The Continued Necessity of Intellectual Freedom
The Continued Necessity of Intellectual Freedom
As Congress scrutinizes top colleges, freedom of speech and thought remain vital pillars of higher education.
(Student protest at Columbia University. Source: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The confidence of college community members to express their ideas and viewpoints, especially on controversial issues, is extremely low and continues to decline precipitously.
Speech of all kinds not expressly designed to incite violence or law-breaking should be acceptable in academic environments. Instead, the permissibility of speech is often heavily regulated by the whims of students and school administrators, groups that primarily push more censorship.
Today, colleges are hostile institutions for freedom of speech. In 2019, 54.7% of college students believed that their college’s atmosphere restricted students’ ability to freely express ideas, which increased to 63.5% in 2021. In 2022, 58.5% of students reported having self-censored; another study found that 20% of students did so frequently.
Peer pressure is a key factor, as younger generations act collectively to protect themselves from ideas they find offensive or uncomfortable.
Their aversion to discomforting thought is enforced by mob justice. When asked to identify all of their motivations for self-censorship, 62.3% of students picked “other students would make critical comments with each other after class,” with no other answer applying to over half of the students.
These fears are well-founded, as we live in a culture that excuses violent reactions to speech. Even in the five most open colleges for speech, as rated by FIRE, 21% of students thought violence was acceptable to use to disrupt campus speech. A slim minority (46%) even supports preventing fellow students from attending certain events, and a majority (55%) believes shouting down a “problematic” speaker is permissible.
These figures should distress anyone who values our basic liberties. It is not surprising that many today brush aside natural rights: the idea that, as wrote John Locke, “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man.”
We live in a country where blatant affronts to the right of life pass with wide margins, even in conservative states. While we no longer live in a nation with federally mandated access to abortion, the backlash to a return of judicial restraint has empowered state legislatures to widen the legality of abortion to even viable children.
The newest justice of our nation’s Supreme Court fails to adhere to natural rights, stating in a confirmation hearing that she does “not hold a position” on its validity. Natural rights stands as one of the founding precepts of Western law and our country itself, and frames the correct goal of the whole of our government: to protect the God-given rights of its citizenry, not to stand as the arbiter of which rights are valid as was the case under the British monarchy. How can one of the nine most powerful judges in our country be so indifferent as to effectively dismiss the foundational change brought about by the American Revolution, and manage to advance to her current position while openly espousing these ideals?
All that aside, even from an argument of pure utility, ignoring the moral failings of censorship, free speech is needed in colleges. Consequentialism, the belief that only the effects of an action should matter in judging its morality, is the only ethical pillar remaining for much of the left, and even a well-reasoned use of that framework undermines silencing expression. Free speech is vitally and foundationally important to the goal of major research institutions: the search for truth. The absence of intellectual freedom puts blinders on the research of academics, turning them from free mustangs to little more than carriage horses; from free inquiry to serving the exact will of those with power over them.
How can truth be found when it is limited to only those ideas accepted by society? How can we reach the “Veritas” enshrined by Harvard University’s motto when the value of a fact hinges on how people react to it?
Yale’s motto of “Light and truth” sets the bar even higher. To me, little “light” exudes from a society that banishes inconvenient truths, sacrificing them to the ether of someone’s feelings.
A society that restricts human creativity and free expression acts remarkably “unmindful of the future,” to quote the motto of our own great institution. There is a reason why political and economic freedom is so heavily correlated with prosperity.
The absence of freedom of speech and thought gives those in power an unrestrained ability to shape the minds and actions of those under their control. Without freedom of thought, the controlling group has a monopoly on information, as no ideas besides what they approve can be shared. They have full power to propagandize.
Even John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous utilitarian philosophers in history and ardent opponent of the theory of natural rights, greatly valued the importance of free speech. In his seminal work, On Liberty, Mill correctly postulates, in terms of speech, that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised… is to prevent harm to others.”
Obviously, there must be limits to freedom of expression on college campuses if it truly does harm people. Droves of students at renowned institutions setting up what amount to modern pogroms to harass and bully many Jewish students, or those who disagree with the fervent support of what effectively amounts to a terrorist state, is not a proper use of free speech and limits the free expression of others through fear.
But instead of relying on the often-flawed views of school administrators of what constitutes harm, or merely what the majority of students deem acceptable to believe or tout, both arbitrary in nature, we have a fair and just standard with which to regulate speech, one rooted in our First Amendment and American jurisprudence. This could both protect academic freedom and curb harassment and threats on college campuses. In regulating speech on campus, we must respect the difference between speech designed to incite violence, something that can be objectively proven, and speech that people merely find objectionable.
The United States Supreme Court’s two-pronged “Brandenburg test,” stemming from its case Brandenburg v. Ohio, provides an excellent line, in stride with Mill’s view, in the sand for what speech should be morally and legally acceptable. More specifically, the case defines the legal acceptability of certain types of inflammatory statements in the United States. It does this by stating that speech is only unlawful when it is both: “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
This would allow students to discuss in a classroom the merits of even heinous ideas like Hamas’s genocidal views, protecting the hypothetical discussion of violent views, without permitting students to chant their support for mass murder and air threats to people around them.
Perhaps the guidelines of the Brandenburg test could be slightly tightened for use in academic settings, as Brandenburg protects even sincere calls to violence that are unlikely to occur (e.g., a single man calling for the invasion of a country). The border of acceptable and unacceptable speech should be more restrictive for a university setting, where freedom of association is more limited, with less of an ability to distance oneself from speech one finds hurtful than the rest of society.
The core assumption in allowing a wide swath of speech is that most speech that might be considered objectionable lacks the violence necessary to be an affront to the rights of others; to someone with a reasonable ability to deal with speech offensive or even harmful to them, speech lacks the long-term ill effects found in physical force. Feminist author Loiuse Richardson-Self offers a counterpoint to my assumption that most non-threatening speech, speech that is acceptable under Brandenburg, should be protected: that “hate speech is violently oppressive.” Her definition of hate speech is not tied to any threat found within the words spoken but to the emotional effect of the speech on its recipient.
This is simply untrue and a terrible lens with which to view the acceptability of speech. The arguments regarding what constitutes “hate speech” illustrate my point perfectly: only speech inciting violence can be uniformly described as oppressive of rights. The bad outcome of hate speech, the emotional damage to the recipient, is determined by said recipient. Two people can be told the same “hateful” speech and react differently, which speaks more to the characteristics of the recipients of the speech than the nature of the speech.
I fail to disprove that all “hate speech” lacks violence. The subjectivity of punishing it trumps its occasional violence. I do not disagree that in a vacuum, some hate speech would meet the criteria of a punishable offense. I merely believe that a clear enough delineation cannot be made between speech that ignores natural rights and speech that is merely irreverent, without simply regulating speech based on the reaction of its recipient, a standard that is neither objective nor just. We must have inciting violence as the legal line of acceptability, as found in Brandenburg.
There is no objective standard for the line of acceptable speech, so we must air on the side of individual rights. Allowing some genuinely hurtful speech is a worthwhile price to prevent outside influences, detached from the context of whatever situation the words were spoken in, to intrude and regulate human interactions.
The distinction between criticism and violent bullying is an example of where the dividing line between what acceptable versus illegal speech should be in the U.S., however the specifics of that distinction are adjudicated.
Bullying primarily consists of threatening remarks designed to intimidate another person. This exerts a toll on the liberty and bodily autonomy of the bullied, as they are forced to worry about their future safety without having performed an action that would justify such preoccupation.
Criticism can certainly be hurtful, but being solely of the mind and not having reached a physical threat, the harm is subjective and not a universally provable violation of natural rights as are violent threats.
Without the freedom to criticize and debate, the marketplace of ideas cannot exist. This is the concept of, in effect, a natural selection of ideas, where freedom of expression allows viewpoints from all sides of the spectrum, even ones most would find abhorrent, and they are allowed to compete for followers without outside intervention. This allows reform of society and societal preconceptions to occur and presents people with the widest swath of ideological options.
It also avoids criminalizing unpopular opinions, an action which can lead to the Streisand effect, boosting the persuasiveness of fringe opinions by letting them point to their government censorship as proof of the veracity of their arguments (“If we are wrong, why are they censoring us?”). This very situation has occurred with a mainstream political figure, Donald Trump, following his removal from state ballots. His supporters have argued that the suppression of his campaign shows nervousness by his ideological enemies, with them tacitly admitting he is right and more persuasive by trying to tank his campaign and not simply defeat him in the general election.
Criminalizing speech and ideologies also violates the natural rights of the people who believe or promulgate them if such ideologies do not directly instigate violence.
Such speech restrictions are, as Mill posits, again in On Liberty, “robbing … those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.” If said opinion is right, it is unjustly taken out of the marketplace of ideas, making society worse; while if it is wrong, restrictions snuff out any fruitful debate over the ideas and end the possibility of the truth naturally conquering something incorrect.
To restrict speech on a campus violates Mill’s belief that human liberty must include both freedom of thought and the freedom to air those ideas to willing listeners. These are intrinsically linked, and a violation of either is an affront to the basic rights of human beings.
Americans and students in the United States continue to enjoy unfettered and unsurveilled freedom of thought and access to information, although those rights seem to be slowly shrinking. These are naught absent the ability to freely, without fear, share one's views or findings.
Without free speech, no ideas other than those deemed acceptable by those in power could be shared interpersonally. This is as bad as having no freedom of thought in the first place.
Authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt illustrate perfectly the student-driven campaign to wash clean colleges of anything mildly offensive. Describing this campaign in their influential article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” this “vindictive protectiveness” they describe fundamentally betrays the purpose of education.
If we are to escape the emotions-driven crusade against the pursuit of knowledge that has gripped this country, we must reject raw emotion in favor of the pursuit of knowledge, reform our culture to place truth above all, and understand the necessity of a right to speech.
[The opinions expressed in this magazine are the author's own and do not reflect the official policy or position of The Spectator, or any students or other contributors associated with the magazine. It is the intention of The Spectator to promote student thought and civil discourse, and it is our hope to maintain that civility in all discussions.]
