The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Humans Are Not Smart Enough to Have Ideas That Lie Beyond Challenge and Debate"
From Eleventh Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus's concurrence in Speech First, Inc. v. Cartwright:
I join fully in Judge Newsom's opinion for this Court. The University of Central Florida's discriminatory-harassment policy almost surely violates the First Amendment. It is grievously overbroad, and it is a content- and viewpoint-based restraint on free speech.
I write separately to underscore the grave peril posed by a policy that effectively polices adherence to intellectual dogma. History provides us with ample warning of those times and places when colleges and universities have stopped pursuing truth and have instead turned themselves into cathedrals for the worship of certain dogma.
By depriving itself of academic institutions that pursue truth over any other concern, a society risks falling into the abyss of ignorance. Humans are not smart enough to have ideas that lie beyond challenge and debate. A discriminatory-harassment policy that assumes the most popular idea or the idea that least "interferes with, limits, deprives, or alters the terms or conditions of education" is the correct one is plainly at odds with the First Amendment and our notion of free speech.
It is in a university setting, perhaps above all others, that our foundational ideas must be subject to examination and re-examination. The process is not necessarily gentle or even cordial, but it cannot be cut off because sometimes it is unpleasant or provocative or exasperating. "Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom." Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, Univ. of Chicago (2015) (quoting President Hanna Holborn Gray).
The University's discriminatory-harassment policy touches on every conceivable topic that may come up on a college campus. Religion, political affiliation, ethnicity, national origin, age, gender identity or expression, and genetic information are just a select few targeted by the policy. The specter of punishment for expressing unorthodox views on these topics stifles rigorous intellectual debate. And the harm is not limited to professors and students while they are on campus. Our future civic and scientific leaders surely will take these values with them after graduation.
A university that has placed its highest premium on the protection of feelings or safe intellectual space has abandoned its core mission. The protection of feelings or the creation of safe space rightly might be the foremost goal in some settings, like at a family dinner, but it is not right for a university. Its unambiguous mission must remain the pursuit of truth. John Stuart Mill put it best in his classic work, On Liberty:
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
A university that turns itself into an asylum from controversy has ceased to be a university; it has just become an asylum.