Two philosophers at Clemson University, each in their own way, have responded to their employer’s punishment of faculty for their comments following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Clemson, acting in response to political pressure from government officials, students, and others, fired one professor and removed two others from their courses to conduct a review of their social media posts.
You can read an account of how this came about here.
Charlie Kurth, a professor of philosophy at the university, posted a sign on his office door:
Professor Kurth apparently is not one to waste words.
News of the sign went viral, with South Carolina State Representative Adam Morgan, complaining about it to Clemson’s president via X/Twitter.
Meanwhile, assistant professor of philosophy Mike Gregory took to the press with an op-ed objecting to Clemson’s actions. Gregory points out that Clemson’s Board of Trustees had adopted “the core principles articulated in the ‘Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression’ at the University of Chicago” just two years ago. Gregory writes:
That report is unequivocal: “It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” By its own policy, Clemson is bound to protect such speech unless it falls into narrow exceptions. The speech at issue did not. To punish it is not only constitutionally dubious but a violation of Clemson’s commitments.
Noting the various external influences that influenced Clemson’s decision, Gregory says:
The danger now is permanent. Faculty have learned that job security depends on avoiding the wrath of politicians. Students have learned that the boundaries of free inquiry are drawn not in classrooms but in legislative chambers. And the public has learned that Clemson is not in charge of Clemson.
And that is a pity, as, he says, “a university exists for education, not as a political trophy.”
The Chicago Principles were a good idea in the woke era, and they’re a good idea now. And if you adopt them, fucking stick to them. That’s the whole point. Freedom of speech means nothing if it’s only freedom of speech for your own side.
Hear hear
Justin, last I heard, Clemson had fired 2 professors and 1 staff member. The staff member was fired last Monday, while the 2 professors were fired last Tuesday, ~18 hours after it was announced that they were being removed from teaching duties pending review.
Local news outlets have gotten the details wrong consistently, in part because they either don’t realize or don’t care that not all staff members are “professors.” National news seems to be picking up the local news stories. You can find the “juiciest” of the social media posts in the story by the student newspaper, which (so far as I am aware) gets the facts right.
As you might expect, while the President and Provost have both sent out emails that talk around the subject without addressing it directly, neither has provided guidance on what faculty are and are not allowed to say (on social media, in class, in their work, whathaveyou) in the opinion of the University. One thing that has been made clear: in the opinion of the SC AG Alan Wilson, speech that does not align with “public decency” does not enjoy the protections the state extends to political speech.
Well done to them for taking a stand.
The biggest credit (which may or may not apply to these individuals) goes to those consistently defend the academic freedom of their colleagues in both the easy cases (ideological agreement) and the hard cases (ideological clash).
If you were quiet when the woke mob came after fellow academics but now are outspoken in defending academic freedom, then shame on you for your blatant double standard. Likewise, if you were outspoken in opposing the woke mob, but now are silent as the rightwing mob tries to censor academic speech they dislike, then shame on you.
You seem to know something I don’t. Can you please tell me about the cases where democratic delegates and state senators demanded professors be fired and said professors were fired? I also seem to have missed the time Biden called for a purge of those on the right. I missed Biden trying to deport students who disagreed with his foreign policy too. That’s big I don’t know how it got past me! But the biased liberal media must have hushed that up. But you can tell me about those cases can’t you? I also missed the “woke mob” creating a watchlist of professors for their followers to harass or send death threats to. Can you tell me more about that? And how many professors did the woke mob actually get fired? It must be a lot for you to be more worried about that than the current purge. Names and workplaces of victims of said woke mob would be nice. I’m sure you’ve got that handy right? If for some reason you don’t then a ballpark estimate of its victims would be nice. I’ll admit I’m in a bit of a bubble. I get most of my news from far left sources like the Financial Times, so it would really help if better informed folks like you would help me out.
A good starting point for you to answer some of these questions is https://www.thefire.org/ the one organization that has been completely consistent in defending academic freedom over the last decade. Given that several of the things you say are false or misleading I will not engage with you on specific points. But, on the general point of who is worse, yes obviously the rightwing in the US is taking things much further in attacking free speech and academic freedom. Indeed, the threat of this was a point made continuously during the woke censorship error. Reasonable moderates kept saying “don’t erode these hard won civil society norms that protect free expression because when the rightwing is ascendent, without these norms to keep them in check, they will likely take things even further”. Turns out we were right.
Thanks so much for the reading list, but sadly I’m really busy right now. So could you just give me two or three examples of professors who were actually fired because of the woke mob? I’m sure that’s somewhere here but like I said I’m busy (darned classes and such). Surely since you’ve read this you can give me a few of really egregious examples that really struck you. And the name of one Democratic elected official who demanded professors be fired? And I know this is asking a lot but it would really help if you could link to the woke mob’s professor watchlist. I do hate to ask for so much of your precious wisdom and time but how are poor ignorant enbubbled folks like me ever going to learn if the better informed and broad minded people like you won’t take a moment to help us out of our caves?
JTD’s last point is right on the money but you’re not addressing it. Sorry to take time of your busy snark schedule, but surely you can appreciate that JTD recognizes an asymmetry, does not make a false equivalence, and so your facile rejoinders are missing the point. The point is: be principled. Your point seems to be: what they’re doing is worse so what we did didn’t matter.
I’m still waiting for him or you or anyone else to tell us exactly what “we” have done. If the “woke mob”has gotten anyone fired or even created a targeted harassment list then I certainly don’t think that’s okay. That’s pretty awful. If you or anyone else knows about a case like then please take two minutes to tell me about it. That’s no harder than writing these “tsk tsk” posts. If you just mean that some college kids were rude to some visiting speakers then while I don’t think that’s ideal I do think it’s either massively dishonest or utterly foolish to say that that’s like having folks fired or systematically harassed though maybe a teensy bit “asymmetrical.”
I didn’t make any claim about the woke mob but if you think the left has been beyond reproach on matters of academic freedom I don’t know what to tell you. This comment on another thread listed examples from the last few years on both sides of the spectrum.
https://dailynous.com/2025/09/19/speech-under-authoritarianism/#comment-479956
I fully recognize there is no equivalence in the means and magnitude of the violations, but again, that is not the point.
1. The implicature of Enrico’s snarky reply was that, really, the ‘woke mob’ (I don’t like the phrase and used ‘the left’ in contrast to the people currently in power) didn’t do anything to warrant JTD’s scolding. If you find Enrico scolding his side for anything in the thread, let me know.
2. I didn’t deny that differences in magnitude might matter. I denied that JTD’s point had anything to do with who was more to blame. But I also think the previous violations weren’t all that innocuous, so granting that differences matter will not make the wrongs disappear.
3. JTD didn’t draw an equivalence, Enrico tried to. JTD pointed to faults on both sides, that’s different. To return to the previous point, that differences in magnitude matter does not entail that smaller magnitude events are negligible. A category 2 hurricane is less strong than a category 5 hurricane but it can still be devastating.
Depending on what exactly one is talking about, the difference in magnitude is more like a category 5 hurricane versus a hair dryer. The force of it, backed now by the state; the level of institutional capitulation (or complicity); and the widespread targeting of faculty and students is not like a professor saying “controversial” things (racism) and then facing warranted pushback from their colleagues and students.
I am not expecting you to be principled, Felix, carry on.
Just noting that I gave you some examples downthread, in case you missed them.
I remember some attempts to fire Camilla Paglia.
“So could you just give me two or three examples of professors who were actually fired because of the woke mob? “
Off the top of my head: Bo Winegard, Noah Carl, Colin Wright, Carole Hooven, Kathleen Stock.
(Winegard and Carl were fired. Hooven and Stock claim they were forced to leave their jobs due to internal harassment and a lack of institutional support for their academic freedom in the face of that harassment. Wright makes somewhat more complicated claims that amount to him determining that political pressure would make him unhirable for a permanent position. I find all three sets of claims credible but YMMV.)
Regarding the claim about lack of institutional support, what does that mean here? There was a separate talk about anti-trans views scheduled the same day that Stock had her own talk, and many of her colleagues decided that they’d rather go to that talk instead. What was the institution supposed to do? Force her colleagues to attend her talk? Similarly, the union indicated that they would support Stock, but also added that they would continue providing support to the people her commentary is about, and that too was somehow taken to be a slight. I don’t think institutional support was ever lacking in Stock’s case.
It’s interesting though that, of the names mentioned here, quite a few have done well for themselves anyway. Column inches in the papers, podcasts, alternative universities. They definitely aren’t unhirable; it’s just that, the places most likely to hire them represent moneyed interests and the right, because their commentary mostly lines up with that.
I don’t want to relitigate Stock for the Nth time. The UK’s official regulator found for her, but (predictably) opinion is sharply split on whether it was a politicized decision. As I say, YMMV.
On your broader point, there is a fairly large difference between “no-one has got fired from academia by the woke mob [not my phrase]” and “many of the people fired from academia by the woke mob have found career success outside academia”. (Not that you were defending the first claim; I was replying to Enrico Matassa, who was.)
Yes, and the university is challenging the regulator, so you’re right, YMMV. On the broader point, my invocation of the example is more to put pressure on the narratives you’ve taken to be credible, especially for those cases/examples.
Another to consider is Wright. No evidence for his account is given beyond his own anecdote, in which a prospective employer is claimed to have said that they would hire him but for his commentary. I don’t know how that could be considered an example of the thing that Enrico is asking for, given that it’s based solely on Wright’s own explanation for why he would struggle to find employment in academia. His account gives little consideration to other more prosaic factors that might explain that, but it’s still presented (by Wright and others) as some triumph of “wokeness” or “the left” over an embattled academic who just wants to study insects (I guess that would be the potential employment Wright was referring to, given his immediate background).
I can’t speak nearly as precisely to the other examples, especially the ones that did result in termination of employment (for “race realists” like Winegard and Carl). My broader point is just to put pressure on the apparent credibility of these narratives, specifically as it relates to them being treated as examples that address Enrico’s query. As I don’t think some of these examples address that query well.
I take your point about my other point (i.e., regarding career success) being different though. On reflection, I think you’re probably right in treating that as being neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this discussion.
I certainly agree that the cases of people being ‘forced out’ are more open to multiple interpretations. I had considered restricting my reply to mentioning only Carl and Winegard, which would satisfy the letter of the request for ‘two or three examples’ and which I think are unambiguous. (From the official announcement of Carl’s firing: “the way in which Dr Carl has conducted himself with regard to his publications and the ideas he has expressed have had a detrimental effect on the atmosphere within the college, with feelings of hurt, betrayal, anger and disbelief that the college could be associated with such views.”)
I didn’t, because I think there is an asymmetry here. There is virtually no sympathy inside academia for the view that people should not be employed because of they oppose right-wing ideas. So cancellations are going to tend to be top-down exercises of power, and for that reason to be quite visible. On the other hand, there is at least some sympathy inside academia for the view that people should not be employed because of they oppose left-wing ideas, and given the precariousness of the academic job market it would be easy for people to act on that view much less visibly (and for the perception that this happens to create a chilling effect more widely). So *if* there are ‘woke mob’ style cancellations, they would be expected to have this slightly different form: online and in-person protests and calls for action, that don’t directly lead to termination but lead to the person’s career progression being foreclosed. (Note that all five of my examples are untenured, though Stock is slightly complicated given the UK system.)
I am unclear on how widespread this sort of quiet cancellation is and I would not bet my life on any of those three examples. (Credible, not conclusive.) But I think the theoretical asymmetry is important enough to be worth noting. I’m not disputing that there were substantially more overt-and-clear cases of termination for left-wing views, even before 2025.
The problem I see with this is that it attributes a great deal of credit (or blame, depending on how you view it) to a supposed “mob,” even though the most direct evidence we have is that they had no effect on institutional response. In Stock’s case, for example, the institution was very clear in their support of her, so far as her academic role/position was concerned. In Wright’s case, there’s even less to go on; all we have is Wright’s own speculations about why he would hypothetically struggle in searching for an academic post.
In the first case (Stock’s), the impact on career progression is nearly impossible to judge because she left, despite having institutional support for her academic position. In the second (Wright’s), it’s likewise nearly impossible, because all we have are Wright’s own musings about his career prospects. It’s possible that they would both have gone on to successfully gain tenure. It’s possible that they wouldn’t. But I don’t think we can conclusively say that the only reason they didn’t go on to tenured academic positions and a long career in academia is because they faced criticism and pushback on their commentary, especially commentary that was often outside their immediate area of work. (I think you agree with this last point, at least in broad strokes, judging by the final paragraph of your comment.)
Regarding Winegard and Carl, to be honest, I don’t know what to say. Maybe they qualify as examples for Enrico’s query; maybe they don’t. Going by the little I know of the relevant cases, from memory, for Winegard, the claim that he was terminated for his views came principally from him, not from his former employer. (I could be wrong here; as I said, I am less familiar with Winegard’s and Carl’s terminations, although I am certainly aware of them and their views.) With Carl, I think you’d have your strongest case; although, again, my lack of familiarity with the exact circumstances surrounding his termination preclude me from saying anything definitive here.
I am generally against the idea of academic institutions terminating employment for academics who hold contemptible views. But the professionalization of the academy also creates challenges for institutions that are expected to serve a diverse community of scholars. So it’s no surprise to me that institutions would face pressure owing to the fear that contemptible views might translate to actions that render the university less safe for those who are the subject (or target) of such views. Of the examples you’ve given, I think at least two (Stock, Wright) do not provide sufficient evidence that institutions yield to such pressure in ways that necessarily damage the careers of those with contemptible views. On the academic side, we have little to go on. On the non-academic side (which, as I acknowledged, is not necessarily here or there for this discussion) it certainly does not, as least in those cases—both have gone on to have plenty of success. Of the other examples, particularly Carl, you may have a stronger case; I admit I’m less equipped right now to argue against it.
I don’t think we’re vastly apart here. I don’t want to suggest that the evidence for Stock or Wright (or Hooven, though you haven’t discussed her) is not going to convince people who were antecedently skeptical (and I certainly don’t want to pick over it!) I was trying to demonstrate that it is not *obviously false* or *absurd* that left-wing pressures have destroyed academics’ careers, which I think you’d grant even if you’re a lot more skeptical than I about the overall likelihood for each case.
One thing that might be worth adding, though: how credible you find someone’s testimony does depend on your background beliefs about the overall situation. Many of the *right*-wing cancellations lack smoking-gun public evidence: often the university will refuse to comment and we are reliant on the cancelled person’s testimony. Nevertheless I have very little skepticism about most of them, because it is so antecedently plausible that this is what happened. I imagine we pretty much 100% agree on this, but disagree quite a bit on the left-wing equivalent. And here it is difficult to make progress because a lot of why I find the testimony of people like Winegard or Wright or Hooven credible relies on offline experience and testimony about similar (if less egregious) issues elsewhere. Presumably, your off-the-record experience is quite different.
(As a narrow factual point: Stock was never going to get tenure, the UK abolished it long ago. But the much stronger employment laws in the UK compared to the US mean she was very unlikely to get fired by Sussex: insofar as she has a legitimate grievance against them, it would be that (in US terms) the campaign against her crossed the line between protected speech and unlawful bullying/harassment, and Sussex failed to protect her. That’s why I say her case is ‘slightly complicated’: it’s closer to a tenured US academic.)
You seem to be equivocating something when you talk about credibility. There’s three different sets of claims in each of these cases: (a) about the factual events; (b) about someone’s emotional reaction to these events; (c) about the moral assessment of these events. You seem to ask for finding testimony about all three credible. But moral testimony is tricky, and often not credible.
In Hooven’s case, for instance, I find her credible about (a) the events (that her colleagues distanced themselves from her) and about (b) her reaction to it (that she felt “forced out”). But I don’t find her credible on (c) the moral assessment. I’m sure she sincerely thinks that this was immoral, or that her actions were undeserving of this reaction. But I have no reason to find that claim credible on the facts. It is not immoral to distance oneself from a colleague and only interact with them as much as is required by the job.
Carl was officially fired for cause (that cause being pseudoscientific conduct / violation of research ethics). Again, we can agree on the facts (what he wrote and that he was fired for it), but don’t have to give credulity to Carl’s assertion that this was protected research activity. People are untrustworthy about the moral assessment of their own conduct or character.
So there is an asymmetry here. But it is not an ideological one. The asymmetry is due to the moral situation in the “right wing” cases being so much clearer. These “cancellations” involve government force and most of us don’t have to accept anyone’s moral testimony to see that this is wrong.
I don’t have time to reply to this in detail but just on Carl: I’m not taking his testimony on anything (in fact I don’t think I’ve read it). I’m going on the public statements of his Cambridge college in their explanation of why he was fired. They are egregiously in violation of academic freedom.
Fair enough. Take my response to be solely about your claims about the asymmetry in whose testimony we accept.
My claim is that the asymmetry comes down to “right-wing cancellations” being so much more obviously wrong than “left-wing cancellations”.
Being “forced out”, as you concede, is very murky. It is not clear that anyone who feels “forced out” was treated unjustly. It also seems reasonable that people can get fired for academic misconduct, including pushing pseudoscience (e.g. consider a biologist pushing creationism), and so there is uncertainty about cases where this supposedly occurred.
By contrast, the government intervening to punish someone for political commentary on social media? Clear cut.
So we’re clear: I think the evidence is excellent but not conclusive that there have been a significant number of left-wing cancellations. I think the evidence is unequivocal that there have been a significant number of right-wing cancellations.
We may disagree about whether, if these things happened, there is a moral difference. If someone is *in fact* harassed out of their job, in my view it’s just as bad as if they were outright fired.
(I mean, to change the valence: if a postdoc leaves academia because she refuses his sexual advances and he destroys her career, that’s going to be hard to prove too. But conditional on it in fact being true, there’s no moral ambiguity.)
> So we’re clear: I think the evidence is excellent but not conclusive that there have been a significant number of left-wing cancellations. I think the evidence is unequivocal that there have been a significant number of right-wing cancellations.
Right, we are at our previous impasse. I think the evidence of “left-wing cancellations” is not “excellent” at all, but largely circumstantial and anecdotal, blown vastly out of proportion by adversarial media figures and credulous commentators.
But I’m glad you see the asymmetry. There’s plenty of daylight between “unequivocal” and “excellent but not conclusive”.
Thus, there is a natural epistemic position from which to decry the unequivocal violations from the right while maintaining a more cautious attitude towards alleged “left-wing cancellations”.
That’s defensible. (Again, modulo the occasional case – like Carl’s – that I really do think is just as unequivocal.) Certainly I don’t think relitigating past controversies is a required prelude to opposing the current wave of right-wing cancel culture. My original response to JTD was intended in part to convey that.
The only thing I would say (this is not aimed at you in particular) is that at the high tide of (what I would call) left-wing cancel culture, a not small number of people actively opposed the idea that academic freedom was any kind of shield for perceived wrongdoing; often the justification was that someone with view X could not be trusted to teach, even absent any direct evidence of a problem with their teaching. Exactly these forms of reasoning are being used today by public figures on the right. I have no interest in people publicly recanting their previous views in response, but I do hope they privately reflect on the moral and strategic advantages of a more principled position.
> often the justification was that someone with view X could not be trusted to teach, even absent any direct evidence of a problem with their teaching. Exactly these forms of reasoning are being used today by public figures on the right.
I think that’s broadly correct, but there remains an asymmetry. The position of (part of) the left-wing was that this argument turns on the content of X (e.g. can a racist be trusted to teach a diverse classroom?). In response, the right stressed content neutrality. But they have now taken on a not content-neutral position themselves.
So while the right is unequivocally hypocritical on free speech, it is far less clear that the left is hypocritical (at large).
It rather depends how they want to object to right-wing cancel culture now! Some of the people fired in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder really did say some pretty ugly things. I can object on academic-freedom grounds to their being fired anyway, without being a hypocrite, because I’ve been consistent on a content-neutral right to academic freedom (Noah Carl said some pretty ugly things too). But the people on the left we’re discussing either to have to object to the post-Kirk firings on academic-freedom grounds (in which case they’re being hypocritical) or else defend the things said case-by-case on the merits.
I know and agree that you’ve been consistent.
It would be hypocritical for someone who previously took a non-content-neutral line to now defend left-wing speech on grounds of content neutrality. But I don’t think I’ve seen much of this.
But I’ve seen plenty of right-wingers (in the highest offices of government) switch their previously content-neutral line entirely.
You attribute the following view to your opposition (elsewhere in here):
> (b) right-wing objections to it are entirely pretextual and complaining about it just plays into the hands of bad actors.
I think the mainfest hypocrisy on the right on free speech supports this claim (b).
To be clear, there has been an ocean of hypocrisy on the right, from JD Vance and Bernard Carr on down. (Whether there have been also principled people on the right slightly depends how you define “right”. There are lots of right-of-center opinion writers at National Review and The Bulwark and The Dispatch who have made principled objections to right-wing cancel culture. There have been a handful of good statements from Republicans in Congress (Rand Paul most noticeably). I haven’t seen anyone in the administration object, and would be surprised if anyone did.)
On the left, the pretty much universal form of objections to academic firings has been that a university has fired someone because of something they said on social media that upset conservatives and that this is ipso facto bad, no further information required. (Justin’s original post, for instance, doesn’t even mention what the fired or suspended professors actually said.)
And by lights (and, to be fair, probably yours) that’s correct! But there ought to be a whole bunch of principled people on the left who should now be saying “Hold on! We can’t automatically assume these people shouldn’t be fired – it depends on the actual content of what they said, we need to look case-by-case.” If that’s happened anywhere, I’ve missed it.
If you find Wright’s claims credible, that might say more about you than about the “woke mob”.
The fact that multiple papers on which he was an author were retracted due to allegations of data fraud never seems to enter these re-tellings of his job market failure (even leaving aside that many qualified people without similar marks on their CVs are equally unsuccessful).
I take this to mean that I should discount Wright’s testimony because he was implicated in data fraud.
If so, I think that’s a terrible attitude. Jonathan Pruitt had at least 15 papers retracted for suspected data falsification and has dozens of co-authors on those papers (I lost count at 25). Are all those people to be forever distrusted because they were deceived by a coauthor? That seems like an awful form of guilt by association, given the division of labor in modern empirical science. To the best of my knowledge there has been no evidence adduced that any of Pruitt’s coauthors, including Wright, had any knowledge of Pruitt’s malfeasance. Putting aside entirely the present issue, we’re not going to make progress on resolving the *replication crisis* if we disincentivize co-authors with this kind of attitude.
(If you just mean that it’s unsurprising that a junior scholar some of whose publications got retracted might not get a job, then I think I was clear that I included Wright because I find his testimony credible, not because the mere fact of a junior academic not making it to a tenure track job is evidence of anything much. If you mean Weight might be sublimating justified upset at being collateral damage in the Pruitt scandal into a more politically legible reason for outrage, then I agree that’s possible and have incrementally, but slightly, decreased my confidence in his testimony on these grounds.)
> I take this to mean that I should discount Wright’s testimony because he was implicated in data fraud.
Sorry, that’s not what I meant.
I meant that there are much, much more salient explanations for Wright’s job market situation than “wokeness”.
Also can you please tell me exactly what I said that was false or misleading? I really need your help. I don’t want to be wrong or heaven help to mislead others. I’m sure that’s true of you too. Please don’t be stingy with your wisdom. What would Socrates say about folks who hoard their treasure houses of knowledge from ignorant folks like me?
I recommend the ‘Scholars Under Fire Database‘ which:
“If you were quiet when the woke mob came after fellow academics but now are outspoken in defending academic freedom, then shame on you for your blatant double standard.”
I would prefer to be more forgiving. People can genuinely change their minds and come to appreciate things in the face of evidence. Don’t say “shame on you”; say “Excellent, now we agree; and please remember this when the wheel turns again”.
This stance still suffers from the unexamined assumption that the content of speech is largely irrelevant to what may and should be done in opposition to speech. Legally, that makes a lot of sense. But morally, I don’t think it does. Speech can be powerful, especially the collective speech of large numbers of individuals. It can and often does threaten rights. And when it does, the speaker (or speakers) can be liable to necessary and proportionate harm in defense of those rights.
It’s not an unexamined assumption. The basic argument is that regulation of speech should be content neutral because any content based restriction is likely to be controversial. There is no principled way to adjudicate cases, much less formulate a general rule, that doesn’t lead to intractable disagreement.
I wasn’t talking about regulating speech. I agree that such regulation should be content neutral. Many of the alleged threats to free speech and academic freedom posed by the “woke mob” are not threats to regulate speech in some unacceptable way.
But social sanction, as Mill recognized, can have the same effects as legislation, so it ends up regulating behavior like social norms do. What non-legal harms do you think it is acceptable to impose on the alleged rights-violators?
It’s an incredibly thoroughly examined assumption; but here I was presupposing it rather than examining it, in conversation with someone who shares that presupposition.
I honestly have never seen what I would regard as a serious examination of this assumption, but you are certainly entitled to presuppose it if you like.
If you are the same Maggie who commented thoughtfully on similar issues at Campus Controversies and “Inclusion… in the Activity of Knowledge Seeking” – Daily Nous, then my quick attempt at a ‘serious examination’ is in my conversation with you there.
Yes, you are right. Or, rather, there are three possibilities that apply to those who previously failed to defend academic freedom when the target was their ideological opponents but now want to champion it:
I embrace people in category (1). But shame on those in (2) or (3).
I’ll leave this alone after this but what really disgusts me about most of these responses is that instead of celebrating people who are taking real risks to actually defend free speech or asking what we can do to help everyone here seems to taking it as a chance to grind their axes about the woke mob moral panic grifters and Machiavellian operators like Weiss, Haidt, and Rufo whipped up. It’s distracting and insulting to Kurth and Gregory and anyone else running real risks or suffering in the clampdown. I’m also just unbelievably tired of right wingers and reactionary centrists peddling this narrative where every abuse of the right is just an understandable, though sometimes regrettable, reaction to people on the left being mean to them. I mean look I know it’s psychologically rewarding to feel like you’re a free speech champion while taking none of the actual risks people like Kurth or Gregory do. Doesn’t make it true though.
To set the record straight: I find it admirably courageous for these professors to take these risks. They are in the right. But we contain multitudes. I left New College of Florida after a hostile takeover, was named and worse by Chris Rufo several times, repeatedly spoke publicly and under my real name to defend colleagues, students, and the institution. I burned my wings and, now being neither tenured nor a US citizen, approach things more cautiously. I also believe progressives and liberals have flouted the norms of free expression, discussion, and academic freedom too many times since at least 2016 and especially around 2020. These attitudes are compatible. I’m proud of what I’ve done and am taking risks by writing under my real name right now. You have accomplished nothing and are taking no risk whatsoever.
“[E]veryone here seems to taking it as a chance to grind their axes about the woke mob moral panic grifters and Machiavellian operators like Weiss, Haidt, and Rufo whipped up.”
There is a genuine strategic disagreement here that you’re not recognizing. There has for years been a serious threat to free speech in universities coming from parts of the right, which has been worsening rapidly with the beginnings of actual state coercion being applied; this is extremely bad and needs to be resisted.
In the light of that, some people in this discussion (on this thread: me, Nicholas Delon, JTD) think, and have been arguing for years, that (a) there is also a serious problem with free speech in universities coming from parts of the left; (b) opposing this is important both because it is wrong in itself and because it empowers anti-academic forces on the right and disempowers pro-academic forces. (And perhaps also (c), in an academic-facing location like a philosophy blog, there is more that one can practically do to oppose left-originating than right-originating threats.)
Other people in this discussion (in this thread: you, Felix) think, and probably have been arguing for years though pseudonymy makes it hard to be sure, that (a) the supposed free speech issues on the left are either vastly exaggerated or simply nonexistent; (b) right-wing objections to it are entirely pretextual and complaining about it just plays into the hands of bad actors.
We might be wrong; you might be wrong. (cf my protracted, and in the end I think productive, exchange with Felix and Queer Philosopher on this a few megathreads ago). But at root this is a disagreement about facts and strategy.
On one more specific thing:
“I’m also just unbelievably tired of right wingers and reactionary centrists peddling this narrative where every abuse of the right is just an understandable, though sometimes regrettable, reaction to people on the left being mean to them.”
No decent and informed person would think that the 9/11 attacks were an “understandable, though sometimes regrettable” response to US foreign policy in the 1980s and 1990s. But plenty of decent and informed people thought that there was a causal connection between US foreign policy and the empowerment of certain radical anti-US forces, and that understanding this causal connection would help us work out how to stop empowering them. Some people on the right tried to shut those people down as apologists for terror; this was very unhelpful for the shared goal of preventing terrorism.
(edit:typo)
I started this sub-thread with the words “Well done to them [Kurth and Gregory] for taking a stand”. I then went on to praise what FIRE does is this space.
One of the reasons why we should be grateful to FIRE is that they often provide legal support to academics and students who are unlawfully sanctioned for their speech. Another reasons is that they try to exhaustively cover, and campaign against, all academic freedom violations in the US. Furthermore, their non-partisan approach and track record of supporting academic freedom across the political spectrum gives them a level of credibility that other organizations working in this space lack. Hence, anyone particularly concerned about the many violations of academic freedom currently occurring should strongly consider making a donation to FIRE.
Universities do not exist for education. This is something that has long disappeared because faculty members have stood silent for decades. The university is effectively a business. It’s why even liberal arts colleges will get rid of the philosophy major if they don’t produce enough majors. How could there be any higher education without philosophy? There’s no good argument unless education is merely a means to the end of making money. And that is all higher education is now. So the recent movements of universities to crack down on professors is not surprising. They function just as other businesses do. What matters most is money and increasing revenue. Everything else will be sacrificed to that end.
Most universities don’t make profits. (And the share of their revenue captured by their senior leadership is usually a tiny fraction of turnover.) The liberal arts colleges that get rid of the philosophy major, when you look into the reasons, tend to be doing it in (sometimes-dysfunctional) response to catastrophic decreases in enrollment.
I hate to be doomer about it, but you’re probably right. Whereas universities could be sites of knowledge production, the incentive structures have increasingly made it so that the knowledge produced is constrained by the prevailing social and economic paradigm. Now that that paradigm has lent itself to an increasingly authoritarian state, it’s no surprise that the process of unmaking the university will accelerate. Not just higher education, but all education, is increasingly becoming the means of producing pliant consumer-workers, whose participation in the processes dictating their lives is increasingly reduced. Because education can be empowering, the first casualties are always those areas of learning and work where that empowerment most directly threatens that paradigm or the state maintaining it. And because much of the modern university is now intertwined with it, it will increasingly bend to pressures coming from the state, even if it means degrading itself and, ultimately, reducing education’s ability to empower.
I was going to say, we should all get together and start our OWN university that doesn’t care at all about money and increasing revenue. We can hire all these out-of-work professors and pay them nothing, since money doesn’t matter …
It’s awful that universities do seem so easily swayed by public pressure, especially to fire professors for tweets (or here, re-tweets). I wonder who the decision-makers are here.
Get VC backers with Thiel associations and a group of Heterodox™ scholars together and then you can!
I just want to make a slight contribution here, which might help understand what is at stake here. I do think that the academic world should have been and should be better about accommodating minority opinions which might be controversial to the wider audience. That includes cases where there was general outrage at quality scholarship that led to informal censorship and self-censorship (as in the Stock case).
However, the past examples are not at all the same as what has happened in the past weeks. As was pointed out, Stock left the university because she rightly felt unsupported and harassed. That is a serious failure. The two cited examples of “firings” were, in the case of Winegard a decision to not renew a contract and in Carl’s case it was based on the reasonable assessment of his work as lacking academic quality. They were internal decisions based on features that did not directly translate to firings as a result of speech.
The cases in the past weeks, where TT faculty have been dismissed after political pressure by sitting Senators, Representatives and Attorney Generals who have threatened to defund the University unless these people were removed for their speech is not merely a difference in magnitude, it is a difference in kind. Censorship of faculty, facilitated by credible threats from the government, and administrators who happily comply, is a different sort of threat to academic freedom than we have seen in the past. This doesnt mean past actions were negligible, but it does mean that they should not be equated with what we have seen recently.
One realistic worry about equating these cases is that it tends to downplay the real threat to academic speech in the current era is the rise of authoritarian governments willing to get directly involved in the staffing decisions of public Universities. That is something we have not seen, and it surely describes something wholly different than the cited cases of past censorship.
I’m in full agreement.
Mike, Stock felt unsupported, but this turns out not to be true—she was supported. The institution repeatedly indicated that they supported Stock, so far as her academic position was concerned, and the union indicated that they would support her vis-à-vis her position as well, although they also stated that they would continue to support the targets of her speech.
There’s a difference between institutional support and institutional capitulation to and endorsement of her views. Stock had the former and she was never entitled to the latter, as the latter would unacceptably encroach on the speech of her critics. Given my academic background, I’m not the most qualified to comment on the quality of her work, but those that are have also expressed disagreement on the “quality scholarship” claim. So, she retained institutional support even though, like Carl, many had appraised her work “as lacking academic quality.” And she ultimately left, despite having institutional support, to pursue other opportunities, including being a founding fellow of UATX.
It’s bizarre how this mythos has developed that Stock was somehow censored, even as she had the support of her institution, the union, and a press eager to publish anything she’d write. Whereas Carl—who, unlike Stock, was actually fired—can be dismissed as having been fired because of a “reasonable assessment” of “academic quality,” as though no one had also raised concerns about the quality of Stock’s academic work, particularly on subjects that were outside her area of expertise, only to be met with little more than institutional finger-wagging as a response.
That is fair. I think that assessing the quality of academic work is sometimes difficult, subjective and can be a pretense. My impression was that in the Carl case, it seemed fairly straightforward that there was a lack of academic quality due to the nature and venue of publications (in that it seemed to be that he had found an outlet in primarily fringe and disreputable venues). At least that didnt seem to be the case in Stock’s case, as she published in traditional venues. But, I may be unclear about some of the details.
Was just trying to point out that “not feeling supported” and the AG of SC saying that he wont hold the university liable for your illegal firing are two vastly different kinds of censorship concerns. However, this doesnt mean we should not think of both as potential issues needing to be addressed, but the latter is CLEARLY much more dangerous and represents a break from previous alleged censorship of faculty. The fact that dozens of faculty were fired after government pressure in the last week is clearly much more concerning and deserves much more attention.
I think Carl’s case is much more egregious than that. See the account at Leiter’s blog and my comment: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2019/05/cambridge-university-fires-post-doc-who-was-target-of-internet-campaign-last-fall.html. There was a massive campaign by students and outside activists; on the basis of that campaign the college held an investigation into his work; they looked at his writings outside the space he was hired to work on; they made up a rule that academic freedom didn’t protect those writings because they were too poor quality; on that basis they then fired him because those writings were bringing the college into disrepute. It’s an open-and-shut academic freedom violation, unless what is in the public record drastically misrepresents the real situation. (I don’t have any inside knowledge, though I do have a lot of experience of how Oxbridge colleges generally operate, so as to be able to see how wildly anomalous this case was.)
I do agree that it is hard to find cases as smoking-gun as this associated with left-wing activism, whereas there are increasingly many associated with right-wing pressure.
Yes perhaps there is a case to be made that the work that they were assessing had little or nothing to do with his stated job title at Cambridge and therefore the quality of that work was not a good reason to fire him. I think that is a good point and so we should remain concerned about this pressure. I am less familiar with free speech protections in the UK.
It remains true, however, that the nature of the pressure is vastly different. Government officials threatening public funds and student groups rallying for an investigation into Carl’s writing is not just a different in magnitude, it is an entirely different kind of pressure based on leveraging the States coercive power to shape faculties. That isnt just about finding a smoking gun, it is an entirely new line being crossed.
Unfortunately, the discussion here of the overall phenomenon of threats to academic freedom has been derailed by commentators focusing on a handful of well known cases that come to mind and then nitpicking them (often through strong ideological lens).
This is not a very helpful way to approach the topic. The starting point for anyone wanting to engage in an earnest, serious discussion of this topic is FIRE’s ‘Scholars under fire” database. Its basic methodology is described here. Here are the key findings from the executive summary of their 2022 report that covers attempts to sanction scholars from 2000-2022:
1,080 scholar sanction attempts occurred between 2000 and 2022.
The annual number of attempts has increased dramatically over time, from four in 2000 to 145 in 2022.
Almost two-thirds of attempts resulted in sanction, including 225 terminations (698 of 1,080, or 65%).
Nearly three-quarters of terminations involved untenured, rather than tenured, scholars (165 of 225, or 73%).
More than one-third of attempts were initiated by undergraduates (402 of 1,080, or 37%).
In 2021, 213 sanction attempts occurred, more than in any other year. This was partially due to Turning Point USA calling on parents and students to contact the institutions of 61 professors featured on their Professor Watchlist website.
Individuals and groups from the political left of the scholar have initiated more sanction attempts than those from the political right of the scholar (560 of 1,080, or 52%; 442 of 1,080, or 41%).
Sanction attempts initiated by groups on campus — namely, undergraduates and/or other scholars — tend to come from the left of the scholar (301 of 402, or 75%, attempts from the left by undergraduates; 146 of 177, or 82%, attempts from the left by other scholars).
Sanction attempts initiated by off-campus groups — namely, by the members of the public and/or government officials — tend to come from the right of the scholar (60 of 77, or 78%, attempts from the right by the general public; 64 of 74, or 86%, attempts from the right by government officials).
More than 4 in 10 sanction attempts were in response to a scholar’s teaching practices and/or scientific inquiry (467 of 1,080, or 43%, in total; 278 of 1,080, or 26%, in response to teaching practices; 238 of 1,080, or 22%, in response to scientific inquiry).
Scholars most often came under fire for speech about race (426 of 1,080, or 39%).
Other controversial topics include institutional policy (259 of 1,080, or 24%) and partisanship (235 of 1,080, or 22%).
Fewer than 1 in 10 sanction attempts occurred because the scholar engaged in contemptuous or malicious speech (64 of 1,080, or 6%). Nearly three-quarters of these attempts came from the right of the scholar (47 of 64, or 73%).
Sanction attempts occurred most often in the disciplines at the core of a liberal arts education: law (95), political science (79), and history (71).
The schools with the highest number of sanction attempts were: Harvard (23), Stanford (22), UCLA (19), Georgetown (16), Columbia (14), and University of Pennsylvania (14).
The schools with the highest number of successful sanctions were: Harvard (12), University of Central Florida (10), Columbia (9), UCLA (9), and University of Florida (9).
This is good advice and good information; thanks for sharing.
I disagree with the absolutist position on free speech that many here appear to be taking for granted. A right of free speech to advocate depriving persons of fundamental liberties cannot be defended by appeal to the interest in liberty that grounds the right of free speech. To do so is contradictory. Mill, whom many regard as an absolutist, noted this contradiction in On Liberty; as indeed have many later prominent liberal philosophers such as Jeremy Waldron (who argued that there is no free speech right advocate Nazism or other exclusionary doctrines).
So, activist conservative speech that advocates stripping LGBT (especially trans) people of their fundamental rights of liberty should not be protected speech. Whereas speech that defends their rights should be. (I am of course speaking of a moral right of free speech here, though I believe that moral rights should entail legal rights. Obviously, American free speech law has veered in the absolutist direction, protecting hate speech as well as lies, etc.)
What makes the current Trumpist effort to curtail free speech rights so egregious is thus not really its scope or state sources (though those are very serious), but precisely its content. The speech they are attempting to suppress (DEI-related, transgender equality, etc.) is often speech advocating for the rights of vulnerable groups. There can be no moral justification whatsoever for such censorship.
This is precisely the sort of anti-liberal thinking that has given rise to right anti-liberalism.
Not making a judgment here, maybe liberalism is dead, maybe it’s even untenable (I’m slightly more optimistic about it), but it’s very clear how this sort of perspective leads directly to the Foucauldian nightmare we’re living through now, where those “in power” decide who is the beleaguered minority and what vision of the good to implement, with public discourse being shaped by these battles rather than reasoned discourse shaping them.
Those in power have always decided, and it’s always been them—taxes too high, regulations too strict, demands for accountability too onerous to put up with, too “divisive.” I’m not sure that “reasoned discourse” is possible in such an environment to begin with.
I agree that the left should have a stronger commitment to free speech. But how do you support the assertion that anti-liberalism on the left *gave rise to* anti-liberalism on the right?
Well, I wouldn’t be completely opposed to the idea that they rose in tandem, and I would be happy to say that both exacerbate the other.
But a lot of the Chris Rufos of today have so much clout because they realized if the left can control and shut down dissent in powerful institutions like public schools and universities, then they can, too. Indeed (by their reasoning), they should, otherwise it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think this whole movement, especially insofar as it involves universities, is clearly backlash against a lot of overreach.
Just as an empirical matter, the strange world of DEI/BLM/”mostly peaceful protests”/pandemic era cancellations/public school curriculum becoming overtly ideological—all of this predated and (in the minds of many, whom I do not agree with) justified the current cultural authoritarianism on display in this administration. So, “led to” might be too strong, but “is a major part of the causal story here” is likely accurate.
I mean, that just is the causal story of the hard right—”you made us do it.” There’s never any sense in which it acts or shows agency; it’s always merely an effect of the actions of others, of their “overreach.” It weirdly exonerates them and the platforms responsible for mainstreaming them, while shifting the burden on to the same nebulous “other” that is said to be emblematic of the “overreach,” whether they wield any significant political power or not.
OK, but (I assume) we’re not *on* the hard right. Who cares about their agency? We care about what *we* could have done or can do to alleviate the issues.
If I’m a terrorist and want to influence my fellow terrorists, then sure, maybe I’ll talk about responsibility and agency. But if I work in counterterrorism I’m not going to waste time on discussing whether disaffected youth in troubled countries have agency in choosing to become terrorists, I’m going to discuss the causal pathways that lead to them becoming terrorists.
That narrative is a causal influence. It’s part of a longstanding pattern of treating the hard right as an inevitability arising from the very existence of its enemies; that its triumphs are preordained because the “other” continues to exist in the body politic. It’s how otherwise “respectable” liberal or centrist platforms are manipulated into laundering the hard right into the mainstream and how, once mainstream, those same platforms seek to exonerate themselves by saying, fundamentally, it could not have been any other way: It was inevitable that, because the “other” persists, because the body politic remains impure, that things should unfold as they are unfolding. No part was played by the hard right, which desired that things unfold as they did; no part by the platforms that platformed them, which gave them the frame of “reasonable concerns.” It all just sort of happened, and if you must blame anyone, well, there’s the “other” right there.
I agree that “they did it first” is a phenomenally bad argument for justifying one’s bad behavior. But my comment was not justifying the MAGA crackdown on universities (obviously…I hope?) but arguing rather than if we all lean into illiberalism and reserve free speech as a right for our ideological allies, while denying it to our ideological opponents, then we can expect things to continue to get worse.
The way I would put it is that the Right is not a monolith. Left wing excesses affect which influence groups on the right become dominant; they empower people like Rufo at the expense of conservatives with a more liberal and/or pro-HE attitude.
Grievances about higher education have been part of right-wing dogma at least since Buckley. I don’t think you can blame anything happening in the last decade or so for this.
We probably reached diminishing returns on this on the previous thread, but briefly for third parties, IF you think that the threat to academic freedom from the Right is unusually serious now (which QP and I both do), AND you think that illiberality on the academic left has been unusually bad in the last decade (which I do but QP doesn’t), THEN it becomes reasonable to explore the possibility of a causal link.
“Reasonable to explore a causal link” is quite a ways out from presupposing for the purposes of political strategizing that such a causal link exists.
The right has been engaged in an anti-liberal project for decades. (Again, compare Buckley: his complaint wasn’t that there was liberal indoctrination at universities, but that there was insufficient conservative indoctrination.) They have recently accrued sufficient power to engage in this project more openly.
If this is a reaction to anything, then not to illiberalism on the left, but to liberal gains throughout society (through the decades: women’s rights, religious pluralism, civil rights, gay marriage, trans inclusion, etc.).
I know that when you, David, propose to remove the things to which the right reacts with illiberalism, you think of left-wing illiberalism as a causal factor. And I believe you mean well. I also believe you have been had.
When I think of the things to which the rights react with illiberalism, I think of civil rights (etc). We cannot take these things away merely because there is an illiberal reaction against them.
That is to say, looking at the object of right-wing resentment is not helpful. When you search for causal factors, you should be looking at what makes something the object of right-wing resentment. And that’ll be their propaganda apparatus. Your efforts would be much better spent fighting that apparatus.
“I know that when you, David, propose to remove the things to which the right reacts with illiberalism, you think of left-wing illiberalism as a causal factor.”
Well, the things I “propose to remove” (or, more modestly, advocate against) are, roughly speaking and in no particular order: not protecting academic freedom in a consistent (and content-neutral) way; making politicized claims on the basis of expertise well outside actual evidence and/or domain-competence; politicizing the scientific process itself; violating federal antidiscrimination law; compelling political views on diversity in the hiring process.
My reasons for thinking that these things happen a lot in academia are only partially driven by external news sources; they are driven as much or more by my own observations over my academic career (including conversations with many colleagues at different US institutions).
My reasons for thinking that these things have a causal influence on which views gain strength in the right are (i) I read plenty of right-of-center media (mostly never-Trump but not all); I see these issues raised with some frequency including by people who otherwise I have reasons to think have integrity; and, by and large and for the most part, the examples they cite are (in my view) examples of genuine bad behavior. (ii) Pro-academic people on the right, who are better placed epistemically to tell than I, consistently say that they do.
But in any case, the causal question is fairly low stakes for me, because I think these things are in any case bad and I would be keen to reduce their prevalence in academia even if it did not improve academia’s standing on the Right. If getting our house in order improves our overall political situation: bonus. If not: it was still worth doing on the merits.
I believe I am making a quintessentially liberal argument here. The American absolutist position on free speech I believe is in part responsible for giving light and air to anti-liberalism, which is now a fire burning out of control. Fascists do not debate to learn what is true or to develop their own or others’ autonomy; for them, debate is a tool serving their will to power. So of course they will insist on their free speech rights to advocate depriving others of their rights (which is incoherent) and their free speech rights to lie in public testimony (also, to my mind, an ultimately incoherent position).
“The American absolutist position on free speech I believe is in part responsible for giving light and air to anti-liberalism, which is now a fire burning out of control.”
Fires don’t need light to burn; but it is much easier to fight fires in daylight than at night.
Alright, my use of that metaphor was not entirely apt: just air, then. Light as in a spark, perhaps.
I disagree with a lot of this, including the claim that many commenters are taking absolutism for granted, but just on 1A law.
Well known exceptions to 1A protection include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, incitement, speech integral to illegal conduct, IP violations, true threats, false advertising, perjury, defamation, and a few other categories. Either speech advocating for stripping others of liberties falls under one or more of these categories or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the ‘absolutist’ (a terrible name given that everybody recognizes exceptions) thinks that’s for good reason—e.g., it falls short of having the material effects that threats, incitement, or intrinsically illegal conduct have.
The main problem with expanding the scope of restrictions based on your argument is that, as Prof L notes, all partisans are advocating for the stripping of certain liberties from certain people (for instance, you are; people advocating for vaccine mandates might be; anti-misinformation crusaders are; and so on). It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how this can go wrong depending on who’s in charge of government.
I would argue that those content exceptions are a record of the court’s attempts over the years to make precisely the sort of principled distinction I mentioned above, between speech that cannot possibly be grounded in a right of liberty, and speech that can be. We may more or less agree on that, if I understand your comment about the “absolutist” above correctly.
The theoretical question then is how high the foundations of liberalism run. Speech about the scope and limits of rights above those foundations is protected; speech below that waterline is not. But liberalism depends on there being *some* foundation of basic rights upon which there can be no reasonable disagreement.
You are right that much protected speech is about what the scope and limits of our various liberties should be. But we have to be able to distinguish reasonable from unreasonable (and often bad faith) dispute over those rights. Surely there is such a difference between speech advocating racial segregation, say, or against women’s access to the vote, and speech advocating for vaccine mandates. I think the former kind of speech is not that difficult to distinguish from the latter.
Some debaters, primarily on the right, though there are those on the left as well, thoroughly reject liberalism. Their appeals to a right of free speech (to advocate depriving others of fundamental rights) are thus hollow.
Bad faith and self-undermining defenses are neither nor there. For all I care, my enemies’ worldview may be wrong from top to bottom, I would still be fundamentally opposed to enabling the government to restrict their speech beyond what 1A law already recognizes. Your position may sound philosophically illuminating to you but it sounds to me profoundly dangerous, and I’m surprised the current climate is not making this plainly obvious to you.
I do fear authoritarianism and fascism, but I guess I just don’t see how insisting on an absolute right of free speech will be much of a bulwark against it. Fascists reject the deep moral foundations of liberalism. If they don’t accept that everyone is equal and free, then they will just discard any prior commitment to the freedom of speech (absolute or not) once they achieve the power to do so.
If most citizens don’t accept liberal principles of equality and freedom, and how free speech is grounded in them, and instead think politics is just a competition for power, then when their faction is on top, why wouldn’t they support just grabbing the brass ring and disposing of the “absolute” right of free speech when their faction is on top?
I explicitly said I do not endorse absolutism (and I think very few people do, in the literal sense of absolutism) and I never claimed free speech was a bulwark against authoritarianism or fascism. What I did suggest is that institutionalizing speech restrictions above and beyond the first amendment would be gifting your opponents legal means to censor you. They might not care about legality but that’s a separate issue.
I guess I should be more precise and say that I don’t think advocating protections for hate speech and lies (in public testimony) is going to slow the advance of fascism. Those are the specific protections I associate with the “absolutist” position on free speech.
My belief is that protecting such speech in fact erodes the foundations of liberalism and makes a fascist takeover more likely.
I think trying to theorize about what hypothetically citizens might think about free speech is less useful than checking empirically. I believe free speech in the fairly unfettered 1st-amendment sense is fairly popular in the US (much more so than you might imagine from the extremes of social media) and it notable (albeit far from conclusive) that Trump’s approval has been falling quite sharply since his endorsement of right wing cancel culture.
I hope you’re right.
I think what Prof A may be getting at is similar to what Beutler gets at here:
It’s not necessarily a question of using state power to suppress speech. It’s more often a question of how we, the general public and public institutions, treat certain speech acts as warranting serious attention, as deserving of a platform, as demanding of “debate.” Failing to attend to this aspect of speech and its effects isn’t a virtue. It just makes it more likely that one will be had, and that they’ll needlessly elevate bad actors as a result. For those that do, I don’t think saying that one didn’t mean to do so, but that they were being principled, is sufficient to wipe the egg off their faces. Because they’ll do it again. And again invoke principle, long after the lesson should have been learned.
When some red-state university president adopts your reasoning and fires a pro-choice faculty member on the grounds that they advocate abridging the rights of the most vulnerable of all, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Exactly right.
I’m not sure why this is regarded as an impressive response when Prof A seems to have already addressed it within their initial comment? You mean to say that anti-choice campaigners can make false claims? Yes, of course. We know that. Why would that obligate us to treat these as morally equivalent scenarios?
The point is that a meaningful free-speech protection can’t hinge on whether the speech in question is *true* – especially when it concerns abstract moral or political principles.
I think pro-choice speech doesn’t actually attack the rights of the vulnerable, and pro-life speech often does – but that is because I am pro-choice! David French (as an example of a principled conservative free speech advocate) thinks exactly the opposite. He and can agree that pro-life and pro-choice advocacy are both protected speech, But if we adopted Prof A’s framework, I would be justified in using coercive means to shut French’s speech down, and he would be justified in using coercive means to shut my speech down, whenever the vagaries of political fate gave us the power to do so. Much of the point of free speech – arguably, much of the point of the whole liberal tradition – is to get away from that kind of raw power politics.
I disagree. The moral standing of a fetus as a person may be a case subject to reasonable disagreement.
But the pro-choice position does not depend on that, anyway. Suppose as a part of his view, French rejects a woman’s right to control her own body and advocates for, say, the imprisonment of pregnant women who may be intent on abortion until they give birth. Would you still agree that his position should be protected speech? What justification could it have by appeal to everyone’s equal interest in their liberty?
I would, for familiar reasons: mostly, that the norm “all political speech is protected” is much easier for courts and other bodies to defend, and much easier to interpret neutrally, and much harder for my political opponents to weaponize, than the norm “political speech is protected when it concerns matters of reasonable disagreement but not matters of unreasonable disagreement.” I cannot assume that I and my ideological allies will always be the ones who police the bounds of ‘reasonable’.
That’s fine, but then your grounding for the right of free speech is a mere modus vivendi. I’m trying to articulate a (politically) liberal point of view.
“ your grounding for the right of free speech is a mere modus vivendi.”
I agree with every word of that except “mere”.
I should add that I also disagree with your general opinion that free speech protections cannot hinge on whether the speech is true or not. The purpose of free discussion is truth (and knowledge). That doesn’t imply that all provable falsehoods should be censored, of course, but just to note that the main defenses of free speech are epistemic.
Since you mentioned him earlier, it’s worth noting that Mill’s epistemic case for free expression implies that we should tolerate false opinions. Millian free speech protections are unequivocally independent of the truth or falsity of opinions but essentially constrained by the harm principle.
Mill’s argument in that regard is complicated. See https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0021.014/1 And I don’t think his epistemic arguments imply that we should tolerate lies.
This article concerns scientific knowledge and argues that Mill’s epistemic rationale implies we should allow such knowledge to be disputed, so I’m not sure what you think it establishes. Mill’s argument is surely complicated; you seem to keep misunderstanding it.
You might consider reading it!
You might consider re-reading it.
I’m sorry-I didn’t mean to offend. I genuinely thought that maybe you had not read it.
The question you are raising is one of the boundaries of reasonable disagreement. My point is that liberalism depends on recognizing some boundary between dispute that is reasonable and dispute that is not. We need standards for distinguishing that boundary.
It may be worth mentioning in this context that the right to “life” of the 14th Amendment begins at birth, as a legal matter. Upon this, there has long been a consensus among jurists on both the left and the right (though there appear to be new rumblings on the right, which is of course feeling ascendant). The debate over abortion rights in US law thus depends entirely on whether or when the state’s interest in protecting the *potential* life of the (non-person) fetus might outweigh the pregnant person’s right to control her own body.
“My point is that liberalism depends on recognizing some boundary between dispute that is reasonable and dispute that is not.”
Plenty of people in the contemporary Republican party think that there is no reasonable dispute that trans women are not women. If we had the free speech laws you seem to be advocating, they could pass legislation criminalizing anyone who disagrees, and very plausibly get the courts to agree with their interpretation of ‘reasonable’, or at least to grant them administrative deference on it. As it is, the First Amendment unambiguously bars anything of the kind, and so while I’m deeply worried about the current administration’s attack on free speech, I’m not concerned that things will go anything like that far short of outright breakdown of rule of law.
(Or, put another way, if we have to have standards for distinguishing the boundary between ‘reasonable’ and ‘unreasonable’, someone with politics inimical to yours may interpret those standards in ways you really do not want.)
I think we are already under the regime you just described (though not, I think, for the reasons you fear), given the Trump administration’s efforts to enforce its executive order outlawing “gender ideology” and requiring the state to refuse to recognize trans women (or trans men) as women (or men). Witness recent events at Texas A&M and Texas Tech.
If citizens regard the laws as nothing but a hodgepodge of compromises between factions jostling for power, then I think we are destined to end up with tremendous injustice and suffering. I don’t think insisting on an absolute right of free speech or any other set of such ground rules will be enough to prevent it, given this bleak understanding of the civil union.
We are nowhere near that regime (my concrete example was mass criminalization of speech; nothing like this has happened). This country has taken several deeply alarming steps towards autocracy and liberalism, but there are hundreds of steps left to take. Maybe we’ll take them, but we haven’t yet.
‘Illiberalism’, sorry! Hopefully obvious from context…
Regarding the last paragraph, but that already occurs, David? I don’t see how we can carry on pretending, especially in current circumstances, that there are no “standards” when it comes to speech and that one may freely say whatever they please, to whichever audience, and with no expectation of any consequences at all, just or unjust, reasonable or unreasonable.
Speech has effects in the world; effects that aren’t independent of the content and of the standards by which that content is appraised in a given context. To relate this to Prof L’s point regarding illiberalism, I don’t think the fact that there tends to be very few creationists in biology departments is due to illiberalism. Nor do I think that there are few anti-vaxxers in medicine due to illiberalism on the part of the “medical establishment” or of “Big Pharma” or whatever. The content and the context matter in explaining those facts and in explaining why we aren’t bashing down the doors of the “illiberal” medical departments, demanding they give an institutional platform to someone like Wakefield.
We recognize that the application of standards has led to the circumstances being such. Could the application of them be wrong, a misjudgment? Sure. Could the standards themselves be bad, requiring revision? Of course. But that’s just part and parcel of what it means for speech to have effects in the world. We can’t pretend to be seated in some vague, view-from-nowhere, “content-neutral” position, indifferent to its effects and what they mean. For better or worse, we are engaged with them and shape them.
“Speech has effects in the world; effects that aren’t independent of the content and of the standards by which that content is appraised in a given context.”
True. Then, as David already noted, we should assess the content of the speech of the professors, teachers, and students who have been censored. Whether it be about Hamas or CK, are you willing to say that these professor’s free speech rights depends on how the content of their speech is interpreted in context?
I am more saying that that context is not optional. That we don’t live in a decontextualized world where speech acts exist in some void and aren’t meant to be understood or have effects—both of which are subject to appraisal in the contexts in which they occur. That’s how certain speech acts are understood as incitement and condemned. Or how certain acts come to be viewed as embarrassing and not warranting serious attention in, say, a professional community. None of this requires or presumes state intervention. As QP points out elsewhere in this thread, that’s actually one of the ways in which current circumstances differ from past alleged attacks on speech—the state is involved. And its involvement is such that it is now setting the standards for how speech acts are to be appraised and treated, independently of the communities that have traditionally (as in, in a liberal tradition) developed, deployed, and (re)evaluated those standards. This is a marked departure from how things have been done, even in a liberal tradition. And what I think Prof A is pointing out here is that, sadly, the decay of that tradition won’t be forestalled by its most ardent defenders, as they seem not to appreciate the larger dynamics at play here.
We might be at cross purposes (this thread has become tangled). I was intending to be talking about legal protections for speech. Certainly I think the First Amendment both does and should protect creationist speech.
I agree that biology departments shouldn’t hire creationists and don’t violate academic freedom in refusing to do so: domain competence is an appropriate thing to consider in hiring and promotion and normal academic freedom definitions (and I believe 1a jurisprudence) recognize that. (But biology departments shouldn’t refuse to hire someone on grounds of their extramural speech).
We may be talking at cross-purposes. Full disclosure: I haven’t kept up with every comment and reply in this comment section, so if I’m missing something it’s probably my fault. I don’t disavow the general point of my comment there, but I can understand if others disregard it as part of the general discussion if it doesn’t fit.
Prof A wrote: A right of free speech to advocate depriving persons of fundamental liberties cannot be defended by appeal to the interest in liberty that grounds the right of free speech.
The question of whether and how to “tolerate the intolerant” is an old one, and admittedly not an easy question. The interest in liberty that grounds the right of free speech is the liberty to say what one wants, within certain very broad limits. That’s related to, but different in certain ways from, other fundamental liberties — e.g., the right to vote, say — that every citizen has. Expressing the very repugnant and illiberal position that certain citizens should not have the right to vote is an instance of protected political speech: the speaker has a liberty interest in expressing his/her repugnant view, and as long as the speaker is not directly inciting violence, it is (and probably should be) protected speech. What is not protected, of course, is the act of depriving some citizens of the right to vote.
p.s. I don’t keep up with the academic literature on free speech, but a long time ago I happened to read Lee Bollinger’s The Tolerant Society (1986). One of his arguments is that “the social role of ‘free speech’” is “intended to help us gain control of feelings relevant to the whole tapestry of social intercourse.” (p. 119) In other words, he argued that it’s socially beneficial to have to restrain e.g. the feelings of anger, or the manifestations of those feelings, that some ‘extremist’ speech understandably provokes.
I agree with this sticks-n-stones distinction (in fact, I think it’s essential in many cases), but the contradiction I mentioned arises independently. If the state censors the speech of someone who advocates depriving persons of the right to vote, as in your example, then the speaker may protest that they have a right of free speech to say what they want, so long as it harms no one. But then why should they have such a right? The speaker responds that they should have a basic right of freedom grounded in their standing as a person. This defense is incoherent. Those whom the speaker argues should be deprived of their right to vote are also persons who, therefore, by the speaker’s own lights, should have the right to vote as a constituent of their right of freedom. So it is impossible to justify a right of free speech advocating depriving others of fundamental constituents of the right of liberty, as least on the grounds of liberty.
Maybe given the speaker’s illiberal promises, it would follow that they do not have a right to free speech. But for all that, they do have a right to free speech, because those illiberal premises are false. We don’t (or shouldn’t) punish people for philosophical incoherence by removing their rights.
Hmmm, an interesting way to frame it! The speaker’s illiberal premises are false, but the liberal premises are true. The speaker’s illiberal premises are in fact provably false, since they are tantamount to asserting a contradiction. So I suppose you are saying something like, free speech should protect even manifestly irrational speech (e.g., asserting P and ~P simultaneously)? Or perhaps your objection consists in pointing out that I would deny free speech protections for such statements, which may seem implausible?
I was thinking aloud to be honest; one or the other!