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The Daily Signal
5 Ways to
Convince College Students That Free Speech Matters
Bruce Ashford
July 20, 2017
In recent days, college students have shouted down, pepper-sprayed,
punched, and otherwise shut down the campus guests whose ideas they
considered offensive.
The most prominent recent cases have included Milo Yiannopoulos
(University of California, Berkeley), Charles Murray (Middlebury
College), and Heather Mac Donald (Claremont McKenna College), but a
number of institutions have disinvited scheduled speakers and
disciplined students or professors for expressing their ideas.
Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Williams University, and
other schools succumbed to student pressure by disinviting scheduled
speakers whose views some students find offensive.
The College of William & Mary, the University of Colorado, and
DePaul University went so far as to discipline students who criticized
affirmative action. The University of Kansas even disciplined a
professor for criticizing the National Rifle Association.
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Making a Fresh Case for Free Speech
Unless we want this depressing trend to continue indefinitely until
free speech has been shuttered—not only on university campuses, but in
coffee shops, churches, and public squares—Americans must make anew the
case for free speech.
Many of this generation’s college students are skeptical of legal
precedents establishing free speech. They have been taught, from a very
young age, to discourage bullying and to protect others against
intolerant or offensive speech.
Little do they know that the protection of free speech actually helps
the very people who have been marginalized or offended by ensuring that
those people can speak freely against the offense.
For many college students, though, “free speech” is a very abstract
right, one that many of them lack the motivation to defend.
They are not convinced, and we must convince them.
We can’t merely say, “Free speech is necessary in a democratic society.
Grow up and get over it, just like we did when we were in college.”
For one, some instances of public speech are genuinely hateful and
therefore deeply disturbing, and we should not make light of the
negative psychological impact of offensive and hateful speech.
Moreover, a condescending reprimand serves to alienate rather than to
persuade.
How to Make the Case on Campus
So, how do we make the case?
Instead of reprimanding students or merely citing the Constitution, we
should also try to persuade them by making a practical argument about
the negative consequences of restricting free speech on college
campuses.
Consider these five negative consequences:
1. It defeats the purpose of going to college in the first place.
As the University of Chicago put it in a statement defending free
speech: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not
support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers
because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone
the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals retreat
from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
One of the purposes of higher education is to welcome students of all
backgrounds and teach them how to discuss and debate a wide variety of
ideas. The restriction of free speech undermines that purpose.
2. It erodes the free and democratic nature of American society.
Public universities should serve as microcosms of democratic society.
Michael Bloomberg and Charles Koch put it well:
The purpose of a college education isn’t to reaffirm students’ beliefs,
it is to challenge, expand, and refine them—and to send students into
the world with minds that are open and questioning, not closed and
self-righteous. This helps young people discover their talents and
prepare them for citizenship in a diverse, pluralistic democratic
society. American society is not always a comfortable place to be; the
college campus shouldn’t be, either.
3. It encourages hypocrisy and undermines our ability to persuade.
If free speech is suppressed, you won’t know who people really are.
People who hold hateful or offensive views will hide who they are, and
you’ll never be able to persuade them of the wrongness of their views.
4. It ignores the fact that social progress often depends on free
speech.
Many of the ideas that most Americans cherish—such as racial and gender
equality—were once considered offensive. But they are no longer
considered offensive precisely because courageous American citizens
were allowed to display the merits of those ideas in public discussion
and debate.
5. It tilts our society in an authoritarian direction.
First, if universities are free today to ban unintentionally offensive
racial expressions, they will be free tomorrow to ban any sort of
critique or evaluation of social groupings. Second, ideological winds
tend to change direction. Students who are eager to suppress other
people’s speech may one day find their own speech being suppressed.
As legal scholar Eugene Volokh has noted, Christians could be banned
from criticizing tenets of Islam, and vice versa. Pacifists could be
restricted from criticizing the military. Conservatives could be
disciplined for arguing that there are biological differences between
men and women.
In two ways, suppression breeds further suppression.
For Americans who are Christians, there is yet another reason to
promote free speech: We want to be free to preach the Christian gospel,
even though many people find Christianity offensive and discriminatory.
And if we do not stem the tide of free speech restrictions, we might
find ourselves in a situation one day where our nation’s universities
and public squares keep us from speaking about that which is most
precious to us.
That is something upon which Christian Americans of all stripes should
be able to agree.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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