What Campus Administrators Don't Get About "Free Speech"

What Campus Administrators Don't Get About "Free Speech"
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Yale president Peter Salovey’s 26 November op-ed in the New York Times, “Free Speech Personified” is a heartfelt and indeed moving account of how in 1963, one courageous individual, Pauli Murray, argued that--even in the aftermath of the murderous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four Black schoolgirls and wounded 22 others—segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace should be allowed to speak at Yale. The problem is that we cannot use 1963 tactics to address 2017 problems on campus. Our historical situation is so vastly different that it is not only wrong to imagine that solutions that seemed to work on free speech issues more than half a century ago could work in an age when hate speech is blasted globally across the Internet, prompting acts of violence and destruction in ways unimaginable in 1963, it is dangerous to do so. For in so doing we misidentify the problem.

University administrators like Salovey are prone to evoke free speech as the reason they allow “even” speakers with whom they disagree to promulgate bigotry on their campuses. They argue that ideas, bad and good, all need to be heard and debated. The problem is that speakers like white supremacist Richard Spencer have no interest in actual debate—they appear on campuses to promote their books and products, and to gain publicity. This has nothing to do with education, it has to do with branding hatred and indirectly receiving the imprimatur of elite universities like Yale.

But to recognize the true issue--danger to campus safety--one needs to go beyond speech to action. As a recent article in The Atlantic points out, the Internet is the main battlefield for fascists—they are adept on using it to incite violence on innocent groups, dox anti-fascist activists, and translate on-line harassment into physical violence.

Yet college administrators refuse to connect the dots. For example, administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, repeatedly turned a deaf ear to students’ cries for help as fascists doxed them, then followed them to their homes, and threatened them with physical harm.

Symptomatic of the squeeze college administrators find themselves in is University of Michigan President Mark S. Schlissel’s public statement regarding granting permission to Richard Spencer to speak on his campus. It starts off with a commendable focus on safety issues rather than just “free speech”--“My foremost priority is ensuring the safety of everyone at this university.” Sadly, in the very next words he writes: “However, as a public university, the law and our commitment to free speech forbid us from declining a speaker based on the presumed content of speech.” But then Schlissel flips back: “But we can and will impose limits on time, place and manner of a speaking engagement to protect the safety of our U-M community. Let me repeat: If we cannot assure a reasonably safe setting for the event, we will not allow it to go forward.”

This is precisely the problem—to really address the real harm and violence that these new hate-mongers present, it is time for an update. What colleges need to do is extend the idea of a “safe setting” beyond the physical campus, and examine the ways fascists and bigots are creating unsafe environments on campus by using the Internet to stage, well in advance, campaigns that at once aggrandize themselves (ironically, often as victims of censorship), and target those who are defending their campuses from precisely such attacks.

Any serious attempt to limit the real harm—not just of speech, but also of actions attached to fascist speech—must be focused on both what might happen on campus, and the new methods on harming students and other campus community members via the Internet. If today there is a free speech issue, it would be the issue of students feeling afraid to voice their opinions lest those opinions be immediately found on fascist websites—decontextualized and framed in libelous language and sent out to people who are ready to do harm, as they did when they murdered Heather Heyer. If there is a denial of rights, those would include the ways that fascist groups hack into private social media postings and, again, send misleading fragments of activists’ speech into the Internet, where any one with a grudge can act on that information.

This is the context in which we should debate free speech. It does us little good, and potentially great harm, to ignore how the world has changed. We should not be willing to fall back on past solutions to address present-day problems, and do so for the sake of expediency. Any educator should know that.

[Filed on behalf of the Campus Antifascist Network]

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