The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech."
An excellent piece in the N.Y. Times Magazine by Prof. Stephen Carter (Yale Law).
An excerpt from Wednesday's article:
What made the congressional hearing so sad was not merely the accusatory quality of the committee's questions, or even the evasive quality of the presidents' answers. It was that the presidents were being asked to interpret their own rules on campus speech — and couldn't.
They're not alone. Existing campus speech rules have led to all sorts of horror stories. Many are true. Because the regulations tend to be standardless — often, deciding what's hateful based on the response of the listener, a so-called "heckler's veto" — they give no fair warning of what's forbidden, leading to such absurdities as stopping a student from passing out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day; or investigating a professor for the sin of stopping to watch a "Back the Blue" rally; or rebuking an untenured lecturer who in a discussion about race showed a documentary that included graphic images of lynching, and read aloud from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Evidently the film, like the letter, included what we're now supposed to call the N-word. (Full disclosure: I've used the word often in my books — fiction and nonfiction alike — and, seemingly only yesterday, I used it in the pages of The Times.)
But even were the rules crystal clear, they'd have both students and faculty looking over their shoulders, wondering which of their ideas might bring forth not disagreement — the mother's milk of academic life — but condemnation from their fellows and, most dreaded of all, investigation. The inculcation of fear as part of daily work on campus is very McCarthyist; more McCarthyist, even, than hauling college presidents before Congress to try to force them to place even more speech off limits. Because having to look over your shoulder is something you contend with every day….
I agree with the philosopher Seana Valentine Shiffrin that when we search for the justifications for free speech, we tend to overlook its value in crafting our own identities, the way that a self can try on ideas like clothes, to discover which fit best. Sometimes the ideas will be beautiful; sometimes they'll be ugly; sometimes they'll look better on one person than another.
This process of testing ideas should be encouraged, particularly among the young. But it carries risks, not least because of what we might call influencers, who wind up dictating which ideas it's fashionable to wear and which should be tossed out. When large majorities of college students report pressure to self-censor, this is what they're talking about….
