The Virtual Campus is the Biggest Threat to the Free Exchange of Ideas
By Suzanne Nossel, PEN America
The real crisis in campus free speech is only beginning. Academics, pundits and politicians have for years decried rising intolerance among college students manifesting in calls to cancel controversial lectures or punish faculty for offensive utterances. In recent weeks protests have erupted over a Skidmore faculty member spotted at a pro-police demonstration and a series of incidents involving professors using words and terms offensive to certain students. Yet a much more serious and widespread threat to campus speech now lurks: namely, that as a growing number of colleges transition to all-remote learning in order to evade COVID-19, and others constrict in-person classes and social opportunities, the campus’ role as a meeting ground for students from wide-ranging backgrounds, experiences and ideologies evaporates.
With quadrangles, dining halls and lecture rooms on many campuses sitting empty, hundreds of thousands of students are losing out on a signature of the American college experience; close encounters with peers who think differently from themselves. In an increasingly stratified society where most American children attend schools where over 75 percent of pupils come from a single racial group, college is the first place where many young people encounter the diversity that characterizes the U.S. population as a whole.
While there has been heavy focus on the ways in which remote learning will impair students’ academic and social progress, the consequences for free speech and open discourse are also potentially grave. When we consider threats to free speech, Americans instinctively think of the First Amendment and its prohibitions on government interference with open expression. Those protections prevent public universities from policing which opinions are afforded a platform on campus or dictating what professors can and cannot say in the classroom. Many private universities have adopted a similarly hands-off approach toward adjudicating speech, consistent with precepts of academic freedom.
But a look at why free expression is embedded in the constitution and has been fortified by a long line of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, reveals that the underlying rationales behind the safeguarding of free speech demand much more than simply keeping government interference at bay. Going back to John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica, free speech has been recognized as a catalyst to finding the truth, in that the rough-and-tumble of ideas brushing up against one another exposes fallacies and helps facts and sound principles emerge by force of wisdom. James Madison, who authored the First Amendment, saw free speech as elemental to self-government, in that people needed to deliberate over a wide range of ideas and opinions in order to choose worthy leaders and sound policies. Justice Louis Brandeis saw free speech as an antidote to “the bondage of irrational fears” including those that drive bigotry and prejudice. More recent scholars cite free speech as a foundation for technological innovation, artistic expression and creativity.
Making good on the promise of free speech as an enabler of social goods requires more than simply keeping official encroachments at bay. It demands robust debate, the dismantling barriers that impair open exchange, amplifying previously silenced voices and bursting insulated bubbles that filter out unfamiliar or challenging notions. While no campus is a perfect marketplace of ideas, the face-to-face exchanges, heterogeneity of student bodies and faculty and emphasis on inquiry render college a time of maximum exposure to wide-ranging views and a golden opportunity to test and evolve your own thinking. While colleges are sometimes accused of brainwashing students toward the liberal leanings of most faculty, a study of over 7,000 undergraduates at 120 colleges in 2018 revealed that most first-year students grew substantially more appreciative of both conservative and liberal attitudes after spending time on campus, leading researchers to conclude that the college experience helps students become more open-minded.
Many of the bonuses of being together in a room vanish on zoom. Native New Yorkers don’t learn how to live with roommates from the Texas panhandle. Late night debates in the common room over god, sexual preferences, Iranian nukes and universal basic income don’t happen. Virtual seminar rooms reinforce extant power dynamics by privileging those confident enough to seize the floor without the subtle signs of encouragement that professors or classmates can offer in real life. It becomes harder to ask a question when you cannot see that others with furrowed foreheads likely share your doubts.
Instead of making new friends, incoming students have little choice but to stick with those from their hometowns or connected to family networks. Upperclassmen are now assembling self-contained pods in rental houses and apartments to congregate for their remote learning, a live version of the atomization that occurs as we each curate our feeds and friend groups online. Many of the flashpoints for encounters across difference — boisterous events, the chalking of slogans on walkways, postering for political groups and tabling outside the student union on behalf of candidates and causes — give way to a ghostly silence when students are stuck at home or enjoying a grab-and-go version of campus life. Buffeted by economic crisis, quarantines and travel restrictions, more students are transferring to schools close to home. At a time when changing demographics and our polarized politics place a premium on the ability to navigate across difference, we face the prospect of a generation of students losing out on years of intensive engagement with those unlike themselves.
By grinding so much of our normal lives to a halt, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to focus on previously unseen facets of society, including the heroic role of grocery employees and the risks posed by invisible aerosols. When it comes to campus speech, we have focused on how to combat outbreaks and patterns of censoriousness, rather than on how to sustain the backdrop of free-flowing interchanges that help shepherd students toward adulthood. In spotlighting only infringements to free speech, we risk taking for granted the vital portal that in-person college provides to generations of young who hear out new ideas and learn how to engage in reasoned debate. As the current crisis prompts debate over the future of higher education we should keep sight of the essential role of the campus as a training ground for exercising free speech rights in a diverse society.
Suzanne Nossel is CEO of PEN America and author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech For All.
