What should a commitment to free speech entail?
By: Ekalavya Chaudhuri
Tags: Academia, College, Politics, Free Speech, University

“This talk was cancelled”.

The French philosopher Voltaire once quipped in his time that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. In ours, most liberal, tolerant, open-outlook university campuses are neither liberal nor tolerant nor have an open outlook.

In the US for example (which, for reasons better or worse, seems always to be one of the focal points to take as a standard when trying to have international conversations about freedom of speech), university campuses are often characterized by an aggressively left-leaning quality. I once heard an American speaker say that when he visited one of these, the faculty were all extremely eager to show him how modern and liberal the entire campus was, with groups and student clubs for a variety of activities, but when the speaker asked them if they had a club for Republican students, the faculty was silent. Later, a student came shyly up to the speaker and said he was thankful to him for raising the question, because there was in fact no space for Republican students to voice their opinions or express anything on campus, no talk of being one, and though this student identified with conservative values and the Republican Party, he did not dare to voice any of these views aloud on that university campus for fear of backlash and ostracization from his peers.

This sort of thing leads to problems because of bubbles developing, ivory tower-buttressed echo chambers that are out of touch with large parts of how the country thinks and acts. At Santa Clara College, a professor expressed excitement on election night before the Presidential election that brought in President Donald Trump, telling a wide group of students (including a Republican student) that they would “never have to hear Donald Trump’s name again.” One supposes that the following November 8 election came as something of a rude awakening to them.

Provocative French author Pascal Bruckner wrote “The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement” in 1995. That book argued that once we are able to identify ourselves as a ‘victim’ and the particular order that has enforced this ‘victim’hood on us (the pig government, males, the slavemasters of the running dogs of imperialism, what have you, for example) we subsequently seek to use it to justify identifying solely with people who too identify with a similar narrative and only such a narrative, continuing from that to shutting out any engagement with those we perceive as our ‘oppressor’s or with views different to us which we immediately label all ‘offensive’.

Once one has attained the first key step for necessary moral absolution in having identified oneself as a victim, such behavior is logically entirely permissible. But one lives and works in the real world, and it is a question if the real world is such an ideal and utopian place as to let people live their entire lives through in such behaviour. The strange thing is that university campuses seem increasingly to be actively teaching students this lesson. Surprisingly, many of these universities style themselves the champions of free speech. Yet, upon their campuses in the actual fact, there seems to be a ‘right kind’ of free speech that is permitted, only one that is ‘in the true’ as Foucault would say.

There seems to operate a subtle or not so subtle imbuing in students of the suggestion that the world out there beyond the immediate sphere of the institution i.e. the ‘safe space’ of the campus, is an earth populated only and only with the fascist, ‘the enemy’, seeking always and everywhere actively to oppress and/or police thought. A natural progression of this line of thinking is to ensure that views espoused by any representatives of lines of thought deemed ‘offensive’ by those figures of authority whose site of situation is within the institution (read the campus), are blocked out or shut down within it.

Beyond being blatantly paradoxical, this leads to problems. Students who would have otherwise liked to explore lines of thought beyond the ones toed by the university campus do not feel safe or empowered to vocally express the idea. Meanwhile, other university students mature in a bubble, a sort of cocoon with exposure to a solitary line of thought. If there is constant, sustained exposure to any one and only single line of thought anywhere in the world, in any model, there is a risk of people persisting under its influence so closely identifying that they become rabid, unreasoning, unquestioning defenders of it.

When a lot of these students pass out of the university campus and into the world at large, they are naturally baffled and enraged to discover that there are others who do not smoothly agree with the views they espouse in a dovetailing way that ‘gels’ precisely. The angered shock is possibly all the more in discovering that not only people situated external to the university campuses but also certain individuals who have been peers as students are among this number; few take the time out to reflect upon the complex series of circumstances that might have worked to ensure that none of these clashes were prepared for while back at university or college in the first place.

This phenomenon breeds an us versus them mentality as an ingrained, inherent and intrinsic feature in the world. Besides, the phenomenon also actively works to ensure that none of any views deemed ‘offensive’ by those who call the shots on university campuses are ever actually questioned or debated on the university campus itself, because they were never discussed or engaged with in the first place. Point B cannot be reached without travelling to point A. This process of travel can naturally not happen if there is no platform for discussing, and speakers who are proponents or advocates of these views are often barred or banned from coming to the campus even if invited by students because a majority of the student populace is agitating. No doubt, in cases this is done well-meaningly. But as the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions, so may the road to a pretty problematic kettle of fish be paved with this sort of ‘well-meaning’. It is a question, speaking in terms of preparation for the real world, if it would not be better for faith to be kept in the very tenets of free speech that these university campuses profess to preach.

Also, it might perhaps be considered that it is possible that people are not exactly a species of sponge who automatically soak up but individuals perfectly capable of thinking, determining things for themselves and coming to decisions regarding which viewpoints to be proponents of and which not. Aristotle said it is the mark of the truly critically trained mind to be able to hold two contrasting thoughts within it without accepting the whole of either if necessary. It is sustained exposure to just one single line of thought that breeds uncritical minds.

University students are rather uniquely equipped in being naturally at an age which is neither young enough to believe and accept in unthinking wonder nor old enough to have too-hardened convictions. There is an opportunity here that it would be a pity to waste. It is a pity that it is so often wasted.

A commitment to free speech should not include paying lip service to the concept of it, but actually doing it. This should include ensuring that there are platforms for people to voice even views that one part of the student populace may find offensive, clubs for students not identifying with the primary trend of politics on campus, opportunities to screen provocatively thought-provoking films with alternate perspectives etc. If such areas of inquiry, debate or discussion are sometimes uncomfortable, so be it, all the better to call truly problematic things out and point them out to people. Only engagement can create such situations.

We cannot afford to not learn this lesson. One has heard the arguments made following in the vein of Karl Popper about there needing to be limits to tolerance, and that is to an extent so, but for it to be thoroughly radically applied over here is a false analogy in my view. If students are not habituated through engaging with conflicting viewpoints on campus, if campuses remain ivory-towered and dead set upon one solitary way of thinking about society, then the going will be very difficult when the sleep of such a mass unreason is broken in the complexity of the real world.

Ideological clashes on campus are salubrious for both the health of the body politic of students on the campus, and for that of the commonality of humanity as a whole. It is through these that students might learn that even if another student differs in their politics, they are just as much of a living, breathing person- and not a demon. Otherwise, there will be a tendency to demonize or, at the least, de-humanize, and view as an emissary of the oppressor, any person whose views one considers ‘offensive’ in the world at large, which precludes any engagement with them as ‘disproportionate labour’ needing to be performed. That is an attitude guaranteed to bring trauma in the long run to someone wishing to persist with it throughout for a lifetime in that big messy place that is the planet earth.