contingent instructional staff, and universities are tempted to sacrifice their core mission by enticing distractions ranging from semiprofessional sports to economic investments. Students, employers, policymakers, and competitors question whether ivy-covered universities remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Perhaps most disturbing is an apparent crisis of confidence among members of the general public in the value of universities in American society. In recent years, Americans who identify with the Republican Party in particular have developed sharply negative views on the contribution of institutions of higher education to the United States.
Despite such causes for doubt, American universities remain the envy of the world. Students from across the globe flock to American universities to pursue educational opportunities unrivaled by anything available in their home countries. The faculties of American universities have dominated the ranks of Nobel Prize winners because they provide a welcoming home to scholars from across the world and the resources and freedom to allow those scholars to push the boundaries of human knowledge. The system of higher education in the United States offers an unmatched diversity of institutions and educational models. A historically high proportion of the population of the United States have earned college degrees, and those numbers continue to grow. The economic value of a college degree continues to rise as well.
These achievements are surprisingly recent, however. It is easy to be lulled into complacency by the long history of many of our most prestigious colleges. Institutions like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale can boast of foundings that predate the formation of the United States itself. But the fact of the matter is that those colleges were for much of their history quite different from what they are today. The colleges of the early republic were more finishing schools than research universities, and they emphasized rote memorization more than critical thinking skills. The modern American university as we know it today was the product of the late nineteenth century. The established institutions of New England that were founded to train ministers were forced to remake themselves into very different institutions, and they were joined by a proliferation of new schools, from the land-grant universities of the Midwest to the new private universities endowed by the Gilded Age elite to the smaller technological, religious, and progressive institutions that carved out unique niches in the collegiate landscape. These modern universities became crucial drivers of economic growth and cultural enrichment over the course of the twentieth century. The modern American university has been with us for only a little over a century. Universities have proven adaptable to social and economic challenges in the past, but there is no guarantee that they will continue to serve the same important functions in American life into the future.
In order to consider how free speech is central to the mission of a university, we must first understand what the mission of a university is. This requires abstracting a bit from the specific situation of any given university. The mission statement of a university tries to identify the core commitments and central goals of that particular institution. Such a statement needs to be abstract enough to encompass the complexity of the institution and allow for changes over time, but it also needs to be specific enough to help an institution set priorities and guide its day-to-day operations. Part of the wonder of higher education in America is its diversity, and there are important differences between Caltech and Sarah Lawrence, between Swarthmore College and Liberty University, between Princeton University and the University of Texas, between Spelman College and the University of West Florida. Such differences will drive individual institutions to make their own peculiar decisions that will shape their community and practices, distinguish them from their peers, and provide a unique experience to their students.
Despite this diversity, modern American universities share some fundamental features in common. From those commonalities, we can see the core mission of the university in general. While identifying a common mission at that level of generality might not help any given institution decide what academic majors to offer, what faculty to hire, or what residence halls to build, it does help identify what an institution must be committed to in order to fit within the framework of a modern university.
At heart, the mission of a university is to produce and disseminate knowledge. Not every university can or should want to do that in the same way. No university seeks to produce knowledge simply, or disseminate it indiscriminately. Choices must be made about how to advance that general mission, but all universities are recognizably engaged in that common enterprise of advancing and disseminating knowledge.
Each part of that formulation is important, and they are inextricably linked in a university environment. The production of knowledge is as integral to the purpose of a university as the dissemination of it. The production of knowledge is, of course, at the heart of the scholarly profession. The scholar embarks on a lifelong journey of learning. That scholarly work might, in the first instance, revolve around the accumulation and synthesis of the existing stock of knowledge. Throughout human history, a critical task has simply been to realize and preserve what is already known. The scholar must pick up the pieces of the scattered bits of knowledge that have been gained in the past, consider the connections between them so that they can be fitted together, and think through their implications for the present age. The first step in the production of knowledge is remembering what has come before.
Learning what there is to be learned can, in the best of cases, generate new insights, new discoveries, and new knowledge. The quest of scholarship, frequently frustrated, is to advance the frontiers of what is known, to learn not only what is already known but also what is not yet known. Pushing the boundaries of what we can know and understand about the natural world, the social world, and the human condition is at the heart of the scholarly enterprise. Universities certainly are not alone in seeking to produce knowledge, but they have been a critically important site for research across a wide range of human endeavors. Moreover, at their best universities are dedicated to the task of gathering, preserving, and advancing human knowledge not for the sake of achieving some other goal, but for its own sake. The struggle to cure a disease, or manufacture a product, or turn a profit can and does lead individuals and organizations to advance the frontiers of knowledge, but such research is ultimately a secondary by-product of those activities and only an instrumental good. Universities are committed to the advancement of human understanding for its own sake. They rest on the proposition that rewards will come from that work, but they encourage the exploration of the unknown without any prior expectation of what those rewards might be. No doubt, there are many intellectual dead ends along this path of progress, but there are also many unexpected gateways to new frontiers. The academic community is dedicated to unbounded exploration, recognizing that there will be many failures, but hoping that there will also be many breakthroughs that could not have been anticipated when the journey began.
Universities are equally committed to the dissemination of knowledge. The scholarly work of producing knowledge is inescapably bound up with the effort to communicate what has been learned. The goal of research is not to hide the light under a bushel, but rather to let it shine forth. The fruits of research are to be shared, with other scholars, with students, and with the general public. Although the scholarly life is often imagined to be isolated, even hermetic, the scholarly enterprise is fundamentally communal. It is a community of scholars that preserves the inherited store of knowledge, and a community that seeks to add to that store. New puzzles and their solutions are advanced, assessed, and recognized by individuals working in a constant dialogue with their peers. Scholarship is a conversation, a conversation that extends across generations and across the globe, and to shut oneself off from that conversation is to shut oneself off from the scholarly enterprise itself.
As a consequence, universities are dedicated to the task of accumulating and sharing our collective knowledge of the world and fostering an environment of constant learning. To do so, universities organize a wide variety of activities to spread the fruits of research. From sponsoring scholarly journals and academic presses to organizing conferences and lectures to maintaining archives and libraries, universities seek to promote the sharing of what has been learned with both a local and a global community of scholars who will in turn make use of and contribute to the common store of knowledge. It is a community that grows rich through the free exchange of ideas.
This community of learning is not limited to those who have dedicated their lives to scholarship. What is gained through research is to be shared not only with other researchers, but also with students and beyond them with the public. Research and teaching are sometimes portrayed as competing goals, but that is true only in a narrow sense. An individual's time is pressured by the competing demands of teaching and scholarship, and undoubtedly some individual scholars have a comparative advantage in one or the other. But most professors know that teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. The best teaching is informed by the latest research, and the challenge of teaching at the college level is determining how to synthesize the mass of research on a given topic and make it accessible for a nonspecialist audience. Academic research should eventually make its way from the pages of a scholarly journal read by relatively few to the classroom where it can be heard by many. Likewise, research is often spurred on by experiences in the classroom. As teacher and student together work through scholarly puzzles and what is known about them, the teacher often leaves those conversations with new insights and a new appreciation of the material, and new thoughts on how those questions might be pressed further. The classroom too is a place of discovery, and not just for the student.
Everything else that universities do flows from this twin mission of generating and disseminating knowledge. Universities are great engines of economic growth. But those benefits are natural products of universities pursuing their core mission of producing and disseminating knowledge. Universities are ill-suited to working as economic agents. Nonetheless, by performing their core function, universities have played an important role in technological innovation and economic growth in the United States and elsewhere over the past century and more. Universities do not and should not focus on maximizing quarterly earnings or bringing new products to market, but they lay the foundations for economic gains. They help build the capital that entrepreneurs leverage to enhance the welfare of society. They perform the basic science that becomes the building blocks of new technologies that reshape the world.
As parents and students are increasingly aware, universities are the training ground for the high-skilled workers needed in the modern knowledge economy. Across their working lives, those who graduate from universities earn a substantial income premium over those who do not, and as a consequence universities have played an important role in lifting generations of Americans out of the economic circumstances in which they were born, and setting them on a new economic path. But much would be lost if universities were reduced to credentialing services for the professional classes. A university degree is worth something because of the intellectual, emotional, and social experiences that universities impart. If those experiences were devalued or debased, then the degree would be worth very little no matter how attractive the campus or elegant the framed diploma.
Universities are incubators of ideas that help shape American society, but their primary purpose is not to mobilize social movements. Universities give free play to new ideas about the wide range of human endeavors, from the sciences to the arts. They shelter dissidents and innovators, idealists and critics. Within universities, scholars question what we think we know about how the world works, about the foundations of society, about the qualities of a well-lived life. Such scholars are not always right, of course. But they expect their ideas to be vigorously debated, to be investigated with both skepticism and care. They push their colleagues and students to reexamine their own assumptions and commitments, and sometimes their unorthodox ideas migrate beyond the ivied walls of the college campus and help remake the daily lives of people far removed from the university.
Universities are critical molders of democratic citizens, but creating better citizens is a by-product of universities performing their primary mission of educating students. Democratic government puts extraordinary demands on the average citizen. Democracies ask individuals not only to earn their living, care for their families, and obey the law, but also to help form public values, set the direction of public policy, and choose the officials who manage public affairs. Universities help produce not only the economic, social, and political leaders who will guide American life, but also the mass of voters who wield decisive power within a republic. Universities help prepare young adults to be thoughtful and responsible contributors to civic life.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface, ix,
Introduction, 1,
1 The Mission of a University, 9,
2 The Tradition of Free Speech, 28,
3 Free Speech on Campus, 51,
Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces, 57,
Hate Speech, 77,
Forms of Protest, 94,
Student Groups and Outside Speakers, 116,
Faculty and Academic Freedom, 141,
4? Ideological Ostracism and Viewpoint Diversity on Campus, 161,
Notes, 181,
For Further Reading, 199,
Index, 205,
Discussion Questions, 211,
What People are Saying About This
"No other book so accessibly presents the fundamental principles of the free speech tradition and applies them to contemporary campus controversies—ranging from the heckling or disinviting of campus speakers to attempts to censure faculty for social media postings. A compelling defense of the university as an enclave of reason, Speak Freely is fresh, illuminating, galvanizing, and persuasive."—Jeffrey Rosen, National Constitution Center and George Washington University Law School
"If John Stuart Mill were around today, this is the book he might write about the free speech crisis on college campuses. Keith Whittington drills deep beneath the law and the excesses of political correctness to explain why universities’ foremost mission is to make and spread knowledge, even at the cost of discomfort, offense, or pain. At a time when many universities have lost their way, Speak Freely exemplifies the clarity, civility, and compassion that they—and we—so badly need."—Jonathan Rauch, author of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought
"Freedom of speech is crucial to the university and democracy. Keith Whittington provides a deep exploration of the reasons why—and carefully examines contemporary challenges on college campuses."—David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of The Libertarian Mind
"An astute, crucial reminder that free speech and a diversity of perspectives are necessary prerequisites for a vibrant intellectual life. Whittington’s persuasive case for both comes at a critical time for all members of the university community, as well as our larger society. Speak Freely is essential reading for everyone who is concerned about higher education and intellectual freedom."—Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship
"Speak Freely is a thoughtful and compelling account of how colleges and universities came to embrace the value of free expression as central to their mission, why they should remain faithful to that value in the face of current controversies, and how they should best approach and address these issues. Carefully reasoned, balanced, and persuasive, this book will be a valuable guide for anyone who wants to better understand what's at stake in today’s disputes over free speech on campus."—Geoffrey Stone,,University of Chicago Law School