BPTL #3
Freedom of Speech
#3: FREEDOM OF SPEECH
In addition to attributing sovereignty to the people, democracy requires education and the free exchange of ideas. During the past week, two separate stories reminded us of the fragile balance between having an open society and tolerating the intolerable. The so-called “fourth estate” is an essential part of government by the people, but information alone is not enough. People also need to learn how to think critically about what they see, hear, and read, a process that entails freedom both inside and outside of classrooms.
On Monday, October 24, 2022, Penn State University cancelled a speech by Gavin McInnes (founder of the Proud Boys) shortly before he was scheduled to speak. According to The Washington Post, McInnes and Alex Stein, a far-right social media performer, were the targets of a protest on campus that became violent. Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi characterized those two as “provocateurs known for their abhorrent views and rhetoric.” The Penn State administration initially said they would host the event “in the interest of promoting free speech” (The New York Times). The Washington Post described The Proud Boys as “a far-right extremist group with a history of violence, known for street brawls with perceived enemies, including the anti-fascist or antifa movement.” Politico reported that Jeremy Bertino, a North Carolina leader of the Proud Boys, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy on October 6, 2022, the first member of the group to admit to the charge stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. One person has been arrested in connection with the Penn State protest by those who opposed the speech. The scheduled event was sponsored by a student group called “Uncensored America” that that was founded by a Penn State student in 2020 with the mission of empowering “young Americans to fight for free speech in order to make American culture free and fun again.”
Also, on October 24, a commentary on Florida House Bill 7 that is related to the principle of free speech, appeared in The Hill (www.the hill.com), a political website based in Washington, D.C. Also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” Bill 7 in the Florida state legislature prohibits “classroom instruction in public schools, colleges, and universities that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels belief in divisive concepts.” The commentary, written by David Wippman (President of Hamilton College) and Glenn C. Altschuler (Professor of American Studies at Cornell University), considers the broader implications not only of Florida’s Bill 7 but of a growing number of attempts by state legislators to “restrict the teaching of critical race theory” as well as other “race and gender-identity related critiques of U.S. society and history.” Lawyers for the state of Florida have responded to charges that Bill 7 violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by claiming that state college curricula and in-class instruction are “government speech,” not “the speech of the educators themselves.” Those lawyers insist that “there is no purported right to academic freedom” and that the state of Florida “has simply chosen to regulate its own speech.”
To what extent does an educational institution have the right to regulate the speech of the people it hires to carry out its mission to educate? Is it just to discipline or fire teachers who claim the academic freedom to pursue the truth with their students even if that pursuit goes against the laws imposed by a state or the rules and regulations of an institution? Wippman and Altschuller put the question in specific, contemporary terms: “Will teachers be disciplined or fired, for example, if they point out that the state’s education policies, ‘going back to the nineteenth century,’ often ‘establish[ed] deeply disparate treatment by race and family income? Or that a criminal statute in Florida prohibited an unmarried interracial couple from ‘habitually living in and occupying the same room at night-time” until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1964? Or that in 2022 a judge struck down Florida’s restrictions on mail-in ballots and drop boxes because they had a disproportionate impact on Black voters?”
Even though some people are likely to dismiss Bill 7 as a way for Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis to gain attention as a potential successor to Donald Trump as the primary leader of the Republican Party, the implications are even broader and more serious. Wippman and Altschuler conclude their commentary this way: “As the American Association of University Professors [AAUP] has recently reminded us, academic freedom is essential for the search for knowledge. For decades, faculty have had primary responsibility for deciding what to teach and how to teach it, subject, of course, to professional standards and peer review.”
These two stories from Monday, October 24 pose philosophical issues that might help shed light on the importance of freedom of speech in general and academic freedom in particular. Let’s begin with a closer look at the statement on academic freedom and tenure by the AAUP, a document that was shaped and endorsed by the premier American philosopher John Dewey. To this day, the 1940 statement by the AAUP stands as the definitive explanation of why academic freedom and tenure are so important. These excerpts are especially relevant:
“The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure and agreement to ensure them in colleges and universities. Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition. Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of rights of the teacher in teaching. It carries with it duties correlative with rights. Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.”
John Dewey is preeminent in American philosophy because he contributed to the important role of education in general and philosophical education in particular, for preparing people to participate as citizens in a democracy. For Dewey, as for the AAUP, the ultimate goal is to promote the common good. Here, again, democracy and ethics go hand in hand. Even elementary school teachers have been strongly influenced by Dewey’s philosophy of education that focuses on teaching students how to think, not what to think. Indoctrination and propaganda have no place in education for democracy, a lesson that citizens, especially lawmakers, from all ends of the political spectrum should keep in mind. The current rhetoric that tries to force us to choose between socialism and fascism is pernicious, especially if we are trying to prepare citizens to live and act in a democracy.
The first news story we considered from October 24 is especially relevant. The students at Penn State who protested and opposed the right of McInnes and Stein to speak on their campus were undermining their own right to free speech. The 1940 AAUP statement clearly says that students—all students—have a fundamental right “to freedom in learning.” They, like the faculty, need to follow the truth wherever it leads, but to do that they must be open to ideas they may not like and must consider opinions they find repulsive. Another philosopher, John Stuart Mill, puts the matter this way: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it robs the human race—posterity as well as the existing generation—those who dissent from the opinion even more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If it is wrong, they lose almost as great a benefit: the clearer perception and more lively impression of truth produced by its collision with error” (On Liberty, Chapter 2 [2.1]).
One may question the wisdom of inviting the likes of McInnes and Stein to a university, but no doubt there are many events on any campus that are worth avoiding. However, preventing the student group “Uncensored America” from holding its meeting seems to be unjustified until the protests turned violent and the meeting itself became a danger to everyone. According to the news reports, the responsibility for that development seems to lie with the protestors, not with the sponsoring group. Ignoring the speakers would probably have been more effective. However, if McInnes actually had something to say, a case to be made, then Mill’s position seems to be reasonable. The goal is simple: hear the case and refute it. That might be a good lesson in critical thinking for all who participate, even if it merely shows the weakness of the rhetoric used by racists, homophobes, and bigots.
The other story from October 24 poses a much greater threat because it shows that the issues at stake are rapidly being turned into laws, especially at the state and local level. Florida’s Bill 7 poses one of the oldest challenges to democracy, the issue of censorship. Already in Plato’s Athens the question of how to educate people for citizenship took center stage, especially when democracy emerged as a viable form of government. If the people are to assume sovereignty, they must be properly educated for that task. In Plato’s Republic, possibly the best-known book ever written on politics, the question of censorship in education is explicitly posed and its value is assessed. In Book 3 of the Republic, the characters Socrates and Glaucon seem to favor keeping students, especially young ones, away from certain topics and ideas—not unlike what Florida’s Bill 7 proposes. Educators who do not follow the orders of those who have a certain kind of education in mind will be sent away, and only those who are willing to follow orders will remain. I believe that Plato’s characters, in the final books of the Republic, reject the model of education posed in Book 3 and replace it with one that is closer to John Dewey’s ideal of helping students learn how to think for themselves. Plato’s dialogue makes it clear that there is no simple blueprint to follow when we are building a human soul, even if that approach works when constructing dormitories. These two models of education contradict each other. One demands conformity to orders from above, whereas the other one demands freedom—autonomy—both at the individual level and at the level of republics.
Whatever lessons we take away from Plato and other classical and modern philosophers, this week’s news shows that the present and future state of democracy cannot and should not ignore the philosophical implications of the political process that is unfolding right now. The central question that will continue to guide this podcast concerns the role of reason and critical thinking as we make our personal choices and our political decisions. The universal quest for the common good pertains not only to citizens of the United States but to all human beings. Finally, it is important to remember we human beings play a central role in shaping all lives on earth in this technological age.