Guest Post: Anti-Trump backlash gags free expression at universities

James Turk, Ryerson University

We are living in difficult and worrisome times.

There has been a resurgence of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and nativist nationalisms in many parts of the world — including Canada.

This renaissance of hate has been intensified by the actions of Donald Trump before and after his election. Fortunately, many have responded against the hate. For some, regrettably, part of that response has been to call for suppression of free speech.

As the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University, I was deeply troubled when Ryerson recently decided to cancel a panel discussion whose topic, ironically, was to be “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses.”

The panel discussion — scheduled to include University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson and former Rebel Media journalist Faith Goldy — was not a march riddled with Klan and neo-Nazis. It was a group of three conservative academics and one right-wing journalist whose ideas are odious to many people, including me. But then, my ideas are likely odious to them.

The security excuse

Free speech wall in Charlottesville, Virginia

The university said it cancelled the event after a security review concluded it was “not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward.” The violent confrontation and deaths in Charlottesville may have both spooked Ryerson officials and made their decision seem prudent to many.

Opponents of the planned panel contributed to the fears — with their Facebook page headlined “No Fascists in Our City” adorned initially with a photo of a crossed-out swastika and a call for mass turnout to stop the panel. “This shit stops now. Either you’re with us or you’re not….”

In cancelling the event, Ryerson gave in to intimidation, prevented a panel discussion of difficult ideas and disagreement over deeply held views, and denied free speech rights to those with opposing views.

Part of freedom of expression is the right to dissent, protest and criticize, but that right does not extend to intimidation, harassment or violence that denies others their free speech rights.

Differences of views are the lifeblood of any university and essential to the mission of advancing knowledge and educating students. Most universities even have statements of principle that guarantee and support free expression.

Depriving views

Yale University’s statement says “to curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.”

The University of Toronto’s statement of purpose guarantees the “rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, and freedom of research. And we affirm that these rights are meaningless unless they entail the right to raise deeply disturbing questions and provocative challenges to the cherished beliefs of society at large and of the university itself.”

Ryerson’s decision to cancel the event violates its own Freedom of Speech policy which states:

“Ryerson does not avoid controversies, difficult ideas, or disagreements over deeply held views. When such disagreements arise within the University or within a broader social context, the University’s primary responsibility is to protect free speech within a culture of mutual respect. The right to freedom of speech comes with the responsibility to exercise that right in an atmosphere free of intimidation and in an environment that supports the free speech rights of those with opposing views.”

This is not a new issue. During the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy period in the 1940s and early ‘50s, many universities abandoned their commitments to academic freedom and freedom of expression. Loyalty oaths were imposed on faculty and many professors accused of being Communists were fired.

The then-president of Yale University, Charles Seymour, famously said in 1949: “There will be no witch hunts at Yale because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists.”

In her book No Ivory Tower, Ellen Schrecker summarized the role of the universities during this period: “In its collaboration with McCarthyism, the academic community behaved just like every other major institution in American life. Such a discovery is demoralizing … . Here, if anywhere, dissent should have found a sanctuary. Yet it did not.”

Cowardice and complicity

That harmful legacy of university cowardice and complicity took years to overcome. We need to remember this past if we do not want to relive it, albeit in the name of new passions and different ideologies and concerns.

Instead, it appears as if we are starting down a dark road that threatens the raison d’être of the university and the fundamental rights to freedom of expression guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If standing by its principles requires a university to make a greater investment in security personnel to protect freedom of expression, that must be seen as a proper cost of doing business.

If threats continue to blossom, then there needs to be discussions with governments to ensure universities have the additional financial resources to ensure free expression does not fall victim to intimidation.

Not only are censorship and suppression fatal to the purpose of the university, they undermine the foundation of democratic society.

When individual rights to freedom of expression are diminished or taken away for an allegedly good cause, they are necessarily invested in some higher authority that is given the right to determine what is acceptable.

The result is censorship from above — ultimately the state — with the likelihood that the champions of that censorship today are its vulnerable targets tomorrow.

James Turk, Director, Centre for Free Expression & Distinguished Visiting Professor, Ryerson University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'

Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'
November 30, 2013 10:17 PM MST


Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke recently with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner following a panel discussion on freedom of speech at the Cato Institute. He explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

What is 'liberal science'?
One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Retreat of the ideologues
Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 30, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

2014 Jefferson Muzzle awards have been announced

Violators of freedom of expression are the "winners" of the 2014 Jefferson Muzzle Awards from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville. Now in their 23rd year, the Muzzles are announced to coincide with Mr. Jefferson's birthday (April 13).

Josh Wheeler

The ten recipients this year include three educational institutions, three state government agencies, and four federal government agencies. They were announced by the Center's executive director, Josh Wheeler, via a press release on Thursday, April 10.

The awards include implicit criticism of the White House press office for limiting access to the news media to even trivial events and of the Department of Justice for "secretly seiz[ing] dozens of phone records of the Associated Press and falsely label[ing] Fox News reporter James Rosen a criminal 'co-conspirator' in order to obtain a search warrant for the reporter’s phone records and emails."

The National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security are joint recipients of a Muzzle

For causing an online retailer to remove from its website a Minnesota man’s products satirizing various government entities on T-shirts, bumper stickers, and other items. Zazzle.com pulled the items from its marketplace after receiving cease and desist letters from the NSA and Homeland Security. Among the items removed were products featuring a variation of the NSA seal along with the statement “The NSA: The only part of government that actually listens.”

The North Carolina General Assembly police are cited for arresting a reporter who was covering a protest at the state capitol, while the Tennessee General Assembly gets dinged for criminalizing undercover reporting at agricultural facilities.

The Kansas Board of Regents receives a 2014 Muzzle award because

Following controversial statements by a member of the University of Kansas faculty on his personal Twitter account, the Kansas Board of Regents (the governing board of the state’s public universities) adopted a social media policy that allows for the firing of a faculty member for using social media in such a way that “impairs…harmony among co-workers,” or that the university’s chief executive officer deems “contrary to the best interest of the university.”

A Florida high school principal gets an award for cutting off the microphone of a graduation speaker who was stumbling over his words and then denying the student an opportunity to accept his diploma with the rest of the class. His reason? He thought the stumbling was an attempt to go "off script" on the approved text of the speech.

The principal of Pemberton High School in New Jersey wins a Muzzle for censoring two articles in the student newspaper, and then forbidding the same newspaper from publishing an article about censorship.

My favorite 2014 Muzzle concerns a case that received a lot of publicity last September. At Modesto Junior College in California, a student was refused permission to distribute copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day. Here's the Thomas Jefferson Center's citation:

Campus police confronted Robert van Tuinen outside the student center as he handed out free copies of the Constitution to his fellow students on September 17—Constitution Day. Officers informed van Tuinen that school policy only permitted literature to be distributed within a tiny designated spot on campus, and only then if scheduled several days in advance.

If you missed the widely-distributed video of this incident, here it is:

To hear Thomas Jefferson Center director Josh Wheeler talk about how the Muzzle Award winners are determined, check out this interview on The Score.

Cross-posted from Bearing Drift (April 9, 2014).

@rick_sincere | facebook.com/ricksincere

From the Archives: 'Don't Let the Feds Be Thought Police'

This article was originally published in the Roanoke Times & World News on April 9, 1991, under the all-caps headline "DON'T LET THE FEDS BE THOUGHT POLICE." It was written in response to legislation that had been introduced by long-time Congressman Henry Hyde, who died in 2007 after 32 years representing Illinois's sixth congressional district.

- - -

I AM AS close to a free-speech absolutist as anyone can imagine. I believe that the survival of a liberal, democratic society depends on broad application of First Amendment protections for speech, assembly, religion and the press.

But I disagree with a bill introduced by Republican Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, the Collegiate Speech Protection Act of 1991. The act would prohibit any private college or university that accepts federal money from making or enforcing "any rule subjecting any student to disciplinary action solely on the basis of speech or other communication" that the First Amendment normally protects from government restrictions.

One impetus for Hyde's bill was Brown University's expulsion of a student for shouting anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-black epithets in a college courtyard in the middle of the night. This incident has been widely misinterpreted as punishment for the student's speech or ideas, rather than his rude and uncivil behavior. On other campuses, sanctions have been used against students and faculty for the expression of "politically incorrect" ideas.

Hyde relates his bill to the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which says the federal government can regulate any and all aspects of a college's operations if it accepts federal funds directly (in the form of research grants, for instance) or indirectly (by accepting tuition payments from students receiving federal scholarship aid).

Under these criteria, only Grove City College in Pennsylvania and Hillsdale College in Michigan would be exempt from the new law; they alone refuse, as a matter of principle, to take financial aid from the U.S. government.

The First Amendment does not prohibit private individuals or entities -- parents, corporations, churches, fraternal associations, colleges or newspaper publishers -- from restricting speech or expression of those in their employ or under their contol. It only applies to government.

Speech-suppression codes, now all the rage on U.S. campuses, are generally a bad idea. They are broadly and vaguely written, poorly administered, and serve to undermine the very cause they seek to advance -- deterring speech and behavior offensive to minorities defined by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. Moreover, the codes inhibit robust discussion of controversial and discomforting thoughts in the environment best suited for free-wheeling discourse.

Far worse than well-intentioned but nebulous standards of "political correctness," however, is the idea of extending the reach of the federal government to regulate the content of speech at private educational institutions.

Non-public colleges and universities are private, voluntary associations that should be able to set their own standards of civility and demarcate their own boundaries of acceptable behavior. Their members -- students, faculty and staff -- are free to leave if they disagree with those standards.

A "religious exemption" in Hyde's bill for denominational colleges acknowledges this, but too narrowly. Why should a church-related college be allowed, say, to prohibit a public lecture on the theory of evolution while a non-sectarian institution, no doubt animated by an integrated educational philosophy all its own, be barred by law from prohibiting a lecture on creationism?

We should not expand the realm of government interference in the private lives of citizens and their freely formed associations. The only thing more fearsome than self-anointed campus leaders taking on the raiments of thought police is federal bureaucrats doing the same.

AUTHOR NOTE: Richard E. Sincere Jr. is an Arlington writer and member of the Libertarian Party of Virginia.

Yale University Press Cowers Before Thugs

Many readers, especially those concerned with free speech issues, in particular, and civil liberties, in general, will remember the worldwide controversy that erupted about four or five years ago when a Danish newspaper decided to print some satirical cartoons that featured images of the Prophet Mohammed.

In the years since, Yale University Press decided to publish a book about the controversy, a scholarly examination of what happened and what it meant.

Scheduled for publication in November 2009, the book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, is written by a Brandeis University political scientist, Jytte Klausen, who was born in Denmark.

So far, so good.

Now comes the news that Yale University Press has deleted the cartoons in question from the book. In other words, Klausen can discuss the cartoons in her book, but she cannot show them.

Here's the New York Times on the story:

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Donatich does not even understand the basic concept of personal responsibility: that blood will not be on "his" hands if someone performs a violent act in reaction to publication of this (or any other book), but rather on the person who acts violently. Violent actors are responsible for their own actions, not the victims of violence. Victims are not culpable for evil done against them.

Yale is afraid, and rather than do the brave thing -- standing up against terrorists and thugs -- it is submitting.

Still, "submission" is just what they want.

The thing is, such submission is not even necessary. The Times' Patricia Cohen explains the view of one Muslim intellectual:

Reza Aslan, a religion scholar and the author of “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” is a fan of the book but decided to withdraw his supportive blurb that was to appear in the book after Yale University Press dropped the pictures. The book is “a definitive account of the entire controversy,” he said, “but to not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic.”

In Mr. Aslan’s view no danger remains. “The controversy has died out now, anyone who wants to see them can see them,” he said of the cartoons, noting that he has written and lectured extensively about the incident and shown the cartoons without any negative reaction. He added that none of the violence occurred in the United States: “There were people who were annoyed, and what kind of publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?”

“This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press,” he continued. “There is no chance of this book having a global audience, let alone causing a global outcry.” He added, “It’s not just academic cowardice, it is just silly and unnecessary.”

The book is still available for sale; it just won't be complete.

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'Schilling Show' Host to Guest on 'Fox & Friends'

Local Charlottesville radio talk-show host Rob Schilling will be a guest on "Fox & Friends" later this morning on the Fox News Channel. The segment is set to air at 8:45 a.m. (Eastern Time).

Schilling, a former member of the Charlottesville City Council, is getting national attention for a post to his show's blog about an Albemarle County middle-school teacher who seems to be indoctrinating her students about politics, rather than teaching them about civics and government. Schilling's guest spot on "Fox & Friends" will anchor a discussion about the responsibilities of teachers to be evenhanded in their discussions of current issues.

His blogpost features photographs from Henley Middle School teacher Margie Shepherd's classroom and states:

Proudly promulgated in Mrs. Shepherd’s cultivation chamber, is a printed, bingo-like game piece mocking Republican Alaska Governor and former Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. This derisive display, apparently acquired from the web site, Palin Bingo, ridicules Gov. Palin via association of her likeness with a number of traducing terms and by displaying a banner over her head, which reads, “AIR SPACE.”

How might this inappropriate and partisan political display affect the comfort level of any child in that classroom who happens to support Governor Palin and/or the Republican Party?

In addition to the insulting insinuation that Gov. Palin is an “airhead,” the same classroom is rife with “ecological,” “United Nations,” and “pacifist/peace” propaganda, all posted with no counterbalancing counsel for pupils’ perusal.

Quoting extensively from an Albemarle County school policy manual, Schilling concludes that Ms. Shepherd's teaching methods are at odds with the rules of the school division.

The story that Schilling broke on his blog (and that he has discussed briefly on his WINA-AM radio program) has already been covered by WCAV-TV in Charlottesville, not once, but twice.

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Chillier Near the Lake

In an action that has a touch of irony, the administration at Marquette University has refused to grant recognition to an organization called "Students for Academic Freedom." As reported by Lindsay Fiori in today's Marquette Tribune:

Students for Academic Freedom has been denied recognition as a student organization on campus because of objections from the Office of Student Development about the group's constitution and proposed activities....

The university "objected to types of programming and activities the group proposed as some of their functions," [dean of student development Mark] McCarthy said. "Such activities include reading lists, academic conferences and classroom speakers, all of which are curricular decisions within the purview of faculty.

"There were concerns in terms of having this organization be the monitoring group for these types of things," McCarthy said. "This issue has a lot to do with the rights of faculty members."

Needless to say, the proposed group was one that represented a conservative viewpoint and wanted to criticize liberal faculty members, although the group's leader pointed out that it had a non-partisan purpose:

"This decision clearly shows that the administration appears to be taking the position that academic freedom at Marquette is inconsistent with allowing the criticism of Marquette's liberal bias by conservatives," said John McAdams, associate professor of political science and the faculty adviser for SAF. "Academia protects women and minorities from offensive comments but does not want to do the same for conservative students."

However, according to [head of SAF Chuck] Rickert, "SAF is a nonpartisan group that both political views could have and would have supported. Its goal is to empower students to have more control of their lives in the academic sphere...to advocate a student bill of rights, or contract from the administration to the students and vice versa."

Marquette recently was in the news when the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) called it out for censoring a graduate student's office door/bulletin board and generally constricting free speech on campus. According to a FIRE news release from last October:

Writer and humorist Dave Barry probably never expected that one of his jokes would spark a university free speech dispute. But in early September, a Marquette University administrator removed a Barry quote about the federal government from Ph.D. student Stuart Ditsler’s office door because the quote was “patently offensive.” Facing this arbitrary exercise of political censorship, Ditsler contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“There have been several high-profile free speech controversies on campuses recently, such as at Columbia this month. But incidents like this one at Marquette and on other campuses illustrate how even innocuous expression is under ongoing assault at our colleges and universities,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said.

In late August, Ditsler posted a quote by Dave Barry on his office door in the philosophy department. The quote read, “As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.” On September 5, Philosophy Department Chair James South sent Ditsler an e-mail stating that he had received several complaints and therefore removed the quote. He wrote, “While I am a strong supporter of academic freedom, I’m afraid that hallways and office doors are not ‘free-speech zones.’ If material is patently offensive and has no obvious academic import or university sanction, I have little choice but to take note.”

“This incident at Marquette is part of a truly disturbing trend,” Lukianoff said. “Administrators seem willing to ban speech across the board and to designate increasingly tiny ‘free speech zones’ rather than risk any student or faculty member being offended.”

Ditsler reports that other members of the philosophy department have posted materials on their doors in the past without receiving reprimand or sanctions. FIRE wrote to Marquette University President Robert A. Wild on September 27 stating that Marquette’s policy against “offensive” materials is completely discretionary and therefore subject to abuse. FIRE also reminded Wild that Marquette’s Student Handbook protects the “right of the members of the university community freely to communicate, by lawful demonstration and protest, the positions that they conscientiously espouse on vital issues of the day.” Wild has not responded to FIRE’s letter.

I don't know enough about SAF's constitution or by-laws to comment on whether those would have served as an impediment to academic freedom (though I doubt it). I find it hard to agree with the Marquette Tribune's editorial stance that the decision to deny recognition was warranted. The rather tepid and poorly-reasoned editorial concludes:

We believe existing academic freedom is adequate, but the university needs to continue and improve efforts towards educating students on the proper channels for issuing complaints.

Is there a college or university on the planet that needs fewer, rather than more, checks and balances to assure that all viewpoints are respected and given space? If some people are discomfited by certain statements or viewpoints, the response should not be to restrict speech, but to expand it so that dialogue and true argument can take place.

SAF's faculty advisor John McAdams had the better point when he wrote on his blog yesterday. Referring to the official explanation from the university administration for Students for Academic Freedom's rejection, McAdams noted:

This statement, which appears to echo arguments fed to Miller by the Office of Student Development, is close to bizarre.

Just reading it, one might gather that Students For Academic Freedom was asking for the right to censor class reading lists at Marquette. One might gather that the organization was asking for the right to veto particular speakers or cancel conferences they don’t like.

In reality, all they asked for is the right to criticize the University, faculty and administrators on any of these issues.

Thus, “academic freedom” to these people means not merely that they get to make the relevant educational decisions. It means they cannot be criticized for decisions they make.

To paraphrase last year's Academy Award-winning song, in a university setting, "it's hard out here for a conservative." Living in a college town, I frequently hear stories that confirm that lament. Groups like FIRE exist to protect viewpoint diversity at both public and private institutions. (The First Amendment cannot be invoked when disputes like this arise on private campuses, but moral suasion can -- and must -- be used instead.)

I have a soft spot in my heart for Marquette University. It is just down the street from Marquette University High School, with which it shares a history. (Both schools celebrate their sesquicentenery this year.) For many years, the university and the high school also shared faculty members and had a unified Jesuit community.

Marquette was also my "safety school" when I was applying to college. Many of my high school classmates went on to MU for college and grad school. And of course I landed at another Jesuit institution, Georgetown University, so a certain fraternalism is expected. (I even interviewed for a job at MU, with the Office of Campus Ministry, just before I graduated from Georgetown, but nothing came of it.) So it is sad for me to see a campus rumpus about academic freedom and free speech there. I hope it is resolved to the benefit of all concerned.