Journal of Free Speech Law: "The Future of Free Speech: Curiosity Culture," by Olivia Eve Gross

A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.

The article is here; the Introduction:

Before entering college in 2020, I thought cancel culture existed solely in the domain of celebrities, newsmakers, social media, consumer brands, and large corporations. I first became aware of the phenomenon in its original context: a TV show was canceled in response to a backlash after its star committed an abhorrent act. In another case, a product-endorsement contract was canceled ahead of public outcry over the spokesperson's reported behavior. As these scenarios grew more common, I assumed cancellations only took place in the realm of the famous.

At the start of my first year at the University of Chicago, I learned that cancel culture had infiltrated campus life. Students were being shunned for voicing an unpopular view in class, excoriated on social media over a pun, or shamed for asking a question because they were of the "wrong" identity for the subject matter. My campus wasn't unique—if anything, Chicago does more than almost any other university to advocate and defend principles of free speech.

This revelation was as bewildering as it was upsetting. The fundamental mission of a liberal-arts education is to promote diverse perspectives, thoughtful debate, intellectual growth, and, hopefully, classmate camaraderie in the shared experience of it all. And my university does a lot to support this objective. But students themselves are now stifling the university experience by using a variety of methods to either silence speech or ensure that certain speech receives social punishment. Such trends have detrimental consequences for the campus community at-large, eroding the university's formative environment of speech. In polling conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, more than half of students (56 percent) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done.

Comments

[Voize]

Protecting your right to speak doesn't require protecting you from the consequences of that speech. If what you say is cruel or hateful and as a result your peers shun you, maybe the fault is with you.

[Absaroka]

I have heard that a lot recently. Can you discuss how you view McCarthyism through that lens? Because it seems like pretty parallel to me: McCarthyism was the cancel culture of it's day. So I'm unclear if you think McCarthyism was hunky-dory, or if you can differentiate it in some way.

(unrelated aside: kind of ironic that anti-semitism was one of the things that would get you de-platformed in 1974. How fashions change)

[CJColucci]

There was a lot more than shunning going on. For example, if people don't want to watch a movie because Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay (there's an old Hollywood joke about the ambitious starlet who was so dumb she f****d the writer), they're well within their rights to stay home, and if that hurts Trumbo's career, that's just the breaks. Nobody has subpoenaed Kevin Sorbo or Sean Penn to investigate their politics.

[Absaroka]

"Nobody has subpoenaed Kevin Sorbo or Sean Penn to investigate their politics"

Fair enough, but ... careers were ruined. Writers were adopting pseudonyms, etc. ISTM there is a lot of overlap in the Venn diagrams.

[Sarcastr0]

McCarthyism was very bad.

It was also organized and led by the US Government.

The solution is the government shouldn't do that.

The solution is not that the government should start to force people to associate with someone with unpopular views, lest they be blacklisted.

[Absaroka]

"It was also organized and led by the US Government."

People's careers were being ruined by pure private action. Sometimes even for profit. No government action there.

[Sarcastr0]

Oh the action was purely private.

The initiative itself was suggested, supported, organized and lead by the US government.

Backlisting would be legal today. It would also be bad.

There's a ton of middle ground between 'I don't want to deal with someone who thinks like this' and the blacklist.

[Absaroka]

"The initiative itself was suggested, supported, organized and lead by the US government."

Well, kinda, and kinda not: "Even during the period of its strictest enforcement from the late 1940s to late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit nor was it easily verifiable. Instead, it was the result of numerous individual decisions implemented by studio executives and was not the result of formal legal statute. Nevertheless, the blacklist directly damaged or ended the careers and incomes of scores of persons working in film, television, and radio."

(wiki)

Now, that started because people refused to testify for HUAC, sure. But it was private action.

And later abuses - I gave you the link - didn't involve the government at all. The infamous grocer from Syracuse was doing it for profit. Read Nizer's memoir.

[Sarcastr0]

“it was the result of numerous individual decisions implemented by studio executives and was not the result of formal legal statute. Nevertheless, the blacklist directly damaged or ended the careers and incomes of scores of persons working in film, television, and radio”
does not mean it was not
suggested, supported, organized and lead by the US government.

Individual decisions, each following the finger pointed by HUAC and associated minions.

"Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears" is not a good book. It is largely uninformative and not terribly engaging. But it does give a decent summary of that era in Hollywood.
I also liked when it talked about the making of Jaws.

[Absaroka]

Well, we disagree on the history.

But let's go with your version ... is a lynch mob worse when it is egged on by the sheriff? If you are the poor SOD dangling, do you care?

(and again, for the third time, read Nizer or Faulk. I can't spoon feed you any more than that.)

[Sarcastr0]

I mean, it seems like a is the case with a lot of history, we're each picking a narrative.
My understanding is that at that nationalistic and conformist time, government as leader without any actual force of law was more of a thing than it is today.
That does not absolve individuals who chose paranoia, self-interest, and nationalism.

See also de facto and de jure Jim Crow.

I don’t understand your what your hypothetical is getting at – do you think you need to demonstrate to me that the backlist was bad? I’m not defending it, nor am I defending a similar hypothetical initiative.
Except there is no similar initiative to the blacklist happening today.

And it would be an authoritarian overreach for the government to attempt to use the government to directly prevent private choices like that. Like so many speech issues.

And neither is this a discrimination issue. It’s not some immutable demographic; it’s based on specific individualized choices.

[Absaroka]

I'm talking about the actual history, not a hypothetical. As I said above "People’s careers were being ruined by pure private action". I have given you the references.

I have read both Nizer's and Faulk's books. They agree on the facts. I have not read anything that disputes their view of things. They proved their allegations in court. I don't know what else I can say.

[Sarcastr0]

I don't think we're even that crossways - you're using your narrative as a way to exclude mine, but they're not at odds.

1. At that nationalistic and conformist time, government could act as leader without any actual force of law.
and
2. Individuals chose paranoia, self-interest, and nationalism.

It can be both-and. Both are legit but-for causes. There's enough blame to spread around.
-----------------------
As DMN pointed out, there is no modern blacklist. The closest we got is University Presidents being hauled before Congress. But part of their job is to be a lightning rod so its not the same level even then.

[Voize]

I don't think careers are being ruined when the writer says that the listeners to some on-campus speech find it objectionable and exclude the speaker. Nobody is convening the Campus Unamerican Activities Committee and jailing uncooperative witnesses who fail to turn on their buddies. I think someone just isn't being welcomed into a group that doesn't want them.

You may feel that the clique would get more out of their university experience if they were more inclusive, and maybe they would, but at most that means they are making a bad decision. They are as free to make that bad decision about who to associate with as the speaker was to make a bad decision about what to say.

[David Nieporent]

Nobody is convening the Campus Unamerican Activities Committee

Several university presidents were called before congressional committees in the past year, and some ultimately lost their jobs, because of their stances on campus speech.

[Ed Grinberg]

Several university presidents were called before congressional committees in the past year, and some ultimately lost their jobs, because of their stances on campus speech.

You make it sound as though these university presidents bravely "stood up for free speech" and were punished for it. Not quite:

[T]he deep problem with their testimonies was not fundamentally about calls for genocide or free speech. It was about double standards — itself a form of antisemitism, but one that can be harder to detect.
The double standard is this: Colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.
...
[T]here’s an institutional hypocrisy...
...
If...they want to continue to forbid and punish speech they find offensive, then the rule must apply for all offensive speech, including calls to wipe out Israel or support homicidal resistance.
...
[T]he time for having it both ways, at the expense of Jews, must come to an end now.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/antisemitism-college-free-speech.html

If you've been happily censoring left & right for years (decades?), but, suddenly, "stand up for free speech" when the target of the openly-genocidal hate speech happens to be a certain group that you don't care as much about ... sorry, but you are not much of a "fighter for free speech" -- you are a hypocrite (and an antisemite).

[Voize]

Liz Magill of U Penn resigned as a result of the hearings last December. Claudine Gay of Harvard weathered the storm with Harvard's support, but later resigned after charges of plagiarism. Sally Kornbluth is still president of MIT.

Elise Stefanik had asked all 3 whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their codes of conduct. They answered awkwardly but consistently with the First Amendment that would apply if they were public schools, that pure speech that was not an imminent threat is protected. The pressure to resign wasn't due to the content of their speech, but to their reluctance to police the speech of others.

It seems to have had an effect. A few months later Columbia president Minouche Shafik appeared before the same committee and agreed that hate speech should be punished. She ultimately found it too difficult a fence to straddle though, and after twice calling in the NYPD to clear and arrest protesters she was under attack from both sides and resigned last August.

I agree it is a threat when the power of government is used in this way to coerce private institutions into restricting speech in ways that the government is forbidden to do. Those who complain that the administration was pressuring social media companies to censor speech should be lining up to vote Stefanik and her allies on both sides of the aisle out of office.

[markm23]

You're ignoring that these University presidents all had a long history of suppressing _some_ hate speech - but antisemitism and support for terrorism, mass murder, kidnapping, torture, rape, and war crimes was just fine with them.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Yeah. That was chilling, and fully reminiscent of the McCarthy era—but mostly of the McCarthy era in decline, when it had already gone so far that it became vulnerable to defiance.

Those university presidents would have served themselves better if they had defied Congress. Showed up, and politely told their interrogators to stick to politics, and leave university administration to the presidents.

[Krayt]

As if to prove the old meme theory politics and religions are the same phenomena with a tiny twist (memeplexes, collections of memes that evolve to get critical mass to seize power) some genius a few years back inhaled some of the worst aspects of religion into politics.

Cancel culture AKA social ostracism is just one.

Another is “if you are not with us, you are against us.” This is part of the anti-racisist concept.

Another is requiring creed repetition. Oh boy, hasn’t that been fun lately.

Some of this is crap The Emperor’s New Clothes warned about, 1984, Fahrenheit 451.

Somehow bold, loud statements we’re correct, unlike all those other periods of history, is supposed to make it OK.

Yes, loud effrontery proves you’re ok, unlike past eras of Nazis, or theocracies, who also used it to silence people not of your memeplex.

You're so certain! It is different from theocracies or Nazis. Oh wait, they were certain, too.

Not you guys. Not you guys!

[Sarcastr0]

What?

[David Nieporent]

Another is “if you are not with us, you are against us.” This is part of the anti-racisist concept.

No, it's not. It's part of the human nature concept. Anti-racists neither invented nor popularized that idea.

[Ed Grinberg]

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/514251-how-silence-is-violence-threatens-true-free-speech-and-public-civility/

[Brett Bellmore]

That they didn't invent it doesn't mean it isn't a critical part of 'anti-racism'.