The Price of Free Speech
Berkley chancellor Carol Christ sent a message regarding free speech on campus out to the student body recently. I have no association to Berkley; it showed up in my twitter feed with a snide remark that somehow implied something was amiss. So I read critically, but eventually, I wound up agreeing with here. Here is the message in its entirety.
Dear students, faculty and staff,
This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear: Public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.
But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint — that we’re required to allow it — but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.
Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.
Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community — tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.
We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.
This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.
We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on Oct. 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on Oct. 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.
Sincerely,
Carol Christ
Chancellor
With its opening lines concerning Charlottesville, the memo immediately defends not only healthy dialogue but the extremest fringes of political activity. I became concerned that this memo was cover, not for a broad variation of thought, but for hate and bigotry.
Anyone who walks around with a swastika or related symbols is condoning genocide, and possibly advocating for it. Anyone waving the Confederate flag is advocating the enslavement of African-Americans. Both were on display in Charlottesville. I do not think we should tolerate intolerance, or those who would use freedom of speech to dismantle the very democracy that provides them that freedom.
Christ quotes Mill to provide a philosophical justification of free speech, and I’d like to refute that justification in the context of hateful, violence-inducing speech. First, Mill claims that the truth will always prevail. I agree that eventually it does. But, it can take a long time for truth to prevail, and prior to that victory there can be great suffering. Both Nazism and American slavery were eventually expunged from this earth, but not before they had taken a terrible price.
The second is “extreme skepticism about the right of any authority” to limit speech, or indeed who is the right authority. In government, this objection is valid, but coöpting it into the university is disingenuous. There is very clear authority, both in an executive sense and an intellectual sense. That authority is the faculty and administrative staff, of which Christ is a member. Indeed the very notion of a professor assumes that a knowledgeable few are going to speak, and the ignorant many are going to listen.
But only half of the intellectual discourse at college happens in a classroom. The remainder is through speakers, panels, discussion meetings, clubs, and staying up late discussing heady matters with your dormmates. This free speech is vibrant, exciting, and refutes (or at least counterbalances) the idea of education as knowledge transfer. None of these ideas are even close to the hate speech we saw in Charlottesville, and I’m starting to wonder if she did herself a disservice by immediately invoking the extremest of speech.
Christ encourages her students to “respond to hate speech with more speech”. It’s fair to wonder if speech is strong enough to counter advocacy of violence. Would it be that difficult, or that slippery of a slope, to say that we don’t want Nazis on campus? Christ remains dignified, aloof, and slippery, her language couched in weasel words and unnamed groups. Noxious, abhorrent, odious — I can’t decide if she is refusing to confront the problem, or trusts that we know the problem well and don’t need the hand-holding.
But the more I reread the memo, the more I see that all the right things are there, just presented a little more weakly — or perhaps less explicitly — than one might first expect. Translated, her paragraph on safe spaces might read: We don’t want Nazis on campus, or anywhere for that matter, but given that these hateful ideologies still exist, you’re going to have to learn to deal with them.
And indeed, the more extreme the idea, the stronger the pushback. Anyone advocating for genocide is going to meet an insurmountable wall of resistance, the theory goes. The same free speech that allows the hateful idea to be spoken also ensures that it won’t get very far afterwards. So it seems odd that we’d want to limit the speech that is already the most difficult to promulgate. And conversely, limiting hate speech forces it underground where it cannot be dealt with nearly as directly or effectively. (See: 4chan. Or on second thought, don’t.)
So yes, it’s tempting to wish Christ had more explicitly rejected hate and bigotry. She could have used her power of speech — amplified by her ability to email everyone — to set expectations, but not standards, as to what speech would be warmly received. But Christ has taken a relatively light hand, preferring moral leadership to executive action. She has made it clear, after enough rereading and thought, that the students are expected to reject hate speech in their community. But a subtler point is easily missed: that most speech is not hate speech, and we should listen to that speech openly, thoughtfully, perhaps critically, but never defensively.