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.

From the Archives: 2012 Jefferson Muzzles bestowed for censoring speech, expression

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 11, 2012. 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.

2012 Jefferson Muzzles bestowed for censoring speech, expression
April 11, 2012 10:29 PM MST

As it has done each year for the past two decades, the Charlottesville-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression has handed out its Jefferson Muzzles to government officials and agencies who stretch their authority and stifle to speech of American citizens.

The Center is also the sponsor of the First Amendment Monument on Charlottesville’s downtown mall, which is sometimes ruefully called the “Free Speech Memorial.”

This year’s Muzzle winners – who may or may not accept their awards graciously – were listed in a news release made available just after midnight on April 12, one day before the birthday of the namesake of the Thomas Jefferson Center:

*The Florida Legislature and Florida Governor Rick Scott for passing the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, a law restricting what Florida physicians may say to their patients regarding guns and gun safety.

*The U.S. State Department for rescinding the invitation to a Palestinian cartoonist to participate in a conference focusing on free speech because some of his cartoons were deemed to be anti-Semitic.

*Sam Houston State University (Texas) Professor Joe Kirk and the University Police Department for their respective actions involving a temporary campus “free speech wall” on which students were invited to write whatever they wanted. Professor Kirk literally cut the “F-word” from the wall where it was utilized to criticize President Obama. The university police then threatened to arrest any students who attempted to write the offending word again.

*Mayor Wayne Garner of Carrollton, Georgia for unilaterally canceling a previously-approved community theater production of The Rocky Horror Show at a publicly-owned venue. The show was in rehearsal when a cast member posted a video clip on his personal Facebook page. When the Mayor saw the clip, he canceled the already advertised production.

*The Administration of Catawba Valley Community College in North Carolina for banning a student from campus after he criticized via Facebook the school’s partnership with Higher One Financial Services and the aggressive marketing of a CVCC branded Debit Mastercard.

*Salem, Missouri Public Library’s Board of Trustees for using filtering software on library computers that classified many non-mainstream religious websites as “occult” or “criminal,” thereby blocking access to the sites.

*Lake of the Ozarks Camdenton R-III School District in Missouri for using filtering software on school computers that blocked access to many websites advocating equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people while comparable anti-gay websites were not blocked.

There were also two Virginia winners, including one that received a “Lifetime Achievement Muzzle”:

*The Norfolk, Virginia, Police Department for arresting and prosecuting a man for filming an on-duty police officer sitting in his car, claiming the man had to have the officer’s permission.

*The Virginia Department of Corrections for preventing an inmate from receiving a spoken word CD of works by Dylan Thomas because of a policy that permits only approved music and faith-based spoken word CDs. This is the third consecutive Muzzle for the VDOC, having previously been censured in 2010 for restricting access to religious spoken word CDs, and in 2011 for denying prisoners’ access to “The Jailhouse Lawyer’s Handbook,” a work detailing the legal rights of prisoners.

It was the Virginia Department of Corrections that received only the third lifetime Muzzle in the history of the awards. The others have been given to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in 1999, and the Federal Communications Commission, in 2008.

Suggested Links

Thomas Jefferson Center announces 2010 Muzzle Awards
Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville
Josh Wheeler discusses ‘Hustler v. Falwell’ as bulwark for free speech
Charlottesville lawyers compile rules against ‘politically correct’ Xmas
Highlighting free-speech worries, Virginia politicians disagree on SOPA

Support Harry's Place: A Blogburst

(I am usually, and appropriately, averse to pasting the words of others in a blog post of my own. But this case is exceptional. As you will see by reading through to the end of this posting, the text below is being copied and pasted onto blogs throughout the world, as a movement against intimidation against bloggers in general and one blogger in particular. Please feel free to do, as I have, and copy this article for use in your own blog. I first saw this on Combs Spouts Off and took the text from NeoConstant. -- Rick Sincere)

Harry’s Place, a UK blog dedicated to promoting the ideals of freedom and democracy, is being sued by Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, which has been linked to Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood, both terrorist organizations. The blog reports that Mr. Sawalha, according to the BBC…

“master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

In their revelation of the impending lawsuit against them leveled by Mohammed Sawalha, they write:

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha has been the prime mover in a number of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood associated projects. He is President of the British Muslim Initiative. He is the past President of the Muslim Association of Britain. He was the founder of IslamExpo, and is registered as the holder of the IslamExpo domain name. He is also a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque….

…Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas.

It looks like Harry’s Place is going up against some pretty top-notch lawyers on this one, and they’ve got guts, but as the post goes on to say:

If Mr Sawalha persists in attempting to silence us with this desperate legal suit, we will need your help.

We won’t be able to stand up to them alone.

This is why we’ve started this blogburst, to get the word out that we won’t let members of Hamas or any radical terrorist group censor us or any of our fellow bloggers.

If you’d like to add your site to the blogroll, simply email us at admin@neoconstant.com, and include your site’s URL.

Then copy and paste this entry into one of your posts. Future posts will be emailed to you. Thanks, and don’t forget to head over to Harry’s Place to show your support of their freedom of speech!

WE SUPPORT HARRY'S PLACE!

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Dep't of Apologies: Canada Unit

An interesting email apology was sent to its readers last week from Maclean's, Canada's pre-eminent news magazine:

We regret that a quote from our leading newsletter article was placed into the subject line of this week's Storyline. For any readers who were offended, we sincerely apologize.

For what was this September 14 statement so regretful? An earlier email, with links to the magazine's cover story, with this subject line:

'Why don't you go f*@! yourself'

That headline was linked to a story with the subhead, "The best bits of Brian Mulroney's memoirs," which began:

In contrast to the unplugged Brian Mulroney of Peter C. Newman’s Secret Mulroney Tapes, the guy in the former prime minister’s Memoirs 1939-1993 is, well, prime ministerial. Or at least as prime ministerial as he can be. With some not particularly close reading between the lines — or via quotations from others, judiciously strewn about by the author — readers can see what Mulroney really thinks about some of the personalities and events of a tumultuous time in Canadian politics.

On his first run for the PC leadership in 1976: The suggestion that he become a candidate left him “shocked.” But Mulroney quickly warmed to the idea, to the extent that losing to Joe Clark was a nightmare: “I began to drink quite heavily with friends over lunch and dinner, and these sessions frequently degenerated into baleful expressions of recrimination and regret. I profanely attacked some people who had let me down.”

This eventually leads to the money quote:

On cutting loose near the end of the 1984 election campaign: “I slid open one of the windows and motioned to one of the fellows carrying an anti-Mulroney sign. I smiled with a show of molars that would have made Jimmy Carter proud. ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself,’ I said, and closed the window.”

While one might find the full, cheeky quotation offensive in (or out of?) context, I fail to see why the bowdlerized headline -- with cartoonish punctuation marks replacing the letters in the allegedly offending word -- requires an apology from Maclean's. It's not like Mulroney dropped the f-bomb on the magazine's cover.

Still, it makes me more curious to read the former PM's memoirs.

Fantasy vs. Reality?

In my brief report on the new documentary film, Jesus Camp, which was screened at the Virginia Film Festival, I pointed out how the pastor in the film warns against imaginary "warlocks" and states that if Harry Potter had been around in Old Testament times, he would have been "put to death."

I saw that movie on Sunday morning, not finding out until later in the day that Parade magazine, the Sunday supplement carried by many U.S. newspapers, reported on efforts to ban Harry Potter books from school libraries:

Now there’s an effort to pull the world’s most popular wizard, Harry Potter, from school libraries in Gwinnett County, Ga. Why? Some parents say kids can’t tell fantasy from reality and will try casting spells on classmates.

"Casting spells on classmates"? Who's having difficulty telling fantasy from reality here? (Hint: It's the parents who believe in magic spells, not the kids who like reading adventure stories.)

Those parents must be the product of government schools, where critical thinking is in short supply.

Censorship? What Censorship?

The Washington Times today has a front-page story about church leaders and conservatives who are fretting about how the media -- both print and broadcast -- are engaging in a kind of "censorship" by denying religious advertisers the opportunity to place their advertisements on TV or in magazines like Rolling Stone.

The article ("Churches decry 'commercial censorship'"), written by correspondent Donna De Marco, begins:

The ongoing controversy between the media and religion heated up this month with Rolling Stone's initial rejection of an ad for a new version of the Bible.

The decision was reversed, and the ad will run next month, but religion-based advertising is becoming an increasingly heated issue as morals and ethics move to the forefront of the political debate.

The media, whether broadcast or print, have the right to turn down ads, but religious organizations and church groups say that right is a form of censorship. They say media must act in the public's interest and not dictate what can or cannot be seen and heard.

It then goes on to list several examples of this "censorship." And in every single example, the media outlet that initially refused to run an ad ended up relenting, permitting the advertiser to place the ad either in its original form or with minor changes.

The complaints have a sort of ironic misdirection, since they emanate largely from conservative groups.

Why is that? Well, for instance, one of the most widely publicized cases of "censorship" was an ad from the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination, which wanted to demonstrate its inclusivity. The ad shows, among other things, a gay couple being turned away by a beefy bouncer at another, unnamed church's door -- along with Hispanic, black, and handicapped individuals. That ad was refused by "liberal" networks NBC and CBS, but accepted by "conservative" Fox. And, the Times notes, "CBS and NBC did accept a second ad from the UCC that ran at the end of December. " (You can see the UCC ad here; click one of the options under "Watch 'Bouncer' commercial.")

So what's the beef? If the complainers can't come up with a single example of a refused ad placement that sticks, they have no complaint.

Moreover, let's not forget that the publications and broadcast outlets have a right, acknowledged by the First Amendment to the Constitution, to control their own message. Do the religious groups want to see a day when their church bulletins must carry advertising for Satanic cults and sex toys?