Abstract
Oh, to be a voice of common sense in an age of uncommon emotional intensity. In an age when, it too often appears, we enjoy no common sense of things. Professor Sigal R. Ben-Porath has written a thoughtfully modest book, the very modesty of which is its greatest asset and weakness. Free Speech on Campus is a valiant effort to create a pedagogical center that will hold at a time when college campuses are coming apart at the seams.
The gist of Ben-Porath’s work is a plea for what she calls ‘inclusive freedom’. With this idea, she would make a unified and coherent whole greater than the sum of its parts. Inclusive freedom is
an approach to free speech on campus that takes into account the necessity of protecting free speech in order to protect democracy and the pursuit of knowledge while recognizing the equal necessity of making sure that all are included in the ensuing conversation. (p. 12)
She seeks to find common ground between those who ‘love free speech (and ridicule the vulnerable, whiny students who demand its curtailment)’ and those who ‘respect identity (and fume at First Amendment purists who, from their privileged ivory tower, refuse to recognize the power differences it creates)’ (p. 12).
But as the term ‘inclusive freedom’ itself suggests, the defense of this idea is necessarily caveat-driven. We should not limit speech (‘Curtailing speech to prevent controversy is both unjustified and ineffective . . .’); instead, we should ‘develop and enforce practices meant to ensure that all can express their views’ (p. 44). On both a broadly conceptual and on a narrowly syntactic level, Ben-Porath wants to reconcile one with the other. Yet without more elaborate philosophical underpinnings or more concrete suggestions for implementation than Ben-Porath has given herself room to provide, the idea can too easily devolve into a slogan dependent on its own circularity. Inclusive freedom is ‘an unwavering commitment . . . that supports speech in all its variety’ (p. 105). Inclusive freedom too soon and too often becomes an unwavering commitment to inclusive freedom.
Ben-Porath is certainly right that demographic changes on college campuses make the idea of inclusive freedom all the more compelling. Today, colleges and universities continue to ‘pursu[e] truth through honest and open-minded research and teaching’, but they also ‘serv[e] a diverse population’ (p. 45). This is, for Ben-Porath, ‘the revised social mission of the university’ (p. 45). She is mostly right, I think, that the two sides of the mission coin ‘are best understood as reinforcing each other rather than standing in tension with teach other (though tensions can arise in specific cases)’ (p. 45). But as the parenthetical caveat suggests, free speech on campus may be an issue best understood through close analysis of specific cases. It is at the margins where the fraying begins, however commonsensical the center is.
In Chapters 1 and 2, Ben-Porath ‘survey[s] the landscape of free speech on American campuses today’ and ‘develops a framework for inclusive freedom in response to the changing mission of higher education in the United States’ (p. 2). This framework, as already noted, ‘reject[s] the tension commonly emphasized in the free speech debate between inclusion and freedom’ (p. 4). Chapter 3 ‘consider[s] the place of identity politics in the debate about free speech on campus, especially in the context of the activities of student groups’ (pp. 4–5). Chapter 4 ‘moves from the quad [that is, non-classroom activities] to the classroom’ (p. 5). Whether speech occurs on the quad or in the classroom, Ben-Porath considers how the campus can provide access for all students without suppressing free expression. In this framework, inclusive freedom is an alternative to the demand for civility. Ben-Porath concludes with a few practical suggestions for preserving inclusive freedom.
On the quad: Ben-Porath argues that colleges should protect and encourage free speech. Importantly, she contends that ‘[s]tudents should not be perceived or encouraged to act in ways that insulate them from conflicting views; exposure to opposition and disagreement should not be included in the notion of harm from which students must be protected’ (p. 48). Besides, Ben-Porath argues,
[c]ensorship of legally protected speech is harmful not only to democratic ideals but also to the minority groups that the censorship seeks to protect. Once censorship based on viewpoint becomes part of the campus procedures and regulation, there is no guarantee that it will stop with the specific perspectives it was introduced to block. (p. 61)
This does not mean – caveat ahead – that colleges should not protect students from ‘verbal aggression’ (p. 52). In her view, ‘members of historically marginalized or currently vulnerable populations . . . are more commonly looking for a space where their voices can be heard and their identities or visions properly represented, affirmed, and expressed’ (p. 52). Rejecting Jeremy Waldron’s (2012) contention that hate speech constitutes a form of group defamation appropriately subject to state regulation (pp. 34–64), Ben-Porath counters that
[t]he notion of harm recognized through the inclusive freedom approach . . . should not lead to a culture of victimhood in which those who claim to be harmed always have the upper hand in policy debates. Instead, the broad notion of harm calls for an expanded set of tools to respond to harms experienced by students. (p. 68)
In the classroom: Ben-Porath rejects the administrative curtailment of speech in favor of more inclusive pedagogical practices. She suggests that ‘it is academic freedom, rather the more general contours of free speech, that should guide classroom (and lab and clinic) work’ (p. 87). Because ‘instructors are bound by intellectual honesty’ (p. 87), the classroom is a more limiting and demanding – that is, more speech-constraining – arena of freedom. Thus, ‘there is no room for questioning scientific evidence, even if one’s ideological position runs counter to the information laid out in class. Similarly, there is no need to accommodate religious or ideological objections to accepted knowledge’ (p. 88). But Ben-Porath goes on to stress that ‘college teaching should contribute to the development of civic skills and values’ (p. 87). Thus, the speech-constraining nature of academic freedom is offset by the inclusive side of inclusive freedom.
Throughout, Ben-Porath puts to good use the distinction between dignitary safety (‘the sense of of being an equal member of the community and of being invited to contribute to a discussion as a valued participant’) and intellectual safety (‘the refusal to listen to challenges to one’s views or to consider opposing viewpoints’) (p. 62). Although here, too, the quest for reconciliation can sound too conciliatory: ‘Challenging intellectual safety, or the attachment to one’s unquestioned beliefs, must be done while maintaining conditions in which every student’s dignity can be affirmed’ (pp. 62–63).
The same dignity/intellectual safety distinction is relied upon by Eamonn Callan (2016) in his essay on ‘Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces’. Like Ben-Porath, Callan believes that an education worth having will inevitably make some students intellectually unsafe. But Callan is more precise when he describes the corrosive effects: ‘A social venue is ‘dignity safe’ for a social group if its members can participate without reasonable worries that they are likely to be humiliated by others’. Humiliation can be effected over time, Callan writes, ‘through a pattern of subtle acts of derogation’; it is experienced not just in discrete acts but ‘by the aggregate impact of many small cues’ – by a litany of microaggressions (which may not be intentional); and such a pattern of subtle derogatory acts is most likely to happen ‘when the equal dignity of some group has only precariously become part of of a given society’s proclaimed self-image after a history of prolonged and blatant oppression’ (p. 68).
This brings us back to Ben-Porath’s focus on demographic change and the revised mission of higher education. The heightened threat of humiliation faced by minorities on college campuses calls for measures to address the countless unkind cuts of performance-impairing residual prejudice. Callan puts his faith in civility, which he considers a complex skill that can be taught like any other complex skill. Ben-Porath is not so sanguine. For her, civility
requires both too much and too little: it requires too little in that it is based on norms of respectability and reasonableness rather than on substance (which could make it acceptable, for instance, to express racist views as long as it is done in a civil manner); it requires too much in that it further marginalizes those whose anger, frustration, and other emotions are deemed unacceptable. (p. 70)
Always thoughtful, Ben-Porath’s work will incite discussion and challenge, as indeed any good treatment of this subject should. A few of my responses:
On the quad: I do not think a college campus ought to be equated with a public forum open to all comers. Even if a state-supported college establishes a free-speech zone, the use of this area is justifiably cabined by the designated goals of higher education, which for almost every campus will include a dedication to individual flourishing unhampered by discriminatory or hateful speech. The college campus is a student’s home. And, as Callan (2016) observes, ‘a plausible condition of being at home in any social environment is the knowledge that one is dignity safe’ (p. 72). My own home is open to rough-and-tumble discussion (though there is considerably less of it now that my children, alas, have found homes of their own). It is not a safe place, however, for verbal aggression in substance or form. Students have been invited, perhaps even courted, to make campus their home; the humiliation effected by hateful speech calls into question whether that invitation was made in good faith (see Callan, 2016: 67). It is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that students want only the opportunity to be heard. Some students (and faculty members) want others (whether outside speakers or other students) not to be heard – because the injury caused by hateful speech, they believe, is not remedied by more speech. Tensions do arise between freedom and inclusion when hateful speech undermines the assurance that all members of the educational community enjoy equal status.
I understand the slippery slope here, but the point of the demographic changes so ardently pursued by the academy is that they call upon colleges and universities to make real changes in the way they do their business. Ben-Porath notes throughout that ‘free speech on campus is not just another instance of free speech in the public sphere of a democratic nation. It is a special case in a special context . . .’ (p. 103). Agreed. It is a special case – no less so than the workplace – that calls for special, if sometimes slippery, solutions. Perhaps Ben-Porath is right when she says that group defamation does not merit a legislative response, but Waldron is concerned with public hate speech generally (and, I assume, with criminal sanctions), not with the special case of free speech on campus. And the slippery slope? Well, it runs in both directions. What speech can’t we tolerate?
In the classroom: Ben-Porath is right that civility alone is no answer. But, in my opinion, this is so not because ‘[c]ivility constrains speech’ but because ‘it replicates exclusive practices without providing the students with the breadth of expression they could use in class’ (p. 97). I think that civility is no answer because it does not constrain enough speech. We should teach civility, but we should move beyond (by no mean trivial) matters of etiquette to teach students how to listen to one another. The goal in the classroom ought to be to encourage active listening. This too is a teachable skill. If students are waiting for a classroom colleague to finish speaking so that they can make a point, something is pedagogically amiss. Why not call upon students to restate a previous student’s discussion point? Or to build upon a previous point? Why not call upon students to formulate a counter-argument to their own points of view? Active listening is an exercise in responsiveness. As such, it works to create a dignity-safe classroom. It teaches students that others (and their viewpoints) have a valid claim to equal representation. It teaches students (and reminds their professors) that we find ‘truth’ indirectly, by contraries. More important, it teaches students and professors alike that education is not really about truth; it is about the pursuit of truth. It offers humility as an antidote to humiliation (see Headley, 2017).
Humility ought also to lead us to temper Ben-Porath’s edict that ‘there is no room for questioning scientific evidence’. Have we not learned by now just how misleading and flat-out wrong ‘accepted knowledge’ can be? I assume that Ben-Porath means that scientific evidence should only be refuted by scientific evidence. But this assumes that science itself is not ideologically driven, not a dutiful creature of cultural norms and biases – including, at times, hateful racist and sexist ones.
Two final caveats of my own: First, I wish Ben-Porath had provided a more elaborate section on the practical classroom application of her inclusive freedom framework, in a sense reaching her conclusion more inductively. The proof of her framework’s value needs hands-on testing. Second, and relatedly, Ben-Porath argues throughout her book that ‘difficult cases should not be the main lens to inform the way colleges respond to ongoing issues of speech on their campuses’ (p. 121, fn. 12). But distinguishing difficult cases is not so cut-and-dry. Ben-Porath writes that Condoleezza Rice, who was disinvited as a commencement speaker at Rutgers University, was ‘hardly a controversial speaker’ (p. 15). But obviously, for some she was. And it is the difficult cases, I think, that would best serve the goal of formulating practical applications of inclusive freedom and, by doing so, bring greater precision and rigor to this important contribution to the free-speech debate.