A SAFE SPACE TO PLAY WITH UNSAFE IDEAS?

An Associated Press background story on the latest manifestations of liberating tolerance opens,

Generations of Americans have held firm to a version of free speech that makes room for even the vilest of views. It’s girded by a belief that the good ideas rise above the bad, that no one should be punished for voicing an idea — except in rare cases where the idea could lead directly to illegal action.

Today, that idea faces competition more forceful and vehement than it has seen for a century.

On college campuses, a newer version of free speech is emerging as young generations redraw the line where expression crosses into harm. There’s a wave of students who have no tolerance for speech that marginalizes. They draw lines around language that leads to damage, either psychological or physical. Their judgments weigh the Constitution but also incorporate histories of privilege and oppression.

“We believe in a diverse set of thoughts," says Kaleb Autman, a Black student at the University of Wisconsin whose group is demanding a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech. “But when your thought is predicated on the subjugation of me or my people, or to a generalized people, then we have problems."

That's "harm" in the current nonsensical meaning, understood as "unpleasant thoughts" rather than fisticuffs, or a panel blowing off an airplane.

The article notes the snowflakery has been a long time in the making.

A new understanding of free speech has been evolving on college campuses for years, marked by the introduction of safe spaces, trigger warnings and a rise in disruptive protests that silence speakers with offensive views. But the Israel-Hamas war and its rhetoric appear to be widening the fault lines and pushing students to demand that university leaders take a side between clashing versions of free speech.

The article hits at, but never fully engages, the possibility that those safe spaces can be partitioned ever so finely, in order that today's coalition for speech suppression fractures, with protected speech becoming proscribed speech.

Columbia University is among several institutions that recently suspended pro-Palestinian student groups, citing their “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Those types of phrases, however some perceive them, are “clearly constitutionally protected,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, a law scholar and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, which was the cradle of the free speech movement in the 1960s. Yet on all sides of the issue, he says, today’s students want to quash speech they don’t like, regardless of its legality.

“What I always hear now is how, when students are upset or offended, they phrase it as, ‘I feel unsafe.' And I think it's so important that we separate out the campus' duty,” he says. “It’s not our role to make them safe from ideas that they don’t want exposed to. But that line, I think, has gotten blurred.”

It doesn't help when university presidents, such as Princeton's Christopher Eisgruber, use commencement addresses as one more opportunity to deliver a homily for the Church of Intersectionality.

“There are people who claim, for example, that when colleges and universities endorse the value of diversity and inclusivity or teach about racism and sexism, they are ‘indoctrinating students’ or in some other way endangering free speech,” Eisgruber proclaimed. “That is wrong.” Princeton graduates, Eisgruber preached, “must stand up and speak up together for the values of free expression and full inclusivity for people of all identities.”

Skeptical of Eisgruber’s positions on gender and sexuality? You are an enemy of equality and diversity — a tired and shameful relic of an oppressive past who must be defeated in “pursuit of a better world.” Concerned about the chilling effect that Princeton’s sprawling Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion apparatus has on campus speech? You, not Eisgruber or the DEI bureaucrats, are the real threat to free speech and academic freedom. Dissenting from the infallible dogmas of social progressivism means accusations of supporting speech censorship and comparisons to Jim Crow-era segregationists. Oh, don’t forget: you must vociferously oppose the censoring bigots governing Florida, lest you threaten the very existence of LGBT people and thus anathematize yourself from the shared “values” that bind the Princeton community.

Any reasonable person observing Eisgruber’s sermon would conclude that its content has no place in the President’s Commencement address. It was a grave mistake for Eisgruber to offer such ideological and divisive remarks at Commencement — purportedly under the moralizing banner of inclusivity, but in reality with the express aim of excluding, marginalizing, and suppressing the voices of those who dispute his particular account of social justice. Indeed, the imagery associated with his sermon was highly disquieting; offered while dressed in official University regalia, at a podium bearing the University’s name and shield, and at one of the University’s highest-profile annual events with faculty assembled behind him, an observer would be forgiven for conflating the highly ideological views expressed in Eisgruber’s sermon with the official institutional positions of Princeton University.

Sadly, President Eisgruber’s Commencement sermon could hardly have come at a worse time for the University. The unsettling effects of Eisgruber’s fallacious interpretation of the value of free speech (as outlined in his sermon) — and the University’s institutional commitment to it — have become more visible in recent months.

You trammel inquiry at your peril.  It does no good to use the power of the state to shut the woke mob up.

Campus officials are being pulled in every direction from donors, alumni, students and politicians. But the latest battle has seen a reversal of sorts in the allegiances over free speech.

Republicans, who have long characterized colleges as liberal hotbeds that stifle free speech, are now calling on those institutions to curb speech seen as antisemitic. Colleges previously accused of ceding ground on free speech are suddenly emerging as its strongest defenders.

“The thing that I don’t know is, does anyone really have a principled position on this? Or is it just about the politics?” says Genevieve Lakier, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Chicago. She fears allegations of antisemitism are being used as a weapon to silence pro-Palestinian speech, and the biggest threats come from donors and legislators.

There is a principled position.

[F]ree speech is primarily a defense against malevolent people, their malign sentiments, and their malicious impulses. Disagreeable, erroneous, and hateful public opinions serve as an early warning system and, at times, an instrument of self-destruction for the malignant.

That's Robert "Bastiat's Window" Graboyes, who continues, "[Speech codes] merely drive the purveyors into the tall grasses, where they slither about in silence—like rattlesnakes whose rattles have been amputated by those too precious to tolerate the sound."  On campus, bourgeois norms used to be sufficient to keep discussion, even about contentious content, civil.

No one was ever so clueless or insensitive as to call for genocide against Jews—or to search for some theoretical “context” to make doing so acceptable. Likewise, no one argued for slavery for African Americans, subjugation of women, or ostracism of gays. On the other hand, there was broad leeway to make controversial, and even offensive assertions. The enforcement mechanism was not the threat of a dean swooping in, but rather the simple desire not to look like an ass in front of one’s classmates.

These days, he fears, not so much, although even now the tradition of open inquiry might remain valuable.

Students are increasingly suspicious of free speech arguments they say have been used to empower some and oppress others. Their version of free speech leaves no room for certain racial slurs, Lakier says, and it introduces new rules around pronouns. Amid changing cultural views, certain kinds of language that were once tolerated are now seen as unacceptable, she says. “Except for a few outliers, that is, I don’t think, a bad thing.”

In nearly 20 years as president of Augustana College, Steven Bahls saw the generational change play out. When confronted with speech disputes in the past, he could settle it by applying the Constitution and explaining case law. At some point that wasn't enough, and emotion came to dominate the debate.

“Students expect the college president to be on their side," says Bahls, a lawyer by trade. “And you know, you can’t blame them. They're paying a lot for their education. And to show students that you’re on their side doesn’t mean you have to agree with them politically.”

It's not the college president's job to take sides, it's his job to protect an environment of free inquiry.  Sometimes, though, it's the people who advocate for liberating tolerance, or is it progressive intolerance, who end up making the best case for the Enlightenment traditions.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a coalition of Black students demanded a total ban on hate speech in 2023 after a white student used racial slurs in a video that spread on social media. The university rejected the demand and said it couldn’t punish constitutionally protected speech.

“How are we supposed to be protected by a document that at one point would have allowed for the enslavement of me as a Black person?” says Autman, a senior in legal studies and sociology. “We should not wait for harm or violence to be inflicted for us to combat it.”

I'd rather that document be amended by Enlightenment principles than have the amendments imposed at rifle point, especially given our experience with solving internal disputes at rifle point.