Forgive some repetition here of often-expressed thoughts but it seems time once again to point out just how misdirected most of the long-running public conversation about campuses and academic freedom tends to be.
It’s tempting to just think that Conor Friedersdorf, Yascha Mounk, Jonathan Haidt and many other commenters who have been on the case when college students complain about offensive Halloween decorations, decrying this rise of a dangerous threat to freedom of speech, are just kind of strategically stupid and thus have persistently misrecognized the actual source and magnitude of the real threats to what they claim to value. Hence (for example) their lack of major forewarning about or persistent attention to conservative governments across the United States taking dramatic moves to suppress speech not just in institutions directly funded by governments but in privately owned platforms and by private citizens, whether it’s legal or not to do so.
Or maybe they weren’t strategically mistaking trivial concerns for real ones but got locked into the attention-getting, click-seeking habits of the extremely online or the payoffs available for “professor who gets on the lecture circuit for wealthy center-right organizations that want to hear chilling true tales of the menace of woke Oberlin students”.
I think there’s a deeper formative schtick here, one that was pioneered by the long-time Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff. I enjoyed reading Hentoff’s jazz commentary, but his main gig was being a free speech absolutist scold. The problem with Hentoff, however, was that he had absolutely no capacity to think systematically about speech, about expression, about representation, and showed very little ability therefore to think strategically about the danger to free speech. He just reacted to incidents. Moreover, like many of his descendants who purport to be primarily devoted to free speech, he showed no actual appetite for pluralism, for diversity of thought, for people who thought in ways really different from his own. Free speech was something that could only talked about in terms of rights, in terms of negative liberties, and yet even in that sense he didn’t seem to be able to think about the power of government and the power of corporations as different kinds of threats from those posed by ordinary people saying “this person should not be on that platform” or “nobody should go to that event, because the speaker is anathema”. He especially had absolutely no idea how to engage the thought that there was a basic difference between what an ordinary citizen might say and what a columnist at the New York Times might say in terms of power, that differential access to platforms, publications and tools for disseminating speech that were gated by corporations and editors was an issue that any free speech advocate had to care about if they were remotely serious.
Most contemporary free-speech scolds are like Hentoff in that their actual personal consumption of speech, of ideas, of art, of culture, operates in incredibly narrow bands. What often seems to be the case—sometimes quite explicitly—is that this group of advocates is mostly motivated by making sure their speech is not interfered with. If they focus on aggrieved college students and social media activists, it’s because that’s where they perceive a threat to themselves or to their most valuable clients and audiences. So they didn’t see that the threat of aggressive governmental intervention in speech in universities and civic organizations, of the kind now unfolding in Florida and other states, is and always has been thousands of times more dangerous than the Oberlin kid complaining about the taco bar appropriating Mexican culture.
That’s not a new threat, either. Even for speech advocates who narrowly invest in attention to academic freedom, there’s a strong tendency to just completely forget that in the 1950s onward into the 1970s American faculty were fired and censured for any suspicion of association with Marxism. Public universities in the South frequently barred any discussion of civil rights and any speakers associated with the civil rights movement until into the 1970s—while also hiring a huge number of new faculty who were expressly charged with teaching history and current affairs in ways that were favorable to Southern segregationists.
I’ve written about this a number of times, but if there’s an actual moment of relative heterodoxy in American universities where a fairly wide variety of political and social points-of-view shared space in humanities and social science departments without fear of sanction from above or activist attention from elsewhere it was incredibly brief and deeply unstable, from maybe the mid-1980s to the early 2000s at best. And even then there were many faculty who had to deal with attempts by colleagues, administrators and publics to shut them up or kick them out.
As just one example, I was deeply surprised recently to find out that one of my absolute favorite courses that I took as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s, on the history of sexuality, was not a long-time offering in the catalogue but was in fact the first time that professor had taught the class due to prior opposition from his departmental colleagues. That professor survived an attempt to deny him tenure only because students protested, and eventually moved to another department in order to find a more supportive institutional environment. I literally can’t think of a more brilliantly taught class I’ve experienced just in purely technical terms, quite aside from the subject matter, and yet it was barely allowed.
But the current campaigns by Ron DeSantis and other state-level actors—and by Republicans in the federal government—don’t worry the Usual Suspects so much because they don’t themselves feel threatened by what’s going on. Probably they feel tempted by it, in fact, much as free-speech crusader Cary Nelson couldn’t help himself when the chance came to crush the academic freedom of someone whose ideas he didn’t like. The temptation runs: “Here comes someone who will really clean out the academy and civil society and public culture of all those annoying people on social media, all those social justice warriors. Taco bars will be safe again!” It wouldn’t be the first time that people who orient as centrists or mainstream liberals manage to sit on their hands while the reds and the hippies get roughed up, figuring that when it’s all over, the centrists will be returned to their former place of assumed authority rather than just being next on the target list.
That’s the ultimate blindspot here. The Usual Suspects know only about the intersection of speech and power in terms of how they can envision freedom from a specific set of civic and disciplinary consequences for themselves and people like themselves. The vision of the Usual Suspects—their favored modality of speech that they’re trying to defend—is pugilistic, contentious, a kind of perpetual jostling between those qualified few who inhabit the meritocratic heights in the specific agora that they convene and control. Heterodox Academy is always willing to convene a healthy debate between its favored members who in fact only differ on minor variations of the same orthodoxy and call that a model of a free and diverse speech community.
A real advocate of more speech from all possible perspectives—an aspirant member of a “heterodox academy” or a really open society—should demonstrate an active love for the widest range of ideas, approaches to artistic representation, ways of speaking and thinking aloud. Not the conventional “I will defend to the death their right to say it” addressed to ideological enemies, but pegging an attachment for free thought to work and statements and performances that aren’t even something to agree or disagree with, that are just perpendicular to or remote to your own habits of thought and expression. They should be aficionados who are more consumed by the pursuit of all the ideas, arguments, art, culture, perspectives and possibilities than they are by hectoring people about speech rights. Protection of the right to speak ought to be about protecting that wide-angle pursuit of all things said and thought and represented.
Power is not something these folks are prepared to think about systematically or with any kind of strategic vision about relative threats to liberty for all. They’re not working to cultivate and protect a commons that is vibrantly full of (and loving towards) maximum pluralism of thought, art and belief. Because in fact that is a hard commons to really live within: you are seen and need to see a huge variety of perspectives, ideas, and experiences and find a way to keep from being a source of abrasion and discouragement. You have to develop a really polymorphous sense of what you find interesting—and a really parsimonious vision of what you disdain. I’m not there, most people aren’t, but that’s what I take free speech absolutism—or valuing heterodoxy— to require if you’re sincere about it.
This is really is the quintessential “first they came for X, and I did nothing” situation. The Middlebury audience that was riled up by the appearance of Charles Murray was never going to be coming for anyone, really. Not even a Charles Murray, unless that person’s only livelihood was coming from giving invited talks to small left-leaning liberal arts colleges, in which case, you know, show some entrepreneurial spirit and branch out a little—or play to your audience a bit more.
DeSantis? He’s coming for everything freely spoken and truthfully thought, for art, for beauty, for debate. The Atlantic Monthly and everything else. However narrow the world of your wished-for heterodoxy, however small and well-policed your agora, it’s going to be far smaller and under the heel of a boot in a DeSantis world.
Image credit: "Ron DeSantis" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.