By Greg Lukianoff
Friday, November 08, 2024
Back in February, Democratic Rep. Derek Kilmer was
supposed to give a lecture on toxic polarization in American discourse at the
University of Puget Sound. He didn’t. The event
was canceled after pro-Palestinian protesters forced themselves into the
lecture hall and stormed the stage.
That same month, Israeli Defense Forces reservist and
lawyer Ran Bar-Yoshafat was supposed to speak on the geopolitical dynamics of
Israel’s war in Gaza at the University of California–Berkeley. He didn’t. The event
was canceled after hundreds of angry protesters surrounded the venue, broke
glass doors, obstructed entryways, and forced themselves into the building.
That same day, Jeffrey Blutinger was supposed to
give a guest lecture at San Jose State University titled “Constructing a Just
Solution: Where Israelis and Palestinians Go from Here.” He didn’t. The event
was canceled because of violent pro-Palestinian protests, and Blutinger was
escorted off campus by police.
These are just a few examples of the violent
deplatforming of speakers that has become commonplace on college campuses.
Deplatforming often takes the form of a heckler’s
veto—disrupting a speech or event in progress and forcing it to conclude
early—or having speakers disinvited from campus speeches or commencement
ceremonies. But it can also take the form of canceling performances of
concerts, plays, or the screenings of movies, or having controversial artwork
removed from public display.
There have been plenty more examples already this
academic year. Speakers at Brooklyn
College, Johns
Hopkins, Indiana
State, the University
of Minnesota, and the University
of Washington have already suffered from this rising illiberal trend.
And it is rising.
In the last decade we have seen more
than 1,000 campaigns to get professors punished for their First
Amendment-protected speech. Nearly two-thirds of those campaigns succeeded, and
almost 200 professors ended up being fired or forced out. For perspective,
during McCarthyism, about 60 communist professors were fired, and about 100
professors were fired for political belief overall. We know this is a wild
underestimate, given that about 1 in 6 professors say that they have been
punished or threatened with punishment for their speech, teaching, or research.
To give further perspective, if extrapolated nationally that would be about a
hundred thousand professors targeted for speech. There is no parallel to that
in American history.
The targeting of professors, which began to increase
around 2015 and accelerated in 2017, would reach its high watermarks in 2020,
2021, and 2022, but began to decline somewhat in 2023. However, we began to see
a dramatic increase in attempts to deplatform invited speakers on campus. In
fact, 2023
is the worst year on record for deplatforming, with a record-setting 145
total attempts and 75 successes. However, 2024 is on track to beat it. As of
November 1, my organization, the Foundation
for Individual Rights and Expression, has already logged 136 attempts in
our Campus
Deplatforming Database for 2024, and there are still two months to go
before the end of the year.
Our institutions of higher learning have done this to
themselves. As Tyler Austin Harper put it in a
piece for The Atlantic, higher education created this problem by
favoring applicants who are interested only, or primarily, in engaging in
activism. Indeed, they made activism a part of their marketing and recruitment
materials. Campus tours often include stops at sites of important protests,
such as Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, which was broken into and occupied
by Vietnam anti-war protesters in 1968 and again
by pro-Palestinian protesters in 2024. Students are attracted to Columbia
by its history of activism, and mirrored the actions of protesters in 1968 to
symbolically link the two movements. And it’s not just elite colleges. Ohio
State, for example, emphasizes its scholarships and opportunities for students
interested in social justice activism, as do countless schools around the
country.
Activism is an important part of free speech and public
participation. My organization and I go to great lengths to protect and defend
it. But by explicitly recruiting activists, and by creating an academic
environment that encourages activism, our universities have forgotten the
importance and the value of a scholarly mindset.
Right now, many students enroll with a predetermined
moral and political certainty and an intolerance for dissent—and schools
largely encourage and reinforce it. Indeed, there isn’t much difference between
asking students how determined of an activist they are and asking them how many
issues they consider essentially settled. And given the fact that modern social
justice activism tends to combine disparate causes into one larger
intersectional whole, being a social justice activist can mean that you are certain
on an awful lot of moral, historical, philosophical, and even scientific
issues. This plague of certainty is why we’re seeing an explicit rejection of
free speech, academic freedom, and free inquiry in the very places that are
meant to be strongholds for them.
Our institutions of higher education should protect their
activists, but they should also prioritize recruiting scholars. The ideal
student should think more like a field anthropologist, someone who is trying to
figure out where the other side is coming from, rather than a strident warrior
in a battle of good versus evil. That open, curious, intellectually humble, and
receptive mindset is the foundation of actual learning, and is critical
to fostering an educational environment that lives up to its intended purpose.
This attitude, if adopted, would effectively eliminate
the notion of disinviting or deplatforming speakers on campus. Even when it’s
right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk and Ann Coulter, Palestinian writer
Mohammed el-Kurd, or any other speaker with controversial views, the scholarly
student would welcome the opportunity to hear their arguments and become better
informed about what others think on issues that matter most. A scholarly
mindset understands that we are not safer from the world for knowing less about
what people actually think.
While the situation on campus is terrible, there is cause
for some cautious optimism. Despite a shoddy past record, schools can—and
sometimes do—change for the better. This year, Dartmouth
became the only ivy league school to earn a “green light” rating from FIRE,
which we award to institutions with no written policies that seriously imperil
student free speech rights. This is largely the result of Dartmouth’s new
president Sian Beilock, who took office in 2023 and committed
to preserving free expression on campus. The school also recently announced
the
expansion of its free expression program, which is aimed at reducing
disruptions and deplatforming incidents at events.
Similarly, the University
of South Carolina didn’t back down last month when other universities would
have surely caved. Amid a chorus of calls, including from the NAACP, to cancel
a “comedy
roast” of Kamala Harris hosted by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes
and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, the school held strong
to its commitment to First Amendment principles.
This is what the First Amendment requires, but it’s also
what the scholarly mindset tolerates in a way the activist mindset cannot.
Still, there’s much more work to be done. The danger is
that a lot of campuses are just going to create superficial solutions to
satisfy the current moment without actually addressing the root problem of
intellectual and moral certainty among their student body. Indeed, all the
incentives for most colleges is to do the absolute minimum to placate angry
alumni and donors. But the entire higher education sector should be taking a
long hard look at itself and start from the very beginning—up to and including
how they seek out and admit students—to make a lasting change.
That starts even before the student recruitment process.
Our colleges and universities for too long have taken positions on issues that
are outside the scope of their missions and would benefit from adopting and
adhering to the principle of institutional
neutrality. Admitted students often participate in a summer orientation
program before moving on campus. Universities should revamp and create
orientation programming geared toward educating those incoming students on free
speech principles, encouraging them to value dialogue across differences as a
critical aspect of learning and growth.
It is also imperative that schools punish students who
violate these principles on campus. Anyone who disrupts speeches should be
disciplined. Anyone who tries to get speakers canceled should be loudly
opposed. And anyone
who engages in violence should be expelled.
Recruiting students focused on academics more than
activism is important. But schools should prioritize free speech values in
hiring. They must implement robust training for administrators, resident
advisers, and student government members in the radical open-mindedness and
intellectual humility of the scholarly mindset. Free speech is a core
democratic right, an essential component of a good society, and the foundation
of a university’s truth-seeking mission—and those who represent the university
need to have a deep and rich understanding and appreciation of these facts.
There must also be consequences for administrators
failing to uphold these principles. Shout downs or disruptions warrant
independent investigations to determine the roles administrators played in the
chaos. Those who do nothing to prevent or stop such heckler’s vetos should be
punished. Those who encouraged or enabled such behavior should be fired. Given
how much of the increase in per-student spending in contemporary higher
education is due to the growth of the bureaucratic class, this should be seen as
a much-needed opportunity to de-bureaucratize—starting with the administrators
who pose the biggest threat to the marketplace of ideas.
Refocusing the climate of higher education to one that
actually opposes orthodoxies, oversimplifications, and unwarranted certainty
would be a radical change—one that challenges many of our natural human
impulses. Embracing the truth-seeking function of higher education requires
thinking in a way that’s very different from the way humans are prone to think.
Even the things that feel most intuitive and obvious still have to be tested
and challenged through experimentation, counterfactuals, and devil’s advocacy.
That’s a tall order, but chipping away at falsity and
striving toward the truth is the point of higher education.
To change this paradigm on campus requires a profoundly
different approach and psychology than these schools are currently teaching
students. Leaning into the process of truth-seeking can be thorny and often
painful, but it’s also worthwhile and necessary. It means letting the facts
lead you rather than imposing your preconceived notions onto your fellow
students, your professors, or the world around you.
However difficult it might be for universities to
reestablish these norms after decades of encouraging the opposite, failing to
do so will have dire consequences. Our institutions will be little more than
dogma factories, churning out wave after wave of activists and leaving us with
no scholars, no thinkers, and no higher learning at all.
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