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Ica spring 2024 exhibitions.

An installation at the ICA.

“Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea” and “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe” are presented as the Institute of Contemporary Art’s spring 2024 exhibitions. The former is an installation that draws inspiration from the Sargasso Sea, the only body of water defined by oceanic currents. The latter, meanwhile, brings together paintings, video, prints, and sculpture by Jackson, who investigates histories related to cities, lands, and individuals in the U.S.

12:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Institute of Contemporary Art, 116 S. 36th St.

Zooman and the Sign

Two people on chaise lounge in conversation

2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Harold Prince Theatre, 3680 Walnut St.

‘The Illuminated Body’

Person sitting on step clutching knee and thigh.

10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Arthur Ross Gallery, 220 S. 34th St.

Mariana Sadovska

Mariana plays an instrument on stage.

Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St.

Campus & Community

The importance of free speech on college campuses

Running penn’s committee on open expression has given sigal ben-porath an up-close look at free speech on campus—and even inspired her to write a book on the topic..

Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor at the Graduate School of Education

Sigal Ben-Porath , a professor at the Graduate School of Education , has been chair of Penn ’s Committee on Open Expression since the 2015-16 academic year, a position that has given her an up-close and personal view of the complications and challenges surrounding free speech, especially in the current, hyper-partisan environment.

Consisting of faculty, staff, and students , the Committee follows Penn’s longstanding Guidelines on Open Expression , which were developed in the 1960s and updated a number of times in subsequent years. Members of the Committee are tasked with upholding the Guidelines and mediating related concerns that are brought before them.

Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor at the Graduate School of Education

Devotion to an open-minded atmosphere on college campuses has been embraced, by and large, by students and faculty for generations, says Ben-Porath, who both believe freedom of expression is imperative for constructive learning and research. Nonetheless, she says students with diverging ideological leanings differ on how free freedom of speech actually is. Certain students believe the right is nearly absolute; others seek to limit debate or the expression of views on topics they believe fall outside the bounds of reasonable discussion.

Ben-Porath’s work on the Open Expression committee moved her to write the book “Free Speech on Campus.” Published last year by the University of Pennsylvania Press , the manuscript examines the current state of the arguments about free speech on college campuses, using real-world examples to explore the contexts in which conflicts and tensions erupt.

In response to her book, Ben-Porath has been invited to give talks about free speech at a variety of higher education institutions, including community colleges, Ivy League universities, and public institutions, some of whom have set up committees to draft or update guidelines on open expression.

Free Speech on Campus

“I think a lot of places are just now waking up to the concern that even if you’re a small place, even if you don’t necessarily see yourself as that visible or your students as necessarily organized in this way, it’s still your problem as well,” she says. “Even if you’re not interested in free speech, free speech is interested in you.”

Administrative awakenings in relation to free speech on college campuses are the result of student activism, and also the fact that universities are a primary target in the current culture wars, Ben-Porath says. University leaders have trepidations about how the higher education sector is perceived. She says where a person stands on the issue of free speech on college campuses is now a marker for a general ideological stance that partisans can use to signal their overall position, similar to how people used to speak about marriage equality.

The most vocal critics accuse universities of being too elitist, lacking ideological diversity, and prioritizing progressive and liberal views.

Commentators and critics point to instances in which conservative speakers have been heckled or prevented from speaking as proof that students at so-called “liberal” universities are too fragile for ideological debate, fail to understand democratic commitments, and are attempting to stifle free speech.

Surveys have shown a more limited support for free speech or First Amendment protections on college campuses, but Ben-Porath says students attempting to limit speech support free speech, but object to free speech being used to harm, denigrate, or devalue another human being.

“This is not being a snowflake, this is being an activist,” she says. “What they are expressing is not oversensitivity that they can’t handle the truth. They are expressing a commitment to the values that we are teaching them and we are not always practicing, like equal dignity to all persons. That doesn’t show fragility, in my view. It actually shows a commitment to democratic values, and we need to listen to that.”

Even if you’re not interested in free speech, free speech is interested in you.

Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the Graduate School of Education

Ben-Porath does not support speech codes or the shutting down of speakers—even those who speak hate. Universities as an institution should not invite such speakers, but if a student or a student group is interested in inviting the person to campus, she does not think the school should intervene.

Aside from individuals calling for violence, Ben-Porath says there are very few people who should be prevented from speaking.

“From where I stand, it’s going to be a pretty small marginal group of people, and I won’t expand it, even when there are people who I see and a lot of people see as quite hateful,” she says. “I don’t necessarily want to prevent them from coming to campus because I think that they are, sadly, a part of our current political debate. I regret that, but I would like to support my students in engaging with that.”

Student activists have a large toolkit for responding to speakers they disagree with if they look historically and in present practice, Ben-Porath says. And these tools are much more effective than shutting speakers down. She says students can use humor, as has been done when responding to the anti-gay preachers on Locust Walk. To protest the preachers’ hateful signs, students created their own humorous signs and collected donations for the Attic, an LGBT youth center, while the preachers spoke.

Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the Graduate School of Education

“The Black Graduate and Professional Student Assembly here on campus staged an excellent protest earlier this fall in response to a speaker speaking against the Black Lives Matter movement,” Ben-Porath says. “Excellent in the sense that it was nonviolent, but a very effective protest.” The students dressed in similar fashion, brought signs expressing their opposition, asked the speaker hard questions, and protested outside the venue.

“They engaged with the content and rejected it effectively,” she says. “They engaged with the actual invitation by their presence, by their visible appearance with their clothes and their signs. I thought that was great because they were able to express their opposition, and to express their valid perspective in opposition to her views way more effectively than if they shouted her down.”

Photo: Ben-Porath’s research focuses on citizenship education, normative aspects of educational and social policy, and the social and educational effects of war.

Two-and-a-half decades of research in Malawi

scuba diver researching coral

Science & Technology

In hot water: Coral resilience in the face of climate change

Over a decade, researchers from Penn studied coral species in Hawaii to better understand their adaptability to the effects of climate change.

cop28 exterior

At COP28, Penn delegation shares wide-ranging knowledge and builds connections

More than two dozen researchers from schools and centers across the University traveled to Dubai for the UN’s annual climate change conference.

Exterior of Singh Center for Nanotechnology lit up at nighS

The Singh Center for Nanotechnology turns 10

Since its founding, the Center’s multidisciplinary approach has been a strength, where researchers from Penn Engineering, Arts & Sciences, and more come together in one space.

autumn leaves at the quad

Penn’s urban forest

Penn’s West Philadelphia campus is home to 240 different tree species, which put on a show during the fall season.

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What Should Free Speech Mean in College?

Universities must cultivate a climate in which students feel comfortable taking intellectual risks. four faculty members weigh in on why setting that culture is hard..

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What Should Free Speech Mean in College?

Illustration: Aad Goudappel

By Jill Patton

I magine a student posting satirical flyers around his dorm that mock undocumented students who fear deportation. Or flyers that say, “Racism lives here.” Or posters advertising a controversial speaker’s visit—which another resident rips down.

Now picture a classroom discussion about police shootings of African Americans. Some students attribute the deaths to cops’ racist attitudes. Another student counters that claim, saying a more likely explanation is that violent crime rates are higher among blacks. “Now, that was particularly uncivil!” the professor replies. Another student stands, as if to storm out in disgust at his classmate’s rebuttal. The professor slams his hand on the table, crying, “Sit down!” as he tries to regain control of the room.

Out in White Plaza—a Stanford free speech zone—a student group staffs a table in support of a Supreme Court nominee. Detractors try to steal the group’s signs, prompting the supporters to film the sign stealers and the taunting that ensues on both sides.

There are no easy answers to how a university should address conflicts in which students feel attacked or silenced—sometimes on both sides simultaneously. As Debra Satz, a philosopher and the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, says, “A central aim of the university—to generate knowledge—depends on the free exchange of ideas.” But, says Satz, who expands on her view in an essay below, “The classroom is not a street corner: No classroom can be a place of learning without abiding by norms of civility and mutual respect.”

For several years now, we’ve debated as a nation whether free speech on college campuses is under duress—and if so, how so and what to do about it. Here, you’ll read four senior faculty members’ views on the matter, and on how Stanford might cultivate open dialogue while paying heed to another university value that molds our educational experiences: inclusion. We hope you’ll consider their views and then share your own .

Jill Patton , ’03, MA ’04, is the senior editor of S tanford .

Ralph Richard Banks (Photo: Natalie Glatzel)

When silence isn’t golden.

by Ralph Richard Banks

“Words are dangerous. That’s why we should always choose them with care.” 

That’s my way of preparing my law students for the discussion of controversial and polarizing topics—abortion, same-sex marriage, capital punishment, affirmative action. I worry that the inclination to censor oneself or others may deprive us all of the full and rich inquiry such topics warrant. I know, too, that students may feel invested in these topics, implicated by them, in a way they don’t when we discuss, say, invalidation of wage and hour laws during the New Deal. It’s all too easy for the class to reach an unproductive equilibrium, where some students don’t speak to avoid the risk of censure and others confidently declare some views righteous and others bigoted.

Students are unlikely to make useful intellectual contributions if they are feeling attacked or if they feel that they don’t belong at Stanford.

Gay and lesbian students may feel, understandably, that criticisms of same-sex marriage imply rejection of them. Other students may be hesitant to voice religious opposition to same-sex marriage, fearing moral condemnation by their classmates. Similar issues arise with race-based affirmative action, where students from underrepresented racial minority groups might feel as though their status as a Stanford student is being questioned. Classmates, in turn, might either imply that they don’t belong or decline to voice important questions about the wisdom and effects of race-based affirmative action.

In short and plain language, we need to cut other people some slack.

In both cases, I try to frame the discussion broadly and to make it about policies rather than people. I situate race-based affirmative action, for example, in the context of the many ways that universities deviate from strict admissions criteria of grades and test scores. I place same-sex marriage within a broader conversation about the changing role and nature of marriage. With both topics, I try to create space for conversation by encouraging students to identify unbigoted reasons that people may oppose race-based affirmative action or the Supreme Court’s mandate of same-sex marriage. 

While the challenges of conversation around such sensitive issues are longstanding, my sense is that they have become more daunting in recent years. It has become increasingly difficult to maintain an environment in which all students feel free to share their views and to join together in working through morally fraught and politically divisive issues.

I see two factors as undermining debate on college campuses. One is the rise of social media, or, more accurately, the dominance of social media as a means through which young people relate to others and learn about their society. Now, what happens inside the classroom is shaped by what could happen outside of the classroom. In class, comments can be made available to the world nearly instantaneously. Social media mobs can seem merciless and relentless. The second factor relates to students’ willingness to pounce on others who voice sentiments they deem unacceptable. Some portion of this inclination stems from anxiety and insecurity; students in their search for comfort seek certainty—an ideological safe space. This confluence of forces can lead to an uncomfortable classroom dynamic, in which the most thoughtful students become the least likely to speak out, leaving a conversation dominated by those with the most extreme and self-righteous views. 

This situation is worsened by the fact that the nearest role models—the faculty—are often not very much better at engaging around polarizing issues. Just as students do not want to be called to account by their classmates, neither do faculty want to be targeted by students for having said something allegedly racist, sexist, classist, etc. All too often, faculty, rationally, pull back from discussing contentious issues for fear of censure. And faculty are aware that if issues do arise, the institution is more likely to protect its own interest, which is in avoiding controversy, protest and bad publicity, than to take a principled stance in support of a faculty member. No wonder that students fall short of our aspirations for full and vigorous debate; faculty often do as well.

I have my own way of pushing back against the forces that squelch debate. I emphasize that even polarizing, politically divisive issues are, in fact, complicated; they highlight difficult questions of law and policy, areas where the answers are not obvious. We would do well, then, to resist the urge toward self-righteousness and instead embrace a sense of humility, with full awareness of the limits of our own understanding. Curiosity will lead to more insight than certainty. 

Confronted with challenging topics, we need to cultivate patience, both with ourselves and with others. We should be less likely to take offense, less likely to impute ill. We need to charitably interpret others’ perspectives and hold in our minds the possibility that they may be criticizing our position, not us; our viewpoint, not our identity. In short and plain language, we need to cut other people some slack. And if we cut them some slack, hopefully they will cut us some slack. That would give everyone more space to join together in trying to figure out this complicated and frightening world in which we live. 

Ralph Richard Banks , ’87, MA ’87, is the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law  School. His scholarship focuses on  the law with respect to race, education, employment and family.

Photo of Michael McConnell.

Academic Value No. 1

by Michael McConnell

Freedom of speech on campus has become controversial as never before. A recent national survey of 2,225 college students found that 57 percent think university administrators should be able to restrict political views that are seen as hurtful or offensive to others. Even at Stanford, students frequently appeal to the university to silence other students whose views make them feel uncomfortable. This makes serious discussion of many important political issues almost impossible. Students of a conservative persuasion tell me that they do not feel free to express their views—even mainstream, reasonable views shared by millions of Americans—in class or in common spaces, for fear of attracting a torrent of abuse from fellow students and occasional disapproval from a small minority of ideologically intolerant faculty. They simply self-censor; they keep their mouths shut.

In disciplines like law, political science, history, the humanities and even medicine, the silencing of political dissent has devastating consequences. The purpose of the university is to search for the truth through the relentless exercise of reason and evidence; that purpose cannot be achieved if dissenting views are suppressed or potentially controversial avenues of inquiry are avoided. At a personal level, it is, of course, bad for the political minority, who feel excluded and unwelcome. But the greatest victims are members of the political majority, the left-progressive students who are deprived of the opportunity to test their arguments against contrary ideas, to learn how to engage with (and perhaps to persuade) people from the other side, and even, on occasion, to discover that they were wrong or misguided. Universities should not be bubbles. A university education should prepare students to encounter the world, in all its diversity and contentiousness, where not everyone will agree and not everyone will be willing to follow left-progressive notions about what can and cannot be said.

Universities should not be bubbles.

Moderate students who share some but not all the views of either side may be the most endangered. In these highly polarized times, students of a conservative, libertarian or religious-traditionalist bent can find friends and allies—at least outside of the classroom or the more public arenas for discussion. But moderates are without a home. They are excoriated if they deviate from the left-progressive orthodoxy but may not wish to make common cause with the right side of the spectrum. My sense is that moderate voices are disappearing from the campus debate. 

Stanford as a university should actively encourage diversity of opinion in a way that would be beyond the proper role of government. We should not be content with protecting the freedom of speech. We should regard a healthy pluralism of opinion as a pedagogical necessity.

What, then, should we do? I have three suggestions.

First, we should undertake a survey of the campus environment to determine just how constrained the expression of dissenting opinions really is. Do students who differ from the majority feel silenced? Do students at Stanford interact with people of differing views? Are serious cross-ideological conversations taking place? Is the classroom a place of free inquiry and discussion, rather than of ideological indoctrination or conformity? These must be questions, not assumptions. As a scientific, empirically minded institution, when Stanford is serious about campus problems, whether they are sexual assaults or the high cost of housing, the first step is to survey students and faculty to find out how serious the problem actually is.

Second, we need to elevate the topic of free exchange of ideas within the Stanford community. For much of our history, educators could assume that free speech and the toleration of difference of opinion were values shared by all Americans. This can no longer be assumed. Perhaps the role of the university in society, and the central place of freedom of expression in fulfilling that role, could be made the focus of a portion of New Student Orientation. Princeton chose Professor Keith Whittington’s Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech as the book all incoming students would read and discuss together last fall. We could, and should, do something similar.

Third, we need an office in the university administration that is committed to protecting freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. Currently, when a student’s poster is taken down by dorm officials or a professor demands ideological conformity, students have no obvious place to go for redress. 

Free speech is not just a legal constraint. It is an academic value. We need to do more to give it life.

Michael McConnell  is the Richard and Frances Mallery  Professor of Law and director of the Constitutional Law Center, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Photo of Hazel Rose Markus.

Listen and Learn

by Hazel Rose Markus

We have two ears and one mouth; it is wise to use them in these proportions. This wisdom, attributed to multiple advice-givers across time and continents, highlights the underappreciated power of listening.

To provide a stable foundation for learning, growth and community at Stanford, our values of free expression and inclusion should be equally strong. Currently, free speech, which privileges the use of the mouth, is far stronger. Inclusion, the idea that everyone belongs and that no one should feel like a guest in someone else’s house, could use buttressing. Cultivating the use of the ears in houses and dorms but also in classes is one way to strengthen inclusion. 

As a psychologist who studies culture, I know that the imbalance in institutional emphasis between free speech and inclusion is hardly unique to Stanford. In the United States, where the individual is understood as a stable, independent entity, free speech has the advantage of historical precedent and widespread philosophical and moral support. Through talking, people express their rights and individuality; they influence their worlds. Americans are constantly exhorted to find and use their voices. Free speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, and the United States is a nation of many free talkers. The best way to counter any excesses of free speech, we are told by legal experts, is with more speech. 

When a class becomes a community, everyone learns more.

Inclusion is a newer and more complex concern with much less historical and institutional underpinning. Inclusion is hard because it removes the spotlight from the free and independent individual and instead illuminates interdependence, relationships and the consequences of individuals’ actions. Meaningful recognition and inclusion of the many experiences and perspectives that now make up Stanford is a challenge that will require many small tweaks, as well as larger changes in norms, policies and practices. 

Speaking freely in my Cultural Psychology class, I noted that in the United States, talking was valuable because “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Several students with East Asian backgrounds seemed puzzled and offered a different cultural take on talking: “The mouth is the source of misfortune” and “The duck that quacks the loudest gets shot.” For those who hail from worlds in which the individual is not centered and separated but understood as a flexible, committed being defined by relations with close others, speaking requires attention to the consequences of one’s speech. And research confirms that while it’s true for European Americans that talking helps thinking, for many Asians and Asian Americans, talking can actually get in the way of thinking.

In class, some students with European American backgrounds were extremely well practiced in speaking freely and often. As one student told me, “I don’t even know what I think until I hear myself saying it.” Others, however, often those with less wealth and privilege, or those who were first-gen, were decidedly more reticent. A student who grew up in a rural community where he practiced fitting in, keeping his head down and paying attention to authority, asked me, “All those students who talk all the time—how do they do it? How do they already have so many ideas and opinions?”

As I have listened to these students, I have learned that they all have a lot to contribute but that the university as currently arranged makes inclusion more likely for the easy talker than for the others. Designing for inclusion raises many speech-related questions: Are people equally familiar and practiced with speaking and with engaging in active debate in the marketplace of ideas? Do they feel equally entitled and empowered to speak? Is speaking the most important way to have impact in the world? When is my speech hurting, threatening or excluding others? Do I have a responsibility to care about this?

These are tough questions, but they are the kinds of questions that Stanford has the responsibility to answer as it designs itself for an inclusive future. Some can be answered by listening to the rich array of perspectives available at Stanford. A class called Intergroup Communication that I teach with Dereca Blackmon, ’91, assistant vice provost and executive director of inclusion and diversity education, facilitates both talking and listening among people with different backgrounds and experiences. Based on a technique known as the fishbowl, students divide themselves into groups and ask and answer questions about one another. The groups can be based on any social distinction—major, region, birth order, religion, etc. 

Often the class begins with gender. Students divide into men, women and gender nonconforming. Each group develops thoughtful questions for the other groups, which take turns sitting in the middle of the room while the other groups pose their questions. In subsequent weeks, students divide into groups based on race and ethnicity, on the socioeconomic level of their families, and on sexual orientation. The class debriefs together following each unit, and outside of class, students meet for a discussion with a student from a different social category than their own. 

A set of norms guides the discussions, including: What is learned here leaves here, what is heard here stays here, make space, take space, understand your intention and own your impact. The questions are real. How can men be allies to women? What do men think about women who ask them out? What are some microaggressions you have experienced? How do you feel knowing you have so much more than other people? How does your family background influence your major? What are the best things about being Native? There is no back-and-forth between those asking the questions and those answering. The focus is on listening. The answers reveal important and often unseen differences, as well as many similarities in dreams and worries. 

After five years as part of this teaching team, I know that listening doesn’t just happen. It requires a set of values and skills grounded in the understanding that for many questions there is often more than one right answer. Yes, this is a class devoted to communication, but time devoted to establishing norms for discussion and getting to know one another can be a valuable use of classroom time whatever the topic. When a class becomes a community, everyone learns more. Innovating, experimenting and doubling down on ways to listen to one another, to ask the important follow-up questions and to listen some more, can give inclusion the institutional support it needs. 

Hazel Rose Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, the co-founder  and co-director of Stanford SPARQ ,  and an author of  Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World.  

Photo of Debra Satz.

Tools for Debate

by Debra Satz

Many of the challenges to the free exchange of ideas on college campuses come from outside: There are individuals and organizations that monitor the teaching of professors who hold controversial views. There are groups that seek simply to incite confrontations. Our public culture is full of voices that hope to shut down or drown out rational deliberation. The existence of the internet also means that many of our well-intentioned mistakes can go viral. All of these social forces lead to a chilling of honest, probing and difficult discussions.

But some of the challenges we face come from within. Let me call out three obstacles to free inquiry that can arise inside our classrooms: 

Conformism. A central impediment with respect to free speech in our classrooms is self-censorship. Many students are afraid to voice opinions that go against what they perceive as the dominant opinion of their peers. Indeed, exercising one’s own judgment when all received opinion seems to go against that judgment is hard. It is far easier to cede to what the philosopher John Stuart Mill calls the “despotism of custom,” to go along with the majority view, to engage in group-think, or at the least to stay quiet. 

Subjectivism. Some students conclude that the existence of disagreement over policy matters means that moral values are subjective—that they are nothing but matters of mere opinion. If that’s right, then there is no point in trying to discuss and reason about them. But that isn’t right. We can subject our values to pressure by seeing if they are consistent with other values and beliefs we hold; we can increase awareness of costs and trade-offs given feasibility constraints and facts; and we can confront our ideas with other ways of thinking and see if they survive critical scrutiny. 

Dogmatism. Some students conclude from the existence of disagreement that someone must be wrong. But not all disagreements are unreasonable. Sincere people motivated to find common ground, and looking at the same evidence, can still disagree about policies because they attach different weights to the moral values involved in such policies, or because the evidence is incomplete and difficult to interpret, or because they assess the risk of different outcomes differently. 

We can confront our ideas with other ways of thinking and see if they survive.

We have pedagogical tools for addressing these difficulties in the classroom. The Socratic method is perhaps the best thing philosophy has produced. Socrates believed in the method of subjecting one’s beliefs to pressure from counterexamples and critical questions. In Plato’s Republic , Socrates begins with the everyday opinion that justice is “truth and returning what one takes,” and argues that this opinion leads to contradictions. By questioning those who hold such an opinion, Socrates shows that the commonsense morality of his time is full of internal tensions and can be brought under pressure by rational thought to resolve those tensions. It’s up to each of us to determine, in the face of critical questioning and open inquiry, our own values and beliefs about what is just. 

The devil’s advocate is another useful tool. When views—including cherished ones—go unchallenged, an educational opportunity is lost. This can even be the case when the opposing views are false or unreasonable. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.” It’s important for teachers to model engagement with diverse perspectives. In my classes on democratic thought, I am always sure to teach the strongest criticisms of democracy and, if necessary, to play the role of the devil’s advocate.

At the moment, we are in the midst of rethinking our undergraduate curriculum to make room in freshman year for classes that confront students with the need to reflect on their moral choices and moral responsibilities, to consider the fact of enduring disagreements in a diverse and free society, to recognize the importance of critical reflection, and to model the norms of civility and mutual respect. May our efforts at Stanford succeed and be a model for our society as a whole. 

Debra Satz   is the Vernon R. and  Lysbeth Warren Anderson Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Marta Sutton  Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society. 

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Writing In Defense of Free Speech in Universities

Cover of Amy Lai's book over a background of fire

This guest post is by Amy Lai, author of In Defense of Free Speech in Universities: A Study of Three Jurisdictions , which is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access. Choice  wrote that the book is “A valuable read for graduate and law students and general readers.” You can read more by Amy Lai on  her blog . 

The idea of this book took root in the summer of 2018, a few months after the Lindsay Shepherd incident in Canada. I became increasingly aware that Canada, where I was then living, was witnessing a free speech crisis in its universities. Nonetheless, the situation was far worse than I thought it was. In early October of the same year, I travelled to a Canadian university to interview for a teaching job. The interviewers expressed a very keen interest in my book project and inquired about its contents and arguments (an act which seemed innocent and which I, in hindsight, would deem very “sneaky”). My strong conviction got the better of me, and I became very candid about my belief that deplatforming speakers is generally not a good policy. That very night, I read from the news that my interviewers were among those in the faculty who had been desperately trying to disinvite speakers whom they considered to harbor the “wrong” views and they had done it multiple times. It therefore hardly came as a surprise when I was notified—two days after the interview—that I did not get the job (any guilt on my part for not having delivered the perfect performance also disappeared).

The free speech crisis no doubt is not unique to Canadian academia. The last ten years has seen a rising number of free speech disputes in western academia, including the United States and the United Kingdom. During this same period, numerous books on campus free speech have appeared on the market. However, they mainly focus on the U.S. They also use academic freedom and free speech interchangeably, offering neither a philosophical analysis nor a historical study of either of them. In addition, they do not provide an in-depth analysis of critical concepts including microaggression, trigger warning, and concept creep, let alone contextualize the analysis with examples and case studies.

My book is divided into three parts. The first part explores the history and philosophical foundations of free speech as well as the importance of free speech in Western universities. It also differentiates free speech from academic freedom and examines their interrelationship.

The second part examines a variety of concepts, including political correctness, trigger warning, microaggression, deplatforming, and safe space. It explains why political correctness, if taken to the extreme, jeopardizes the freedom of inquiry. It also affirms the harmfulness of microaggression, while encouraging targets to assert their agency to resist microaggressive acts and reclaim their dignity. It further examines how deplatforming hurts freedom of inquiry, and why turning the campus into a safe space might justify the use of pre-emptive violence against those unfairly perceived as threatening the safety of the bubble.

The third part contextualizes all the concepts in Part two in its discussion of numerous case studies in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Canada. Whereas the U.S. has done a fair job in safeguarding free speech in its university campuses, largely due to robust protection offered by its First Amendment tradition, the U.K.’s free speech bill holds some promise in improving the dire situation. Canada, however, lags far behind these two countries, due to the uncertainty as to whether its constitution (the “Charter”) applies to universities as well as the lack of courage of many university presidents and employees.

Finally, what distinguishes In Defense of Free Speech in Universities from other books is its emphasis on the rising threat posed by hostile foreign governments to Western academia, and its urgent call for protecting free discourse despite rampant attempts to suppress narratives critical of such governments (e.g. China) on many Western university campuses. The book emphasizes that even if “every man has a price,” universities in democratic countries must set the price as high as possible, resist temptations to bargain away its most fundamental liberties, and safeguard the university as a bastion of free speech.

Getting this book manuscript accepted and publishing it have been some of the proudest moments of my life. Admittedly, I was rather emotionally overwhelmed by what happened in my city of birth (Hong Kong) as I wrote and revised the manuscript from 2019 through 2022. I always feel saddened by the fact that many young people in Western countries, who never have had to fight for their freedom of speech, take it for granted and so readily give it up. I hope that my readers will heed the warning in the book and help protect this fundamental freedom.

Books Mentioned In This Post

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In Defense of Free Speech in Universities

freedom of speech in universities essay

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FIRE effectively and decisively defends the fundamental rights of tens of thousands of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses while simultaneously reaching millions on and off campus through education and outreach. In case after case, FIRE brings about favorable resolutions not only for those individuals facing campus rights violations, but also for the millions of other students affected by the culture of censorship within our institutions of higher education. In addition to our defense of specific individuals and groups, FIRE works across the nation and in all forms of media to empower campus activists, reform restrictive policies, and inform the public about the state of rights on our campuses.

If you find yourself asking "What are my rights on campus?" — FIRE has the answer.

Free speech on campus: Why is it important?

Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right, and there’s no place that this right should be more valued and protected than America’s colleges and universities. A university exists to educate students and advance the frontiers of human knowledge, and does so by acting as a “marketplace of ideas” where ideas compete. The intellectual vitality of a university depends on this competition—something that cannot happen properly when students or faculty members fear punishment for expressing views that might be unpopular with the public at large or disfavored by university administrators.

Nevertheless, free speech on campus is under continuous threat at many of America’s colleges, pushed aside in favor of politics, comfort, or simply a desire to avoid controversy. As a result, speech codes dictating what may or may not be said, “free speech zones” confining college free speech to tiny areas of campus, and administrative attempts to punish or repress campus free speech on a case-by-case basis are common today in academia.

What is the First Amendment?

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights that expressly prohibits the United States Congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” prohibiting the free exercise of religion, infringing freedom of speech, infringing freedom of the press , limiting the right to peaceably assemble, or limiting the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The protections of the First Amendment are extended to state governments and public university campuses by the Fourteenth Amendment.

What is religious liberty?

Religious liberty is the right to follow the faith of your choice—or to follow no faith at all. Religious liberty is a cornerstone of our nation and is the very first freedom guaranteed to Americans by the Bill of Rights. Yet on many college and university campuses, the right to associate on the basis of religious belief and even the right to express those beliefs is under attack. Under the guise of “nondiscrimination” policies, religious groups are often told that they may not choose the membership or leadership of their groups using religious criteria. Other students who merely express religious beliefs in public are condemned and even punished for “hate speech” or “intolerance.” FIRE’s cases dealing with religious liberty display our commitment to defending America’s religious pluralism by protecting students’ rights to express their views and to associate around shared beliefs.

What is due process?

The right to due process refers to the idea that governmental authorities must provide fair, unbiased, and equitable procedures when determining a person’s guilt or innocence. The same principle applies to judicial hearings on college campuses; if those campuses care about the justice and accuracy of their findings, they must provide fair and consistent procedures for the accuser and the accused.

History has taught that the rights of all Americans can be secured only through the establishment of fair procedures and with a consciousness that all are equal in the eyes of the law. Yet on many campuses, the accused face “kangaroo courts” that lack fair procedures, in which the political viewpoint or institutional interests of the “judges” greatly affect the outcomes of trials. The accused are often charged with no specific offense, given no right to face their accusers, and sentenced with no regard for fairness or consistency. As a result, a generation of students is being taught the wrong lessons about justice—and facing the ruinous consequences for their personal, academic, and professional lives. Students must come to know that justice means more than merely the enforcement of the will of the powerful and the suppression of the views of the powerless.

What is freedom of conscience?

Freedom of conscience means the right to be free to think and believe as you will without the imposition of official coercive power over those beliefs.

Liberty cannot exist when people are forced to conform their thoughts and expression to an official viewpoint. Differences of opinion are the natural byproducts of a vibrant, free society. At many of our nation’s colleges and universities, however, students are expected to share a single viewpoint on hotly debated matters like the meaning and significance of diversity, the definition of social justice, and the impermissibility of “hate speech.” Mandatory “diversity training,” in which students are instructed in an officially-approved ideology, is common. Some institutions have enacted policies that require students to speak and even share identical attitudes on these matters or face disciplinary charges.

FIRE’s mission

FIRE’s mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience. 

Founded in 1999 as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for over 20 years FIRE has worked to advance the cause of free speech and the values of the First Amendment on our nation’s college and university campuses. We have done so through our commitments to sincere nonpartisanship, courageous advocacy, and an enduring belief in free speech as a force for good. 

In 2022, FIRE changed its name to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to reflect its broader effort to protect and promote these values off campus, as well. 

FIRE pursues its charitable mission to preserve free expression’s foundational place in American democracy and culture as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. All contributions to FIRE are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

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Navigating freedom of speech vs. discrimination and harassment on campus

The Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance (OIEC) is responsible for educating about and addressing concerns under the Discrimination and Harassment Policy for the University of Colorado Boulder. OIEC is committed to fostering a safe and inclusive learning environment for our campus community. This guide will help students, faculty, staff and the broader community better understand the parameters by which OIEC enforces these policies and creates an equitable environment while respecting an individual’s right to free expression.

What is free speech and what is CU Boulder’s role in upholding it? 

Freedom of speech is the right of a person to articulate opinions and ideas verbally or symbolically without threat or reprisal. Unless it rises to the level of discrimination or harassment, as described below, speech that is hurtful, biased, or offensive in nature is generally protected by the First Amendment. 

Previous court rulings have deemed that restricting offensive or biased speech at public universities, like CU Boulder, would conflict with the First Amendment’s well established principles protecting freedom of expression. Consistent with these principles, CU Boulder has a long history of supporting freedom of speech and academic freedom, acting as a forum where competing ideas and perspectives can co-exist. Our campus encourages its students, faculty, and staff to challenge ideas through the exercise of reason and civil debate.

How discriminatory or harassing speech differs

Speech is not protected when it constitutes discrimination or harassment targeted at an individual or defined group of individuals based on protected-class identity : 

Discrimination occurs when an individual suffers an adverse consequence––such as being deprived of a resource, opportunity or benefit such as failure to be hired or denial of admission to an academic program––on the basis of protected class. 

Harassment is defined by unwelcome verbal or physical conduct related to one’s protected class that unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work or academic performance, or creates an intimidating or hostile work or educational environment.

How OIEC determines the difference

OIEC must review the initial evidence, context and requirements of the policy when an incident of unwelcome or offensive conduct is reported to our office. It applies university policies and federal regulatory guidance to determine whether the alleged conduct would constitute discrimination or harassment in violation of the policy. If so, OIEC follows the process articulated in the OIEC Resolutions Procedures .

It’s important to know that harmful or hateful speech that is found to not violate university policy is not endorsed by CU Boulder or OIEC. Our campus understands that this speech can be very impactful to members of our community.  At the same time, because our university is public, that doesn't mean it can be censored or punished. We recognize that this obligation can feel frustrating or challenging, particularly when what was said doesn’t align with university values. This tension is a difficult reality of being a public institution that must balance various rights and protections.

If you feel threatened by protected speech…

Regardless of whether OIEC is able to address conduct under the Discrimination and Harassment Policy, we can help people get connected with campus support resources when they have been impacted by harmful speech. One campus resource is the Office of Victim Assistance (OVA) , which provides free and confidential trauma-specific counseling and advocacy for those impacted by traumatic experiences. A confidential resource like OVA can help people sort through their various rights and reporting options in a confidential setting, as well as discuss self-care and coping skills. OVA is available to students, graduate students, staff and faculty and its confidential services can be utilized by members of the campus community at any time. 

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Freedom of Speech

[ Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Jeffrey W. Howard replaces the former entry on this topic by the previous author. ]

Human beings have significant interests in communicating what they think to others, and in listening to what others have to say. These interests make it difficult to justify coercive restrictions on people’s communications, plausibly grounding a moral right to speak (and listen) to others that is properly protected by law. That there ought to be such legal protections for speech is uncontroversial among political and legal philosophers. But disagreement arises when we turn to the details. What are the interests or values that justify this presumption against restricting speech? And what, if anything, counts as an adequate justification for overcoming the presumption? This entry is chiefly concerned with exploring the philosophical literature on these questions.

The entry begins by distinguishing different ideas to which the term “freedom of speech” can refer. It then reviews the variety of concerns taken to justify freedom of speech. Next, the entry considers the proper limits of freedom of speech, cataloging different views on when and why restrictions on communication can be morally justified, and what considerations are relevant when evaluating restrictions. Finally, it considers the role of speech intermediaries in a philosophical analysis of freedom of speech, with special attention to internet platforms.

1. What is Freedom of Speech?

2.1 listener theories, 2.2 speaker theories, 2.3 democracy theories, 2.4 thinker theories, 2.5 toleration theories, 2.6 instrumental theories: political abuse and slippery slopes, 2.7 free speech skepticism, 3.1 absoluteness, coverage, and protection, 3.2 the limits of free speech: external constraints, 3.3 the limits of free speech: internal constraints, 3.4 proportionality: chilling effects and political abuse, 3.5 necessity: the counter-speech alternative, 4. the future of free speech theory: platform ethics, other internet resources, related entries.

In the philosophical literature, the terms “freedom of speech”, “free speech”, “freedom of expression”, and “freedom of communication” are mostly used equivalently. This entry will follow that convention, notwithstanding the fact that these formulations evoke subtly different phenomena. For example, it is widely understood that artistic expressions, such as dancing and painting, fall within the ambit of this freedom, even though they don’t straightforwardly seem to qualify as speech , which intuitively connotes some kind of linguistic utterance (see Tushnet, Chen, & Blocher 2017 for discussion). Still, they plainly qualify as communicative activity, conveying some kind of message, however vague or open to interpretation it may be.

Yet the extension of “free speech” is not fruitfully specified through conceptual analysis alone. The quest to distinguish speech from conduct, for the purpose of excluding the latter from protection, is notoriously thorny (Fish 1994: 106), despite some notable attempts (such as Greenawalt 1989: 58ff). As John Hart Ely writes concerning Vietnam War protesters who incinerated their draft cards, such activity is “100% action and 100% expression” (1975: 1495). It is only once we understand why we should care about free speech in the first place—the values it instantiates or serves—that we can evaluate whether a law banning the burning of draft cards (or whatever else) violates free speech. It is the task of a normative conception of free speech to offer an account of the values at stake, which in turn can illuminate the kinds of activities wherein those values are realized, and the kinds of restrictions that manifest hostility to those values. For example, if free speech is justified by the value of respecting citizens’ prerogative to hear many points of view and to make up their own minds, then banning the burning of draft cards to limit the views to which citizens will be exposed is manifestly incompatible with that purpose. If, in contrast, such activity is banned as part of a generally applied ordinance restricting fires in public, it would likely raise no free-speech concerns. (For a recent analysis of this issue, see Kramer 2021: 25ff).

Accordingly, the next section discusses different conceptions of free speech that arise in the philosophical literature, each oriented to some underlying moral or political value. Before turning to the discussion of those conceptions, some further preliminary distinctions will be useful.

First, we can distinguish between the morality of free speech and the law of free speech. In political philosophy, one standard approach is to theorize free speech as a requirement of morality, tracing the implications of such a theory for law and policy. Note that while this is the order of justification, it need not be the order of investigation; it is perfectly sensible to begin by studying an existing legal protection for speech (such as the First Amendment in the U.S.) and then asking what could justify such a protection (or something like it).

But of course morality and law can diverge. The most obvious way they can diverge is when the law is unjust. Existing legal protections for speech, embodied in the positive law of particular jurisdictions, may be misguided in various ways. In other words, a justified legal right to free speech, and the actual legal right to free speech in the positive law of a particular jurisdiction, can come apart. In some cases, positive legal rights might protect too little speech. For example, some jurisdictions’ speech laws make exceptions for blasphemy, such that criminalizing blasphemy does not breach the legal right to free speech within that legal system. But clearly one could argue that a justified legal right to free speech would not include any such exception. In other cases, positive legal rights might perhaps protect too much speech. Consider the fact that, as a matter of U.S. constitutional precedent, the First Amendment broadly protects speech that expresses or incites racial or religious hatred. Plainly we could agree that this is so as a matter of positive law while disagreeing about whether it ought to be so. (This is most straightforwardly true if we are legal positivists. These distinctions are muddied by moralistic theories of constitutional interpretation, which enjoin us to interpret positive legal rights in a constitutional text partly through the prism of our favorite normative political theory; see Dworkin 1996.)

Second, we can distinguish rights-based theories of free speech from non-rights-based theories. For many liberals, the legal right to free speech is justified by appealing to an underlying moral right to free speech, understood as a natural right held by all persons. (Some use the term human right equivalently—e.g., Alexander 2005—though the appropriate usage of that term is contested.) The operative notion of a moral right here is that of a claim-right (to invoke the influential analysis of Hohfeld 1917); it thereby correlates to moral duties held by others (paradigmatically, the state) to respect or protect the right. Such a right is natural in that it exerts normative force independently of whether anyone thinks it does, and regardless of whether it is codified into the law. A tyrannical state that imprisons dissidents acts unjustly, violating moral rights, even if there is no legal right to freedom of expression in its legal system.

For others, the underlying moral justification for free speech law need not come in the form of a natural moral right. For example, consequentialists might favor a legal right to free speech (on, e.g., welfare-maximizing grounds) without thinking that it tracks any underlying natural right. Or consider democratic theorists who have defended legal protections for free speech as central to democracy. Such theorists may think there is an underlying natural moral right to free speech, but they need not (especially if they hold an instrumental justification for democracy). Or consider deontologists who have argued that free speech functions as a kind of side-constraint on legitimate state action, requiring that the state always justify its decisions in a manner that respects citizens’ autonomy (Scanlon 1972). This theory does not cast free speech as a right, but rather as a principle that forbids the creation of laws that restrict speech on certain grounds. In the Hohfeldian analysis (Hohfeld 1917), such a principle may be understood as an immunity rather than a claim-right (Scanlon 2013: 402). Finally, some “minimalists” (to use a designation in Cohen 1993) favor legal protection for speech principally in response to government malice, corruption, and incompetence (see Schauer 1982; Epstein 1992; Leiter 2016). Such theorists need not recognize any fundamental moral right, either.

Third, among those who do ground free speech in a natural moral right, there is scope for disagreement about how tightly the law should mirror that right (as with any right; see Buchanan 2013). It is an open question what the precise legal codification of the moral right to free speech should involve. A justified legal right to freedom of speech may not mirror the precise contours of the natural moral right to freedom of speech. A raft of instrumental concerns enters the downstream analysis of what any justified legal right should look like; hence a defensible legal right to free speech may protect more speech (or indeed less speech) than the underlying moral right that justifies it. For example, even if the moral right to free speech does not protect so-called hate speech, such speech may still merit legal protection in the final analysis (say, because it would be too risky to entrust states with the power to limit those communications).

2. Justifying Free Speech

I will now examine several of the morally significant considerations taken to justify freedom of expression. Note that while many theorists have built whole conceptions of free speech out of a single interest or value alone, pluralism in this domain remains an option. It may well be that a plurality of interests serves to justify freedom of expression, properly understood (see, influentially, Emerson 1970 and Cohen 1993).

Suppose a state bans certain books on the grounds that it does not want us to hear the messages or arguments contained within them. Such censorship seems to involve some kind of insult or disrespect to citizens—treating us like children instead of adults who have a right to make up our own minds. This insight is fundamental in the free speech tradition. On this view, the state wrongs citizens by arrogating to itself the authority to decide what messages they ought to hear. That is so even if the state thinks that the speech will cause harm. As one author puts it,

the government may not suppress speech on the ground that the speech is likely to persuade people to do something that the government considers harmful. (Strauss 1991: 335)

Why are restrictions on persuasive speech objectionable? For some scholars, the relevant wrong here is a form of disrespect for citizens’ basic capacities (Dworkin 1996: 200; Nagel 2002: 44). For others, the wrong here inheres in a violation of the kind of relationship the state should have with its people: namely, that it should always act from a view of them as autonomous, and so entitled to make up their own minds (Scanlon 1972). It would simply be incompatible with a view of ourselves as autonomous—as authors of our own lives and choices—to grant the state the authority to pre-screen which opinions, arguments, and perspectives we should be allowed to think through, allowing us access only to those of which it approves.

This position is especially well-suited to justify some central doctrines of First Amendment jurisprudence. First, it justifies the claim that freedom of expression especially implicates the purposes with which the state acts. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons why the state might restrict speech (so-called “time, place, and manner” restrictions)—for example, noise curfews in residential neighborhoods, which do not raise serious free speech concerns. Yet when the state restricts speech with the purpose of manipulating the communicative environment and controlling the views to which citizens are exposed, free speech is directly affronted (Rubenfeld 2001; Alexander 2005; Kramer 2021). To be sure, purposes are not all that matter for free speech theory. For example, the chilling effects of otherwise justified speech regulations (discussed below) are seldom intended. But they undoubtedly matter.

Second, this view justifies the related doctrines of content neutrality and viewpoint neutrality (see G. Stone 1983 and 1987) . Content neutrality is violated when the state bans discussion of certain topics (“no discussion of abortion”), whereas viewpoint neutrality is violated when the state bans advocacy of certain views (“no pro-choice views may be expressed”). Both affront free speech, though viewpoint-discrimination is especially egregious and so even harder to justify. While listener autonomy theories are not the only theories that can ground these commitments, they are in a strong position to account for their plausibility. Note that while these doctrines are central to the American approach to free speech, they are less central to other states’ jurisprudence (see A. Stone 2017).

Third, this approach helps us see that free speech is potentially implicated whenever the state seeks to control our thoughts and the processes through which we form beliefs. Consider an attempt to ban Marx’s Capital . As Marx is deceased, he is probably not wronged through such censorship. But even if one held idiosyncratic views about posthumous rights, such that Marx were wronged, it would be curious to think this was the central objection to such censorship. Those with the gravest complaint would be the living adults who have the prerogative to read the book and make up their own minds about it. Indeed free speech may even be implicated if the state banned watching sunsets or playing video games on the grounds that is disapproved of the thoughts to which such experiences might gave rise (Alexander 2005: 8–9; Kramer 2021: 22).

These arguments emphasize the noninstrumental imperative of respecting listener autonomy. But there is an instrumental version of the view. Our autonomy interests are not merely respected by free speech; they are promoted by an environment in which we learn what others have to say. Our interests in access to information is served by exposure to a wide range of viewpoints about both empirical and normative issues (Cohen 1993: 229), which help us reflect on what goals to choose and how best to pursue them. These informational interests are monumental. As Raz suggests, if we had to choose whether to express our own views on some question, or listen to the rest of humanity’s views on that question, we would choose the latter; it is our interest as listeners in the public good of a vibrant public discourse that, he thinks, centrally justifies free speech (1991).

Such an interest in acquiring justified beliefs, or in accessing truth, can be defended as part of a fully consequentialist political philosophy. J.S. Mill famously defends free speech instrumentally, appealing to its epistemic benefits in On Liberty . Mill believes that, given our fallibility, we should routinely keep an open mind as to whether a seemingly false view may actually be true, or at least contain some valuable grain of truth. And even where a proposition is manifestly false, there is value in allowing its expression so that we can better apprehend why we take it to be false (1859: chapter 2), enabled through discursive conflict (cf. Simpson 2021). Mill’s argument focuses especially on the benefits to audiences:

It is is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect. (1859: chapter 2, p. 94)

These views are sometimes associated with the idea of a “marketplace of ideas”, whereby the open clash of views inevitably leads to the correct ones winning out in debate. Few in the contemporary literature holds such a strong teleological thesis about the consequences of unrestricted debate (e.g., see Brietzke 1997; cf. Volokh 2011). Much evidence from behavioral economics and social psychology, as well as insights about epistemic injustice from feminist epistemology, strongly suggest that human beings’ rational powers are seriously limited. Smug confidence in the marketplace of ideas belies this. Yet it is doubtful that Mill held such a strong teleological thesis (Gordon 1997). Mill’s point was not that unrestricted discussion necessarily leads people to acquire the truth. Rather, it is simply the best mechanism available for ascertaining the truth, relative to alternatives in which some arbiter declares what he sees as true and suppresses what he sees as false (see also Leiter 2016).

Note that Mill’s views on free speech in chapter 2 in On Liberty are not simply the application of the general liberty principle defended in chapter 1 of that work; his view is not that speech is anodyne and therefore seldom runs afoul of the harm principle. The reason a separate argument is necessary in chapter 2 is precisely that he is carving out a partial qualification of the harm principle for speech (on this issue see Jacobson 2000, Schauer 2011b, and Turner 2014). On Mill’s view, plenty of harmful speech should still be allowed. Imminently dangerous speech, where there is no time for discussion before harm eventuates, may be restricted; but where there is time for discussion, it must be allowed. Hence Mill’s famous example that vociferous criticism of corn dealers as

starvers of the poor…ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer. (1859: chapter 3, p. 100)

The point is not that such speech is harmless; it’s that the instrumental benefits of permitting its expressions—and exposing its falsehood through public argument—justify the (remaining) costs.

Many authors have unsurprisingly argued that free speech is justified by our interests as speakers . This family of arguments emphasizes the role of speech in the development and exercise of our personal autonomy—our capacity to be the reflective authors of our own lives (Baker 1989; Redish 1982; Rawls 2005). Here an emphasis on freedom of expression is apt; we have an “expressive interest” (Cohen 1993: 224) in declaring our views—about the good life, about justice, about our identity, and about other aspects of the truth as we see it.

Our interests in self-expression may not always depend on the availability of a willing audience; we may have interests simply in shouting from the rooftops to declare who we are and what we believe, regardless of who else hears us. Hence communications to oneself—for example, in a diary or journal—are plausibly protected from interference (Redish 1992: 30–1; Shiffrin 2014: 83, 93; Kramer 2021: 23).

Yet we also have distinctive interests in sharing what we think with others. Part of how we develop our conceptions of the good life, forming judgments about how to live, is precisely through talking through the matter with others. This “deliberative interest” in directly served through opportunities to tell others what we think, so that we can learn from their feedback (Cohen 1993). Such encounters also offer opportunities to persuade others to adopt our views, and indeed to learn through such discussions who else already shares our views (Raz 1991).

Speech also seems like a central way in which we develop our capacities. This, too, is central to J.S. Mill’s defense of free speech, enabling people to explore different perspectives and points of view (1859). Hence it seems that when children engage in speech, to figure out what they think and to use their imagination to try out different ways of being in the world, they are directly engaging this interest. That explains the intuition that children, and not just adults, merit at least some protection under a principle of freedom of speech.

Note that while it is common to refer to speaker autonomy , we could simply refer to speakers’ capacities. Some political liberals hold that an emphasis on autonomy is objectionably Kantian or otherwise perfectionist, valorizing autonomy as a comprehensive moral ideal in a manner that is inappropriate for a liberal state (Cohen 1993: 229; Quong 2011). For such theorists, an undue emphasis on autonomy is incompatible with ideals of liberal neutrality toward different comprehensive conceptions of the good life (though cf. Shiffrin 2014: 81).

If free speech is justified by the importance of our interests in expressing ourselves, this justifies negative duties to refrain from interfering with speakers without adequate justification. Just as with listener theories, a strong presumption against content-based restrictions, and especially against viewpoint discrimination, is a clear requirement of the view. For the state to restrict citizens’ speech on the grounds that it disfavors what they have to say would affront the equal freedom of citizens. Imagine the state were to disallow the expression of Muslim or Jewish views, but allow the expression of Christian views. This would plainly transgress the right to freedom of expression, by valuing certain speakers’ interests in expressing themselves over others.

Many arguments for the right to free speech center on its special significance for democracy (Cohen 1993; Heinze 2016: Heyman 2009; Sunstein 1993; Weinstein 2011; Post 1991, 2009, 2011). It is possible to defend free speech on the noninstrumental ground that it is necessary to respect agents as democratic citizens. To restrict citizens’ speech is to disrespect their status as free and equal moral agents, who have a moral right to debate and decide the law for themselves (Rawls 2005).

Alternatively (or additionally), one can defend free speech on the instrumental ground that free speech promotes democracy, or whatever values democracy is meant to serve. So, for example, suppose the purpose of democracy is the republican one of establishing a state of non-domination between relationally egalitarian citizens; free speech can be defended as promoting that relation (Whitten 2022; Bonotti & Seglow 2022). Or suppose that democracy is valuable because of its role in promoting just outcomes (Arneson 2009) or tending to track those outcomes in a manner than is publicly justifiable (Estlund 2008) or is otherwise epistemically valuable (Landemore 2013).

Perhaps free speech doesn’t merely respect or promote democracy; another framing is that it is constitutive of it (Meiklejohn 1948, 1960; Heinze 2016). As Rawls says: “to restrict or suppress free political speech…always implies at least a partial suspension of democracy” (2005: 254). On this view, to be committed to democracy just is , in part, to be committed to free speech. Deliberative democrats famously contend that voting merely punctuates a larger process defined by a commitment to open deliberation among free and equal citizens (Gutmann & Thompson 2008). Such an unrestricted discussion is marked not by considerations of instrumental rationality and market forces, but rather, as Habermas puts it, “the unforced force of the better argument” (1992 [1996: 37]). One crucial way in which free speech might be constitutive of democracy is if it serves as a legitimation condition . On this view, without a process of open public discourse, the outcomes of the democratic decision-making process lack legitimacy (Dworkin 2009, Brettschneider 2012: 75–78, Cohen 1997, and Heinze 2016).

Those who justify free speech on democratic grounds may view this as a special application of a more general insight. For example, Scanlon’s listener theory (discussed above) contends that the state must always respect its citizens as capable of making up their own minds (1972)—a position with clear democratic implications. Likewise, Baker is adamant that both free speech and democracy are justified by the same underlying value of autonomy (2009). And while Rawls sees the democratic role of free speech as worthy of emphasis, he is clear that free speech is one of several basic liberties that enable the development and exercise of our moral powers: our capacities for a sense of justice and for the rational pursuit a lifeplan (2005). In this way, many theorists see the continuity between free speech and our broader interests as moral agents as a virtue, not a drawback (e.g., Kendrick 2017).

Even so, some democracy theorists hold that democracy has a special role in a theory of free speech, such that political speech in particular merits special protection (for an overview, see Barendt 2005: 154ff). One consequence of such views is that contributions to public discourse on political questions merit greater protection under the law (Sunstein 1993; cf. Cohen 1993: 227; Alexander 2005: 137–8). For some scholars, this may reflect instrumental anxieties about the special danger that the state will restrict the political speech of opponents and dissenters. But for others, an emphasis on political speech seems to reflect a normative claim that such speech is genuinely of greater significance, meriting greater protection, than other kinds of speech.

While conventional in the free speech literature, it is artificial to separate out our interests as speakers, listeners, and democratic citizens. Communication, and the thinking that feeds into it and that it enables, invariably engages our interests and activities across all these capacities. This insight is central to Seana Shiffrin’s groundbreaking thinker-based theory of freedom of speech, which seeks to unify the range of considerations that have informed the traditional theories (2014). Like other theories (e.g., Scanlon 1978, Cohen 1993), Shiffrin’s theory is pluralist in the range of interests it appeals to. But it offers a unifying framework that explains why this range of interests merits protection together.

On Shiffrin’s view, freedom of speech is best understood as encompassing both freedom of communication and freedom of thought, which while logically distinct are mutually reinforcing and interdependent (Shiffrin 2014: 79). Shiffrin’s account involves several profound claims about the relation between communication and thought. A central contention is that “free speech is essential to the development, functioning, and operation of thinkers” (2014: 91). This is, in part, because we must often externalize our ideas to articulate them precisely and hold them at a distance where we can evaluate them (p. 89). It is also because we work out what we think largely by talking it through with others. Such communicative processes may be monological, but they are typically dialogical; speaker and listener interests are thereby mutually engaged in an ongoing manner that cannot be neatly disentangled, as ideas are ping-ponged back and forth. Moreover, such discussions may concern democratic politics—engaging our interests as democratic citizens—but of course they need not. Aesthetics, music, local sports, the existence of God—these all are encompassed (2014: 92–93). Pace prevailing democratic theories,

One’s thoughts about political affairs are intrinsically and ex ante no more and no less central to the human self than thoughts about one’s mortality or one’s friends. (Shiffrin 2014: 93)

The other central aspect of Shiffrin’s view appeals to the necessity of communication for successfully exercising our moral agency. Sincere communication enables us

to share needs, emotions, intentions, convictions, ambitions, desires, fantasies, disappointments, and judgments. Thereby, we are enabled to form and execute complex cooperative plans, to understand one another, to appreciate and negotiate around our differences. (2014: 1)

Without clear and precise communication of the sort that only speech can provide, we cannot cooperate to discharge our collective obligations. Nor can we exercise our normative powers (such as consenting, waiving, or promising). Our moral agency thus depends upon protected channels through which we can relay our sincere thoughts to one another. The central role of free speech is to protect those channels, by ensuring agents are free to share what they are thinking without fear of sanction.

The thinker-based view has wide-ranging normative implications. For example, by emphasizing the continuity of speech and thought (a connection also noted in Macklem 2006 and Gilmore 2011), Shiffrin’s view powerfully explains the First Amendment doctrine that compelled speech also constitutes a violation of freedom of expression. Traditional listener- and speaker-focused theories seemingly cannot explain what is fundamentally objectionable with forcing someone to declare a commitment to something, as with children compelled to pledge allegiance to the American flag ( West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette 1943). “What seems most troubling about the compelled pledge”, Shiffrin writes,

is that the motive behind the regulation, and its possible effect, is to interfere with the autonomous thought processes of the compelled speaker. (2014: 94)

Further, Shiffrin’s view explains why a concern for free speech does not merely correlate to negative duties not to interfere with expression; it also supports positive responsibilities on the part of the state to educate citizens, encouraging and supporting their development and exercise as thinking beings (2014: 107).

Consider briefly one final family of free speech theories, which appeal to the role of toleration or self-restraint. On one argument, freedom of speech is important because it develops our character as liberal citizens, helping us tame our illiberal impulses. The underlying idea of Lee Bollinger’s view is that liberalism is difficult; we recurrently face temptation to punish those who hold contrary views. Freedom of speech helps us to practice the general ethos of toleration in a manner than fortifies our liberal convictions (1986). Deeply offensive speech, like pro-Nazi speech, is protected precisely because toleration in these enormously difficult cases promotes “a general social ethic” of toleration more generally (1986: 248), thereby restraining unjust exercises of state power overall. This consequentialist argument treats the protection of offensive speech not as a tricky borderline case, but as “integral to the central functions of the principle of free speech” (1986: 133). It is precisely because tolerating evil speech involves “extraordinary self-restraint” (1986: 10) that it works its salutary effects on society generally.

The idea of self-restraint arises, too, in Matthew Kramer’s recent defense of free speech. Like listener theories, Kramer’s strongly deontological theory condemns censorship aimed at protecting audiences from exposure to misguided views. At the core of his theory is the thesis that the state’s paramount moral responsibility is to furnish the social conditions that serve the development and maintenance of citizens’ self-respect and respect for others. The achievement of such an ethically resilient citizenry, on Kramer’s view, has the effect of neutering the harmfulness of countless harmful communications. “Securely in a position of ethical strength”, the state “can treat the wares of pornographers and the maunderings of bigots as execrable chirps that are to be endured with contempt” (Kramer 2021: 147). In contrast, in a society where the state has failed to do its duty of inculcating a robust liberal-egalitarian ethos, the communication of illiberal creeds may well pose a substantial threat. Yet for the state then to react by banning such speech is

overweening because with them the system’s officials take control of communications that should have been defused (through the system’s fulfillment of its moral obligations) without prohibitory or preventative impositions. (2021: 147)

(One might agree with Kramer that this is so, but diverge by arguing that the state—having failed in its initial duty—ought to take measures to prevent the harms that flow from that failure.)

These theories are striking in that they assume that a chief task of free speech theory is to explain why harmful speech ought to be protected. This is in contrast to those who think that the chief task of free speech theory is to explain our interests in communicating with others, treating the further issue of whether (wrongfully) harmful communications should be protected as an open question, with different reasonable answers available (Kendrick 2017). In this way, toleration theories—alongside a lot of philosophical work on free speech—seem designed to vindicate the demanding American legal position on free speech, one unshared by virtually all other liberal democracies.

One final family of arguments for free speech appeals to the danger of granting the state powers it may abuse. On this view, we protect free speech chiefly because if we didn’t, it would be far easier for the state to silence its political opponents and enact unjust policies. On this view, a state with censorial powers is likely to abuse them. As Richard Epstein notes, focusing on the American case,

the entire structure of federalism, divided government, and the system of checks and balances at the federal level shows that the theme of distrust has worked itself into the warp and woof of our constitutional structure.

“The protection of speech”, he writes, “…should be read in light of these political concerns” (Epstein 1992: 49).

This view is not merely a restatement of the democracy theory; it does not affirm free speech as an element of valuable self-governance. Nor does it reduce to the uncontroversial thought that citizens need freedom of speech to check the behavior of fallible government agents (Blasi 1977). One need not imagine human beings to be particularly sinister to insist (as democracy theorists do) that the decisions of those entrusted with great power be subject to public discussion and scrutiny. The argument under consideration here is more pessimistic about human nature. It is an argument about the slippery slope that we create even when enacting (otherwise justified) speech restrictions; we set an unacceptable precedent for future conduct by the state (see Schauer 1985). While this argument is theoretical, there is clearly historical evidence for it, as in the manifold cases in which bans on dangerous sedition were used to suppress legitimate war protest. (For a sweeping canonical study of the uses and abuses of speech regulations during wartime, with a focus on U.S. history, see G. Stone 2004.)

These instrumental concerns could potentially justify the legal protection for free speech. But they do not to attempt to justify why we should care about free speech as a positive moral ideal (Shiffrin 2014: 83n); they are, in Cohen’s helpful terminology, “minimalist” rather than “maximalist” (Cohen 1993: 210). Accordingly, they cannot explain why free speech is something that even the most trustworthy, morally competent administrations, with little risk of corruption or degeneration, ought to respect. Of course, minimalists will deny that accounting for speech’s positive value is a requirement of a theory of free speech, and that critiquing them for this omission begs the question.

Pluralists may see instrumental concerns as valuably supplementing or qualifying noninstrumental views. For example, instrumental concerns may play a role in justifying deviations between the moral right to free communication, on the one hand, and a properly specified legal right to free communication, on the other. Suppose that there is no moral right to engage in certain forms of harmful expression (such as hate speech), and that there is in fact a moral duty to refrain from such expression. Even so, it does not follow automatically that such a right ought to be legally enforced. Concerns about the dangers of granting the state such power plausibly militate against the enforcement of at least some of our communicative duties—at least in those jurisdictions that lack robust and competently administered liberal-democratic safeguards.

This entry has canvassed a range of views about what justifies freedom of expression, with particular attention to theories that conceive free speech as a natural moral right. Clearly, the proponents of such views believe that they succeed in this justificatory effort. But others dissent, doubting that the case for a bona fide moral right to free speech comes through. Let us briefly note the nature of this challenge from free speech skeptics , exploring a prominent line of reply.

The challenge from skeptics is generally understood as that of showing that free speech is a special right . As Leslie Kendrick notes,

the term “special right” generally requires that a special right be entirely distinct from other rights and activities and that it receive a very high degree of protection. (2017: 90)

(Note that this usage is not to be confused from the alternative usage of “special right”, referring to conditional rights arising out of particular relationships; see Hart 1955.)

Take each aspect in turn. First, to vindicate free speech as a special right, it must serve some distinctive value or interest (Schauer 2015). Suppose free speech were just an implication of a general principle not to interfere in people’s liberty without justification. As Joel Feinberg puts it, “Liberty should be the norm; coercion always needs some special justification” (1984: 9). In such a case, then while there still might be contingent, historical reasons to single speech out in law as worthy of protection (Alexander 2005: 186), such reasons would not track anything especially distinctive about speech as an underlying moral matter. Second, to count as a special right, free speech must be robust in what it protects, such that only a compelling justification can override it (Dworkin 2013: 131). This captures the conviction, prominent among American constitutional theorists, that “any robust free speech principle must protect at least some harmful speech despite the harm it may cause” (Schauer 2011b: 81; see also Schauer 1982).

If the task of justifying a moral right to free speech requires surmounting both hurdles, it is a tall order. Skeptics about a special right to free speech doubt that the order can be met, and so deny that a natural moral right to freedom of expression can be justified (Schauer 2015; Alexander & Horton 1983; Alexander 2005; Husak 1985). But these theorists may be demanding too much (Kendrick 2017). Start with the claim that free speech must be distinctive. We can accept that free speech be more than simply one implication of a general presumption of liberty. But need it be wholly distinctive? Consider the thesis that free speech is justified by our autonomy interests—interests that justify other rights such as freedom of religion and association. Is it a problem if free speech is justified by interests that are continuous with, or overlap with, interests that justify other rights? Pace the free speech skeptics, maybe not. So long as such claims deserve special recognition, and are worth distinguishing by name, this may be enough (Kendrick 2017: 101). Many of the views canvassed above share normative bases with other important rights. For example, Rawls is clear that he thinks all the basic liberties constitute

essential social conditions for the adequate development and full exercise of the two powers of moral personality over a complete life. (Rawls 2005: 293)

The debate, then, is whether such a shared basis is a theoretical virtue (or at least theoretically unproblematic) or whether it is a theoretical vice, as the skeptics avow.

As for the claim that free speech must be robust, protecting harmful speech, “it is not necessary for a free speech right to protect harmful speech in order for it to be called a free speech right” (Kendrick 2017: 102). We do not tend to think that religious liberty must protect harmful religious activities for it to count as a special right. So it would be strange to insist that the right to free speech must meet this burden to count as a special right. Most of the theorists mentioned above take themselves to be offering views that protect quite a lot of harmful speech. Yet we can question whether this feature is a necessary component of their views, or whether we could imagine variations without this result.

3. Justifying Speech Restrictions

When, and why, can restrictions on speech be justified? It is common in public debate on free speech to hear the provocative claim that free speech is absolute . But the plausibility of such a claim depends on what is exactly meant by it. If understood to mean that no communications between humans can ever be restricted, such a view is held by no one in the philosophical debate. When I threaten to kill you unless you hand me your money; when I offer to bribe the security guard to let me access the bank vault; when I disclose insider information that the company in which you’re heavily invested is about to go bust; when I defame you by falsely posting online that you’re a child abuser; when I endanger you by labeling a drug as safe despite its potentially fatal side-effects; when I reveal your whereabouts to assist a murderer intent on killing you—across all these cases, communications may be uncontroversially restricted. But there are different views as to why.

To help organize such views, consider a set of distinctions influentially defended by Schauer (from 1982 onward). The first category involves uncovered speech : speech that does not even presumptively fall within the scope of a principle of free expression. Many of the speech-acts just canvassed, such as the speech involved in making a threat or insider training, plausibly count as uncovered speech. As the U.S. Supreme Court has said of fighting words (e.g., insults calculated to provoke a street fight),

such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. ( Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 1942)

The general idea here is that some speech simply has negligible—and often no —value as free speech, in light of its utter disconnection from the values that justify free speech in the first place. (For discussion of so-called “low-value speech” in the U.S. context, see Sunstein 1989 and Lakier 2015.) Accordingly, when such low-value speech is harmful, it is particularly easy to justify its curtailment. Hence the Court’s view that “the prevention and punishment of [this speech] have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem”. For legislation restricting such speech, the U.S. Supreme Court applies a “rational basis” test, which is very easy to meet, as it simply asks whether the law is rationally related to a legitimate state interest. (Note that it is widely held that it would still be impermissible to selectively ban low-value speech on a viewpoint-discriminatory basis—e.g., if a state only banned fighting words from left-wing activists while allowing them from right-wing activists.)

Schauer’s next category concerns speech that is covered but unprotected . This is speech that engages the values that underpin free speech; yet the countervailing harm of the speech justifies its restriction. In such cases, while there is real value in such expression as free speech, that value is outweighed by competing normative concerns (or even, as we will see below, on behalf of the very values that underpin free speech). In U.S. constitutional jurisprudence, this category encompasses those extremely rare cases in which restrictions on political speech pass the “strict scrutiny” test, whereby narrow restrictions on high-value speech can be justified due to the compelling state interests thereby served. Consider Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project 2010, in which the Court held that an NGO’s legal advice to a terrorist organization on how to pursue peaceful legal channels were legitimately criminalized under a counter-terrorism statute. While such speech had value as free speech (at least on one interpretation of this contested ruling), the imperative of counter-terrorism justified its restriction. (Arguably, commercial speech, while sometimes called low-value speech by scholars, falls into the covered but unprotected category. Under U.S. law, legislation restricting it receives “intermediate scrutiny” by courts—requiring restrictions to be narrowly drawn to advance a substantial government interest. Such a test suggests that commercial speech has bona fide free-speech value, making it harder to justify regulations on it than regulations on genuinely low-value speech like fighting words. It simply doesn’t have as much free-speech value as categories like political speech, religious speech, or press speech, all of which trigger the strict scrutiny test when restricted.)

As a philosophical matter, we can reasonably disagree about what speech qualifies as covered but unprotected (and need not treat the verdicts of the U.S. Supreme Court as philosophically decisive). For example, consider politically-inflected hate speech, which advances repugnant ideas about the inferior status of certain groups. One could concur that there is substantial free-speech value in such expression, just because it involves the sincere expression of views about central questions of politics and justice (however misguided the views doubtlessly are). Yet one could nevertheless hold that such speech should not be protected in virtue of the substantial harms to which it can lead. In such cases, the free-speech value is outweighed. Many scholars who defend the permissibility of legal restrictions on hate speech hold such a view (e.g., Parekh 2012; Waldron 2012). (More radically, one could hold that such speech’s value is corrupted by its evil, such that it qualifies as genuinely low-value; Howard 2019a.)

The final category of speech encompasses expression that is covered and protected . To declare that speech is protected just is to conclude that it is immune from restriction. A preponderance of human communications fall into this category. This does not mean that such speech can never be regulated ; content-neutral time, place, and manner regulations (e.g., prohibiting loud nighttime protests) can certainly be justified (G. Stone 1987). But such regulations must not be viewpoint discriminatory; they must apply even-handedly across all forms of protected speech.

Schauer’s taxonomy offers a useful organizing framework for how we should think about different forms of speech. Where does it leave the claim that free speech is absolute? The possibility of speech that is covered but unprotected suggests that free speech should sometimes be restricted on account of rival normative concerns. Of course, one could contend that such a category, while logically possible, is substantively an empty set; such a position would involve some kind of absoluteness about free speech (holding that where free-speech values are engaged by expression, no countervailing values can ever be weighty enough to override them). Such a position would be absolutist in a certain sense while granting the permissibility of restrictions on speech that do not engage the free-speech values. (For a recent critique of Schauer’s framework, arguing that governmental designation of some speech as low-value is incompatible with the very ideal of free speech, see Kramer 2021: 31.)

In what follows, this entry will focus on Schauer’s second category: speech that is covered by a free speech principle, but is nevertheless unprotected because of the harms it causes. How do we determine what speech falls into this category? How, in other words, do we determine the limits of free speech? Unsurprisingly, this is where most of the controversy lies.

Most legal systems that protect free speech recognize that the right has limits. Consider, for example, international human rights law, which emphatically protects the freedom of speech as a fundamental human right while also affirming specific restrictions on certain seriously harmful speech. Article 19 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights declares that “[e]veryone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds”—but then immediately notes that this right “carries with it special duties and responsibilities”. The subsequent ICCPR article proceeds to endorse legal restrictions on “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence”, as well as speech constituting “propaganda for war” (ICCPR). While such restrictions would plainly be struck down as unconstitutional affronts to free speech in the U.S., this more restrictive approach prevails in most liberal democracies’ treatment of harmful speech.

Set aside the legal issue for now. How should we think about how to determine the limits of the moral right free speech? Those seeking to justify limits on speech tend to appeal to one of two strategies (Howard and Simpson forthcoming). The first strategy appeals to the importance of balancing free speech against other moral values when they come into conflict. This strategy involves external limits on free speech. (The next strategy, discussed below, invokes free speech itself, or the values that justify it, as limit-setting rationales; it thus involves internal limits on free speech.)

A balancing approach recognizes a moral conflict between unfettered communication and external values. Consider again the case of hate speech, understood as expression that attacks members of socially vulnerable groups as inferior or dangerous. On all of the theories canvassed above, there are grounds for thinking that restrictions on hate speech are prima facie in violation of the moral right to free speech. Banning hate speech to prevent people from hearing ideas that might incline them to bigotry plainly seems to disrespect listener autonomy. Further, even when speakers are expressing prejudiced views, they are still engaging their autonomous faculties. Certainly, they are expressing views on questions of public political concern, even false ones. And as thinkers they are engaged in the communication of sincere testimony to others. On many of the leading theories, the values underpinning free speech seem to be militate against bans on hate speech.

Even so, other values matter. Consider, for example, the value of upholding the equal dignity of all citizens. A central insight of critical race theory is that public expressions of white supremacy, for example, attack and undermine that equal dignity (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, & Crenshaw 1993). On Jeremy Waldron’s view (2012), hate speech is best understood as a form of group defamation, launching spurious attacks on others’ reputations and thereby undermining their standing as respected equals in their own community (relatedly, see Beauharnais v. Illinois 1952).

Countries that ban hate speech, accordingly, are plausibly understood not as opposed to free speech, but as recognizing the importance that it be balanced when conflicting with other values. Such balancing can be understood in different ways. In European human rights law, for example, the relevant idea is that the right to free speech is balanced against other rights ; the relevant task, accordingly, is to specify what counts as a proportionate balance between these rights (see Alexy 2003; J. Greene 2021).

For others, the very idea of balancing rights undermines their deontic character. This alternative framing holds that the balancing occurs before we specify what rights are; on this view, we balance interests against each other, and only once we’ve undertaken that balancing do we proceed to define what our rights protect. As Scanlon puts it,

The only balancing is balancing of interests. Rights are not balanced, but are defined, or redefined, in the light of the balance of interests and of empirical facts about how these interests can best be protected. (2008: 78)

This balancing need not come in the form of some crude consequentialism; otherwise it would be acceptable to limit the rights of the few to secure trivial benefits for the many. On a contractualist moral theory such as Scanlon’s, the test is to assess the strength of any given individual’s reason to engage in (or access) the speech, against the strength of any given individual’s reason to oppose it.

Note that those who engage in balancing need not give up on the idea of viewpoint neutrality; they can accept that, as a general principle, the state should not restrict speech on the grounds that it disapproves of its message and dislikes that others will hear it. The point, instead, is that this commitment is defeasible; it is possible to be overridden.

One final comment is apt. Those who are keen to balance free speech against other values tend to be motivated by the concern that speech can cause harm, either directly or indirectly (on this distinction, see Schauer 1993). But to justify restrictions on speech, it is not sufficient (and perhaps not even necessary) to show that such speech imposes or risks imposing harm. The crucial point is that the speech is wrongful (or, perhaps, wrongfully harmful or risky) , breaching a moral duty that speakers owe to others. Yet very few in the free speech literature think that the mere offensiveness of speech is sufficient to justify restrictions on it. Even Joel Feinberg, who thinks offensiveness can sometimes be grounds for restricting conduct, makes a sweeping exception for

[e]xpressions of opinion, especially about matters of public policy, but also about matters of empirical fact, and about historical, scientific, theological, philosophical, political, and moral questions. (1985: 44)

And in many cases, offensive speech may be actively salutary, as when racists are offended by defenses of racial equality (Waldron 1987). Accordingly, despite how large it looms in public debate, discussion of offensive speech will not play a major role in the discussion here.

We saw that one way to justify limits on free speech is to balance it against other values. On that approach, free speech is externally constrained. A second approach, in contrast, is internally constrained. On this approach, the very values that justify free speech themselves determine its own limits. This is a revisionist approach to free speech since, unlike orthodox thinking, it contends that a commitment to free speech values can counterintuitively support the restriction of speech—a surprising inversion of traditional thinking on the topic (see Howard and Simpson forthcoming). This move—justifying restrictions on speech by appealing to the values that underpin free speech—is now prevalent in the philosophical literature (for an overview, see Barendt 2005: 1ff).

Consider, for example, the claim that free speech is justified by concerns of listener autonomy. On such a view, as we saw above, autonomous citizens have interests in exposure to a wide range of viewpoints, so that they can decide for themselves what to believe. But many have pointed out that this is not autonomous citizens’ only interest; they also have interests in not getting murdered by those incited by incendiary speakers (Amdur 1980). Likewise, insofar as being targeted by hate speech undermines the exercise of one’s autonomous capacities, appeal to the underlying value of autonomy could well support restrictions on such speech (Brison 1998; see also Brink 2001). What’s more, if our interests as listeners in acquiring accurate information is undermined by fraudulent information, then restrictions on such information could well be compatible with our status as autonomous; this was one of the insights that led Scanlon to complicate his theory of free speech (1978).

Or consider the theory that free speech is justified because of its role in enabling autonomous speakers to express themselves. But as Japa Pallikkathayil has argued, some speech can intimidate its audiences into staying silent (as with some hate speech), out of fear for what will happen if they speak up (Pallikkathayil 2020). In principle, then, restrictions on hate speech may serve to support the value of speaker expression, rather than undermine it (see also Langton 2018; Maitra 2009; Maitra & McGowan 2007; and Matsuda 1989: 2337). Indeed, among the most prominent claims in feminist critiques of pornography is precisely that it silences women—not merely through its (perlocutionary) effects in inspiring rape, but more insidiously through its (illocutionary) effects in altering the force of the word “no” (see MacKinnon 1984; Langton 1993; and West 204 [2022]; McGowan 2003 and 2019; cf. Kramer 2021, pp. 160ff).

Now consider democracy theories. On the one hand, democracy theorists are adamant that citizens should be free to discuss any proposals, even the destruction of democracy itself (e.g., Meiklejohn 1948: 65–66). On the other hand, it isn’t obvious why citizens’ duties as democratic citizens could not set a limit to their democratic speech rights (Howard 2019a). The Nazi propagandist Goebbels is said to have remarked:

This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed. (as quoted in Fox & Nolte 1995: 1)

But it is not clear why this is necessarily so. Why should we insist on a conception of democracy that contains a self-destruct mechanism? Merely stipulating that democracy requires this is not enough (see A. Greene and Simpson 2017).

Finally, consider Shiffrin’s thinker-based theory. Shiffrin’s view is especially well-placed to explain why varieties of harmful communications are protected speech; what the theory values is the sincere transmission of veridical testimony, whereby speakers disclose what they genuinely believe to others, even if what they believe is wrongheaded and dangerous. Yet because the sincere testimony of thinkers is what qualifies some communication for protection, Shiffrin is adamant that lying falls outside the protective ambit of freedom of expression (2014) This, then, sets an internal limit on her own theory (even if she herself disfavors all lies’ outright prohibition for reasons of tolerance). The claim that lying falls outside the protective ambit of free speech is itself a recurrent suggestion in the literature (Strauss 1991: 355; Brown 2023). In an era of rampant disinformation, this internal limit is of substantial practical significance.

Suppose the moral right (or principle) of free speech is limited, as most think, such that not all communications fall within its protective ambit (either for external reasons, internal reasons, or both). Even so, it does not follow that laws banning such unprotected speech can be justified all-things-considered. Further moral tests must be passed before any particular policy restricting speech can be justified. This sub-section focuses on the requirement that speech restrictions be proportionate .

The idea that laws implicating fundamental rights must be proportionate is central in many jurisdictions’ constitutional law, as well as in the international law of human rights. As a representative example, consider the specification of proportionality offered by the Supreme Court of Canada:

First, the measures adopted must be carefully designed to achieve the objective in question. They must not be arbitrary, unfair, or based on irrational considerations. In short, they must be rationally connected to the objective. Second, the means, even if rationally connected to the objective in this first sense, should impair “as little as possible” the right or freedom in question[…] Third, there must be a proportionality between the effects of the measures which are responsible for limiting the Charter right or freedom, and the objective which has been identified as of “sufficient importance” ( R v. Oakes 1986).

It is this third element (often called “proportionality stricto sensu ”) on which we will concentrate here; this is the focused sense of proportionality that roughly tracks how the term is used in the philosophical literatures on defensive harm and war, as well as (with some relevant differences) criminal punishment. (The strict scrutiny and intermediate scrutiny tests of U.S. constitutional law are arguably variations of the proportionality test; but set aside this complication for now as it distracts from the core philosophical issues. For relevant legal discussion, see Tsesis 2020.)

Proportionality, in the strict sense, concerns the relation between the costs or harms imposed by some measure and the benefits that the measure is designed to secure. The organizing distinction in recent philosophical literature (albeit largely missing in the literature on free speech) is one between narrow proportionality and wide proportionality . While there are different ways to cut up the terrain between these terms, let us stipulatively define them as follows. An interference is narrowly proportionate just in case the intended target of the interference is liable to bear the costs of that interference. An interference is widely proportionate just in case the collateral costs that the interference unintentionally imposes on others can be justified. (This distinction largely follows the literature in just war theory and the ethics of defensive force; see McMahan 2009.) While the distinction is historically absent from free speech theory, it has powerful payoffs in helping to structure this chaotic debate (as argued in Howard 2019a).

So start with the idea that restrictions on communication must be narrowly proportionate . For a restriction to be narrowly proportionate, those whose communications are restricted must be liable to bear their costs, such that they are not wronged by their imposition. One standard way to be liable to bear certain costs is to have a moral duty to bear them (Tadros 2012). So, for example, if speakers have a moral duty to refrain from libel, hate speech, or some other form of harmful speech, they are liable to bear at least some costs involved in the enforcement of that duty. Those costs cannot be unlimited; a policy of executing hate speakers could not plausibly be justified. Typically, in both defensive and punitive contexts, wrongdoers’ liability is determined by their culpability, the severity of their wrong, or some combination of the two. While it is difficult to say in the abstract what the precise maximal cost ceiling is for any given restriction, as it depends hugely on the details, the point is simply that there is some ceiling above which a speech restriction (like any restriction) imposes unacceptably high costs, even on wrongdoers.

Second, for a speech restriction to be justified, we must also show that it would be widely proportionate . Suppose a speaker is liable to bear the costs of some policy restricting her communication, such that she is not wronged by its imposition. It may be that the collateral costs of such a policy would render it unacceptable. One set of costs is chilling effects , the “overdeterrence of benign conduct that occurs incidentally to a law’s legitimate purpose or scope” (Kendrick 2013: 1649). The core idea is that laws targeting unprotected, legitimately proscribed expression may nevertheless end up having a deleterious impact on protected expression. This is because laws are often vague, overbroad, and in any case are likely to be misapplied by fallible officials (Schauer 1978: 699).

Note that if a speech restriction produces chilling effects, it does not follow that the restriction should not exist at all. Rather, concern about chilling effects instead suggests that speech restrictions should be under-inclusive—restricting less speech than is actually harmful—in order to create “breathing space”, or “a buffer zone of strategic protection” (Schauer 1978: 710) for legitimate expression and so reduce unwanted self-censorship. For example, some have argued that even though speech can cause harm recklessly or negligently, we should insist on specific intent as the mens rea of speech crimes in order to reduce any chilling effects that could follow (Alexander 1995: 21–128; Schauer 1978: 707; cf. Kendrick 2013).

But chilling effects are not the only sort of collateral effects to which speech restrictions could lead. Earlier we noted the risk that states might abuse their censorial powers. This, too, could militate in favor of underinclusive speech restrictions. Or the implication could be more radical. Consider the problem that it is difficult to author restrictions on hate speech in a tightly specified way; the language involved is open-ended in a manner that enables states to exercise considerable judgment in deciding what speech-acts, in fact, count as violations (see Strossen 2018). Given the danger that the state will misuse or abuse these laws to punish legitimate speech, some might think this renders their enactment widely disproportionate. Indeed, even if the law were well-crafted and would be judiciously applied by current officials, the point is that those in the future may not be so trustworthy.

Those inclined to accept such a position might simply draw the conclusion that legislatures ought to refrain from enacting laws against hate speech. A more radical conclusion is that the legal right to free speech ought to be specified so that hate speech is constitutionally protected. In other words, we ought to give speakers a legal right to violate their moral duties, since enforcing those moral duties through law is simply too risky. By appealing to this logic, it is conceivable that the First Amendment position on hate speech could be justified all-things-considered—not because the underlying moral right to free speech protects hate speech, but because hate speech must be protected for instrumental reasons of preventing future abuses of power (Howard 2019a).

Suppose certain restrictions on harmful speech can be justified as proportionate, in both the narrow and wide senses. This is still not sufficient to justify them all-things-considered. Additionally, they must be justified as necessary . (Note that some conceptions of proportionality in human rights law encompass the necessity requirement, but this entry follows the prevailing philosophical convention by treating them as distinct.)

Why might restrictions on harmful speech be unnecessary? One of the standard claims in the free speech literature is that we should respond to harmful speech not by banning it, but by arguing back against it. Counter-speech—not censorship—is the appropriate solution. This line of reasoning is old. As John Milton put it in 1644: “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” The insistence on counter-speech as the remedy for harmful speech is similarly found, as noted above, throughout chapter 2 of Mill’s On Liberty .

For many scholars, this line of reply is justified by the fact that they think the harmful speech in question is protected by the moral right to free speech. For such scholars, counter-speech is the right response because censorship is morally off the table. For other scholars, the recourse to counter-speech has a plausible distinct rationale (although it is seldom articulated): its possibility renders legal restrictions unnecessary. And because it is objectionable to use gratuitous coercion, legal restrictions are therefore impermissible (Howard 2019a). Such a view could plausibly justify Mill’s aforementioned analysis in the corn dealer example, whereby censorship is permissible but only when there’s no time for counter-speech—a view that is also endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio 395 U.S. 444 (1969).

Whether this argument succeeds depends upon a wide range of further assumptions—about the comparable effectiveness of counter-speech relative to law; about the burdens that counter-speech imposes on prospective counter-speakers. Supposing that the argument succeeds, it invites a range of further normative questions about the ethics of counter-speech. For example, it is important who has the duty to engage in counter-speech, who its intended audience is, and what specific forms the counter-speech ought to take—especially in order to maximize its persuasive effectiveness (Brettschneider 2012; Cepollaro, Lepoutre, & Simpson 2023; Howard 2021b; Lepoutre 2021; Badano & Nuti 2017). It is also important to ask questions about the moral limits of counter-speech. For example, insofar as publicly shaming wrongful speakers has become a prominent form of counter-speech, it is crucial to interrogate its permissibility (e.g., Billingham and Parr 2020).

This final section canvasses the young philosophical debate concerning freedom of speech on the internet. With some important exceptions (e.g., Barendt 2005: 451ff), this issue has only recently accelerated (for an excellent edited collection, see Brison & Gelber 2019). There are many normative questions to be asked about the moral rights and obligations of internet platforms. Here are three. First, do internet platforms have moral duties to respect the free speech of their users? Second, do internet platforms have moral duties to restrict (or at least refrain from amplifying) harmful speech posted by their users? And finally, if platforms do indeed have moral duties to restrict harmful speech, should those duties be legally enforced?

The reference to internet platforms , is a deliberate focus on large-scale social media platforms, through which people can discover and publicly share user-generated content. We set aside other entities such as search engines (Whitney & Simpson 2019), important though they are. That is simply because the central political controversies, on which philosophical input is most urgent, concern the large social-media platforms.

Consider the question of whether internet platforms have moral duties to respect the free speech of their users. One dominant view in the public discourse holds that the answer is no . On this view, platforms are private entities, and as such enjoy the prerogative to host whatever speech they like. This would arguably be a function of them having free speech rights themselves. Just as the free speech rights of the New York Times give it the authority to publish whatever op-eds it sees fit, the free speech rights of platforms give them the authority to exercise editorial or curatorial judgment about what speech to allow. On this view, if Facebook were to decide to become a Buddhist forum, amplifying the speech of Buddhist users and promoting Buddhist perspectives and ideas, and banning speech promoting other religions, it would be entirely within its moral (and thus proper legal) rights to do so. So, too, if it were to decide to become an atheist forum.

A radical alternative view holds that internet platforms constitute a public forum , a term of art from U.S. free speech jurisprudence used to designate spaces “designed for and dedicated to expressive activities” ( Southeastern Promotions Ltd., v. Conrad 1975). As Kramer has argued:

social-media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have become public fora. Although the companies that create and run those platforms are not morally obligated to sustain them in existence at all, the role of controlling a public forum morally obligates each such company to comply with the principle of freedom of expression while performing that role. No constraints that deviate from the kinds of neutrality required under that principle are morally legitimate. (Kramer 2021: 58–59)

On this demanding view, platforms’ duties to respect speech are (roughly) identical to the duties of states. Accordingly, if efforts by the state to restrict hate speech, pornography, and public health misinformation (for example) are objectionable affronts to free speech, so too are platforms’ content moderation rules for such content. A more moderate view does not hold that platforms are public forums as such, but holds that government channels or pages qualify as public forums (the claim at issue in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump (2019).)

Even if we deny that platforms constitute public forums, it is plausible that they engage in a governance function of some kind (Klonick 2018). As Jack Balkin has argued, the traditional model of free speech, which sees it as a relation between speakers and the state, is today plausibly supplanted by a triadic model, involving a more complex relation between speakers, governments, and intermediaries (2004, 2009, 2018, 2021). If platforms do indeed have some kind of governance function, it may well trigger responsibilities for transparency and accountability (as with new legislation such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act).

Second, consider the question of whether platforms have a duty to remove harmful content posted by users. Even those who regard them as public forums could agree that platforms may have a moral responsibility to remove illegal unprotected speech. Yet a dominant view in the public debate has historically defended platforms’ place as mere conduits for others’ speech. This is the current position under U.S. law (as with 47 U.S. Code §230), which broadly exempts platforms from liability for much illegal speech, such as defamation. On this view, we should view platforms as akin to bulletin boards: blame whoever posts wrongful content, but don’t hold the owner of the board responsible.

This view is under strain. Even under current U.S. law, platforms are liable for removing some content, such as child sexual abuse material and copyright infringements, suggesting that it is appropriate to demand some accountability for the wrongful content posted by others. An increasing body of philosophical work explores the idea that platforms are indeed morally responsible for removing extreme content. For example, some have argued that platforms have a special responsibility to prevent the radicalization that occurs on their networks, given the ways in which extreme content is amplified to susceptible users (Barnes 2022). Without engaging in moderation (i.e., removal) of harmful content, platforms are plausibly complicit with the wrongful harms perpetrated by users (Howard forthcoming).

Yet it remains an open question what a responsible content moderation policy ought to involve. Many are tempted by a juridical model, whereby platforms remove speech in accordance with clearly announced rules, with user appeals mechanisms in place for individual speech decisions to ensure they are correctly made (critiqued in Douek 2022b). Yet platforms have billions of users and remove millions of pieces of content per week. Accordingly, perfection is not possible. Moving quickly to remove harmful content during a crisis—e.g., Covid misinformation—will inevitably increase the number of false positives (i.e., legitimate speech taken down as collateral damage). It is plausible that the individualistic model of speech decisions adopted by courts is decidedly implausible to help us govern online content moderation; as noted in Douek 2021 and 2022a, what is needed is analysis of how the overall system should operate at scale, with a focus on achieving proportionality between benefits and costs. Alternatively, one might double down and insist that the juridical model is appropriate, given the normative significance of speech. And if it is infeasible for social-media companies to meet its demands given their size, then all the worse for social-media companies. On this view, it is they who must bend to meet the moral demands of free speech theory, not the other way around.

Substantial philosophical work needs to be done to deliver on this goal. The work is complicated by the fact that artificial intelligence (AI) is central to the processes of content moderation; human moderators, themselves subjected to terrible working conditions at long hours, work in conjunction with machine learning tools to identify and remove content that platforms have restricted. Yet AI systems notoriously are as biased as their training data. Further, their “black box” decisions are cryptic and cannot be easily understood. Given that countless speech decisions will necessarily be made without human involvement, it is right to ask whether it is reasonable to expect users to accept the deliverances of machines (e.g., see Vredenburgh 2022; Lazar forthcoming a). Note that machine intelligence is used not merely for content moderation, narrowly understood as the enforcement of rules about what speech is allowed. It is also deployed for the broader practice of content curation, determining what speech gets amplified — raising the question of what normative principles should govern such amplification; see Lazar forthcoming b).

Finally, there is the question of legal enforcement. Showing that platforms have the moral responsibility to engage in content moderation is necessary to justifying its codification into a legal responsibility. Yet it is not sufficient; one could accept that platforms have moral duties to moderate (some) harmful speech while also denying that those moral duties ought to be legally enforced. A strong, noninstrumental version of such a view would hold that while speakers have moral duties to refrain from wrongful speech, and platforms have duties not to platform or amplify it, the coercive enforcement of such duties would violate the moral right to freedom of expression. A more contingent, instrumental version of the view would hold that legal enforcement is not in principle impermissible; but in practice, it is simply too risky to grant the state the authority to enforce platforms’ and speakers’ moral duties, given the potential for abuse and overreach.

Liberals who champion the orthodox interpretation of the First Amendment, yet insist on robust content moderation, likely hold one or both of these views. Yet globally such views seem to be in the minority. Serious legislation is imminent that will subject social-media companies to burdensome regulation, in the form of such laws as the Digital Services Act in the European Union and the Online Safety Bill in the UK. Normatively evaluating such legislation is a pressing task. So, too, is the task of designing normative theories to guide the design of content moderation systems, and the wider governance of the digital public sphere. On both fronts, political philosophers should get back to work.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
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ethics: search engines and | hate speech | legal rights | liberalism | Mill, John Stuart | Mill, John Stuart: moral and political philosophy | pornography: and censorship | rights | social networking and ethics | toleration

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors and anonymous referees of this Encyclopedia for helpful feedback. I am greatly indebted to Robert Mark Simpson for many incisive suggestions, which substantially improved the entry. This entry was written while on a fellowship funded by UK Research & Innovation (grant reference MR/V025600/1); I am thankful to UKRI for the support.

Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey W. Howard < jeffrey . howard @ ucl . ac . uk >

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A tale of two arguments about free speech on campus.

Graphic of bullhorn with lightning bolts coming out of it to symbolize sound; red background with faded look.

Which of the warring gods should we serve? —Max Weber

Freedom of expression, we are often told, is democracy’s lifeblood, the medium through which even the most contentious viewpoints can pass. Free speech, according to this view, is debate’s condition of possibility; it is not, in principle, meant to be the subject of debate itself. In times of crisis, however, foundational principles are called into question. The present seems just such a moment. Rather than provide the broader framework for disagreement, free speech itself has become a source of contention. Nowhere is this more true than on college and university campuses.

The current debate is rooted in controversies surrounding “political correctness” and campus speech codes dating back to the 1980s. In the past five years, however, these culture wars seem to have entered a new phase. In 2014, multiple prominent speakers were disinvited from campuses following student protests. Some of these incidents were reactions to the wave of police shootings of African Americans that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement. Around the same time, the terms microaggressions , trigger warnings , and safe spaces became increasingly mainstream, introducing a new vocabulary for defining acceptable limits on speech.

The AAUP has weighed in on such controversies in the past. Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure has long opposed the practice of disinviting outside speakers, holding that “the freedom to hear is an essential condition of the university community and an inseparable part of academic freedom.” Committee A has also opposed speech codes and demands for trigger warnings on academic freedom grounds.

More recently, the AAUP’s Committee on Government Relations has voiced opposition to efforts to “legislate” free speech. In its 2018 report Campus Free-Speech Legislation: History, Progress, and Problems , the committee, of which I am a member, took a critical look at efforts by the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank, to push states to pass legislation based on a model “campus free-speech” bill it developed. Such legislation, the report found, represents an inappropriate incursion into campus policy. Moreover, when it mandates overly punitive or simplistic approaches to free speech, this legislation threatens to undermine the very principles it purports to uphold.

As the committee’s report on campus free-speech legislation notes, “many of the most difficult issues surrounding free speech at present are about balancing unobstructed dialogue with the need to make all constituencies on campus feel included.” In our intensely polarized times, such balancing of competing demands has become increasingly difficult; the question of free speech has become, ironically, an issue about which many on campus are increasingly indisposed to listen to one another.

While a diversity of opinion exists on free-speech controversies, two main threads of argumentation have come to define the debate. The claims made by various commentators and organizations can shed light on the terms and limits of that debate.

Campus Free-Speech Movement

Among the most outspoken of the groups sounding an alarm about free speech on campus is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE, as it is usually called, touts its ideological diversity: FIRE president Greg Lukianoff describes it as a “unique organization” made up of “liberals, conservatives, libertarians, atheists, Christians, Jews, [and] Muslims” seeking to defend individual rights on campuses. The group does, however, receive significant funding from conservative groups, and many of its prominent members have ties to the Republican Party. Its system for rating colleges’ and universities’ free-speech standards—FIRE keeps tallies of disinvitations, “shout-downs,” speech codes, and other practices it opposes—is frequently invoked by conservative legislators and think tanks, as well as university administrators who curry their favor.

The lament about the current state of campus discourse frequently made by FIRE and groups on the political right invokes a recurring set of themes:

Support for free speech as a fundamental democratic value is declining on college campuses. This assertion draws on poll data indicating that today’s college students no longer regard free speech as an absolute right. In a recent article in the National Review (which closely follows campus free-speech controversies), David French, past president of FIRE, refers to a survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation that reveals that while most students (89 percent) say that they believe in the importance of free speech, a strong majority (64 percent) favor, contrary to First Amendment jurisprudence, prohibiting “hate speech.” Conservative political writer Michael Barone, also writing for the National Review , finds it alarming that 61 percent of men and only 35 percent of women favor free speech over “inclusion and diversity”—a fact all the more troubling, he believes, in light of women’s increasingly dominant role in colleges and universities.

Colleges and universities have ceased to be champions of free speech and have become, rather, institutions that actively repress dissent. The 2017 Goldwater Institute report that included the model campus free-speech legislation cited above declares, “Freedom of speech, that cornerstone of our liberty and most fundamental constitutional right, is under siege on America’s college campuses.” Speech codes, free-speech zones, and trigger warnings are frequently cited as unacceptable limits on free speech. In this vein, the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank in North Carolina, recently criticized biasincident reporting systems used on some campuses, arguing that “empowering students to report other students for offensive speech is unwise at best and dangerous for serious debate of uncomfortable and complex political issues.” Barone succinctly sums up this position: “College and university campuses have been transformed over the past half-century from the zone of our society most tolerant of free speech to the zone least tolerant.” Greg Lukianoff dubs this trend “unlearning liberty.”

Colleges and universities have taken sides on public controversies and pressured students and faculty to do the same, denying “viewpoint diversity” and promoting an academic “monoculture.” FIRE’s website states that at many colleges “students are expected to share a single viewpoint on hotly debated matters like the meaning and significance of diversity, the definition of social justice, and the impermissibility of ‘hate speech.’” The Martin Center notes that “free speech protections are necessary but not sufficient on a public campus; students should not feel pressured to conform to the political sentiment favored by administrators and professors.”

Some conservatives fear that colleges have shifted from protecting free speech to promoting liberal beliefs. The Martin Center cites new student orientation programs as a particular cause for concern: “Programs, skits, and speeches during freshman orientation can indoctrinate students and set the social climate,” teaching students that “if you don’t lean liberal, then your opinions are not welcome.” It also objects to campus-wide diversity and climate-change statements, noting, for example, that the Obama-initiated American Campuses Act on Climate Pledge is “a clear violation of institutional neutrality, likely to silence faculty and student critics of anthropogenic global warming.”

Anti-free-speech attitudes are often promoted by administrators with agendas other than the advancement of learning. On this point, conservatives’ contempt for big government and social engineering overlaps with their aversion to what they claim is intolerant campus discourse. If students behave badly, they maintain, it is because administrators who seek their approval—or docility—are so eager to accommodate them. FIRE worries about “mandatory ‘diversity training,’ in which students are instructed in an officially- approved ideology,” and “policies that require students to speak and even share approved attitudes on these matters or face disciplinary charges.” Though conservatives often make this critique, liberal-leaning faculty exasperated by ever-expanding administrative bloat sometimes become their fellow travelers. In his well-known book The Fall of the Faculty , political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg notes that administrators often champion policies designed to promote equality and diversity. Yet they do so, Ginsberg argues, because they fear student criticism and because these programs “help administrators bolster their own power vis-à-vis faculty,” who, because of their typically progressive views, “are unwilling to be seen as siding with putative oppressors.” In short: show me a campus hostile to free speech, and I’ll show you an institution awash with associate deans and vice provosts.

Hostility to free speech is grounded in a misguided and infantilizing view of human psychology. One of the striking features of those involved in the campus free-speech movement, intellectually speaking, is their frequent invocation of social science and psychology when disparaging policies that, in their view, shield students from divergent opinions. The most thorough attempt to couch the campus free-speech debate in psychological terms is in the collaborative work of FIRE’s Lukianoff and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In 2015, they coauthored a much-discussed article in the Atlantic , “The Coddling of the American Mind,” that served as the basis for a recent book with the same title. Lukianoff and Haidt identify several ill-advised psychological theories upon which they believe the current generation of college students has been weaned: “safetyism,” or an exaggerated concern with purging one’s environment of threats; “emotional reasoning,” which refers to the belief that what we feel to be true is true; and “us vs. them” thinking. These psychological fallacies are directly responsible, Lukianoff and Haidt maintain, for several theories that universities widely endorse: emotional reasoning leads to an exaggerated concern with “microaggressions” and efforts to disinvite allegedly threatening speakers; “us vs. them” thinking gives rise to the preoccupation with “intersectionality” in its more extreme forms and the practice of public shaming. Drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy, Lukianoff and Haidt claim that today’s campus culture nurtures immaturity and even pathologies, rather than fostering an environment that provides young people with the challenges and stressors they need to “mature into strong and capable adults, able to engage productively with people and ideas that challenge their beliefs and moral convictions.” Their book is arguably the campus free-speech movement’s most sophisticated manifesto.

Inclusion and Diversity

The position often identified with those on the other side of the campus free-speech debate can also be formulated as an ideal type. It consists less, however, in a point-by-point rebuttal of the arguments made by those affiliated with the campus free-speech movement than in a different argument altogether:

The real challenge that colleges and universities now face is not evolving attitudes toward free speech but changing demographics. A Pew Research Center survey from several years ago found that, while college enrollment increased for all racial and ethnic groups between 1996 and 2012, the number of Hispanic students had tripled (a 240 percent increase) and that of African Americans had grown by 72 percent, compared with 12 percent growth for whites. The Knight/ Gallup survey mentioned above shows that black students value diverse and inclusive environments over free-speech protections by 68 percent, whereas white students prefer free speech by 52 percent (with men doing so by 61 percent). Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, observed in a Washington Post editorial that “on many campuses, the students at the center of heated controversies are not,” as some conservatives likes to suggest, “the helicopter-parented offspring of the upper middle class” but “students of color” concerned with “eradicating persistent manifestations of discrimination that have outlasted decades of efforts at integration,” such as slurs, racist incidents, stereotyping, and segregation.

The benefits of free speech are unevenly distributed. In the wake of the Charlottesville events of August 2017, K-Sue Park, an attorney and fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, argued in the New York Times that the First Amendment offers most of its benefits to the economically and racially privileged. A “well-funded machinery ready to harass journalists and academics has arisen,” she observed, “in the space beyond First Amendment litigation.” Some black professors who denounce white supremacy have, for example, faced physical threats, such as lynching and rape. “Could prioritizing First Amendment rights,” Park asks, “make the distribution of power in this country even more unequal and further silence the communities most burdened by histories of censorship?”

The “free-speech” rallying cry can be a diversion. In his analysis of several campus controversies from 2015, notably a student protest at Yale University targeting faculty who had characterized offensive Halloween costumes as a free-speech issue, New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb observed that many incidents that are framed as First Amendment issues first arise as attempts to enhance awareness of deep-seated problems relating to race. In such cases, bemoaning the denial of free-speech rights is a way of changing the conversation. Cobb writes, “The default for avoiding discussion of racism is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights.”

While free speech is important, other democratic values are too. Though it would be difficult to imagine a democratic community that does not recognize and value freedom of expression, it is equally mistaken to assume that free speech alone defines the democratic values higher education institutions practice and cultivate. One such principle upon which colleges and universities depend is physical safety. Many so-called campus free-speech incidents are responses to the perceived threat of far-right groups, whose presence appears to have risen dramatically in the past few years. In June 2017, J. Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center informed Congress of a “surge in campus organizing and recruitment by white nationalists,” including around 250 incidents on over 150 campuses involving the distribution of racist flyers by groups such as IdentityEvropa. As Nossel writes, “Of course students feel menaced when white supremacists march and chant in their college town or hang nooses on campus trees.”

Speech that poisons the communal well can reasonably be limited or forbidden. The political philosopher Jeremy Waldron succinctly articulated in his 2012 book The Harm in Hate Speech a view shared by many students and professors. Our society—and our universities— were founded, he argues, on a “public good of inclusiveness” that requires each group to accept that “society is not just for them.” Utterances that directly threaten inclusiveness are not simply, as First Amendment purists maintain, “thought we hate” but a calculated “disfiguring of our social environment” through messages conveying that “in the opinion of one group . . . members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship.” Restrictions on this kind of speech are not simply regrettable derogations from the principle of free speech but positively necessary to democracy’s preservation.

Free-Speech Impasse

What these two sets of arguments have in common is that they are not merely theories of free-speech rights but statements about the ends of public life as such. In his classic essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin contrasted what he called “negative” and “positive” liberty. Negative liberty does not stipulate how we should live but simply delineates the outer boundaries of our freedom; positive liberty maintains, to the contrary, that freedom is justified insofar as it is fulfills some higher purpose. Historically, free speech has epitomized negative liberty: its robustness is measured by process (what can be said), not outcome (what is or should be said). In our polarized times, however, many critics on both the left and the right have incorporated free speech into their respective conceptions of positive liberty. This is more apparent on the left, which increasingly sees inclusivity and full citizenship rights as the end that expressive rights must ultimately serve. But the free-speech fundamentalism defended by the Right has metamorphosed into a form of positive liberty as well. When Lukianoff and Haidt contend that humans need challenges to develop, or when the alt-right provocateur Ben Shapiro tells student audiences that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” they are making more than procedural defenses of free speech: they are claiming that adversity is a positive good, a necessary condition for human growth. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living; it shouldn’t be allowed.

Many of those involved in the campus free-speech debate are thus pursuing what Max Weber called a “politics of ultimate ends,” or what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “political passions”: value commitments so exacting that they must stand in the way of more pragmatic considerations. Perhaps it is this very sense of moral urgency that leads both sides to disregard the tensions that characterize each position. Many conservatives insist that they are concerned with protecting everyone’s free-speech rights on college campuses. At the same time, in bemoaning the lack of conservative voices in colleges and universities and calling for “viewpoint diversity,” they embrace, at times, initiatives that sound suspiciously like affirmative action. Nor do conservatives seem sure how to reconcile their “adversity is good for you” free-speech message with business models that encourage colleges and universities to view students as consumers (who expect some coddling); indeed, public institutions have had to resort to this model as a result of cuts in state appropriations advocated by the Right. Some of those who are focused on building inclusive learning environments, meanwhile, seem tempted by a babywith- the-bathwater solution: if free speech is indelibly tainted by privilege, they wonder, has the time come to jettison the language of individual rights, to dismiss them, as did Marxists of yore, as “purely formal” compared to the urgent task of realizing the utopia of inclusivity? The role that free-speech protections, despite their real limitations, have played in protecting unprivileged opinion—religious dissent, pacifism, radicalism, and even civil rights—deserves some consideration before liberalism is tossed off as a relic from an unworthy past.

When one considers the terms of the free-speech debate, it is striking how far its assumptions about the nature of higher education diverge from those upon which the AAUP was founded. The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure rests on the premise that political passions hail from society at large and that one of the university’s functions is to calm those passions through the sobering effects of good scholarship. Whatever the merits of the various arguments that now dominate campus discourse about free speech and inclusion, it is difficult to discern in them any hope that the university might, in the words of the 1915 Declaration , render public opinion “more circumspect,” “check the more hasty and unconsidered impulses of popular feeling,” and “train the democracy to the habit of looking before and after.”

So long as the broader culture continues to be so deeply polarized, a resolution to the campus freespeech debate in the immediate future seems highly unlikely. Neither position can really accommodate compromise: free-speech absolutism and the utopia of inclusivity leave little room for negotiation. Calls for civility entertain the fantasy that the root problem might magically disappear instead of proposing a practical solution. Perhaps the best one can hope for now is the return to what political scientists call forbearance—a willingness, in the name of preserving democratic practices, to refrain from maximizing one’s advantages over one’s opponents in ways that could result in their obliteration. Far from appeasing or tempering the warring factions of campus culture, calls for free speech, however understood and defined, seem likely, for the foreseeable future, to feed their rage. 

Michael C. Behrent is associate professor of history at Appalachian State University, a member of the AAUP’s Committee on Government Relations, and vice president of the North Carolina AAUP conference. His email address is [email protected] . 

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Hate speech is protected free speech, even on college campuses

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freedom of speech in universities essay

“We should refuse to allow hateful speakers on campus,” a campus faculty member said.

The statement was met with resounding applause. I mentally prepared for the response to what I was going to say next.

It was September, and I was at a forum at which several professors, including me, discussed free speech issues before a large audience of students at the University of California Berkeley. Several faculty and students had already implored Chancellor Carol Christ to revoke the invitations of conservative provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campus, and their declarations were met with enthusiasm.

Read Robert Post’s argument that it makes little sense to apply the First Amendment to colleges here .

freedom of speech in universities essay

Finally, I spoke up. “Be clear that if Chancellor Christ were to exclude speakers based on their viewpoint, she would get sued and lose,” I said. “The speakers would get an injunction and be allowed to speak. They would recover attorneys’ fees and maybe money damages. They would be portrayed as victims. And since they would get to speak anyway, nothing would be gained.”

No one applauded.

I have been dean of Berkeley’s law school for several months. But before I arrived at campus, the university, home of the free speech movement of the 1960s, had become a battleground for a new kind of campus speech debate.

In late September, elaborate security precautions were taken when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at Berkeley; $600,000 had to be spent so he could deliver his remarks without disruption. When conservative student groups attempted to host a “Free Speech Week,” and invited conservative speakers like Coulter and Steve Bannon, the campus steeled itself to spend in excess of $1 million to allow them to speak while ensuring safety on the campus. (In the end, “Free Speech Week” was canceled by the student group that had organized it.)

I have been teaching First Amendment law to law students and undergraduates for more than 37 years. I have also litigated free speech cases, including at the Supreme Court. I believe that Chancellor Christ and the campus have done a superb job of adhering to the First Amendment, protecting free speech while ensuring the safety of students, staff, and faculty. But it’s also become clear to me that current college students are often ambivalent, or even hostile, to the idea of free speech on campus.

Students today are driven by a desire to protect their classmates from hate speech

Disputes over free speech on campus have long occurred, but today is different. Usually in the past, it was students who wanted to speak out and campus administrators who tried to stop demonstrations. Now it often is about outside speakers and outside disruptors, like the radical leftist protest group antifa. The campus is just the place for their battle.

At Berkeley and elsewhere, it is now often students and faculty calling for preventing the speakers while campus officials are steadfastly protecting freedom of expression.

In my seminars the past two years (before Berkeley, I was at UC Irvine’s law school), I was surprised by how much the students wanted campuses to stop offensive speech — and the degree to which they trusted campus officials to have the power to do so. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Institute said that four in 10 college students believe the government should be able to prevent people from publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups.

While teaching our class on free speech on campus at UC Irvine, Chancellor Howard Gillman and I realized that the students’ desire to restrict hurtful speech came from laudable instincts. This is the first generation of college students to be taught from a young age that bullying is wrong; they have internalized this message. Many spoke powerfully of instances in which they or their friends had suffered from hurtful speech. They want to make campuses inclusive for all, and they know that hate speech causes great harm, especially among those who have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education.

But I worry, too, that students do not realize the degree to which free speech has been essential for the advancement of rights and equality. There would not have been a 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, without the women’s suffrage movement and its widespread demonstrations. The civil rights protests of the 1960s — lunch counter sit-ins, the march on Selma, demonstrations on campuses — were essential to bringing about the end of segregation.

Those events, though, are ancient history for my students. I worry that they equate freedom of speech more with the vitriol of the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak than the anti-Vietnam War protests I participated in when I was in college. I was surprised by how little our students knew about the history of free speech, including the outbreak of McCarthyism, when faculty and students suffered greatly from the lack of legal protection for expression and academic freedom.

Although all of this makes the context different today, the law of the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom are clear and long established. The Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the First Amendment means public institutions cannot punish speech, or exclude speakers, on the grounds that it is hateful or deeply offensive. This includes public colleges and universities.

freedom of speech in universities essay

Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment

Every effort by the government to regulate hate speech has been declared unconstitutional. Over 25 years ago, more than 350 colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes. But every court to consider such a hate speech code declared it to be unconstitutional. The codes inevitably were far too vague in terms of what speech was permitted and what was prohibited. Of course, free speech is not absolute and can be punished when it incites illegal activity, constitutes a “true threat” that causes a person to fear imminent harm to his or her physical safety, or rises to the level of prohibited harassment.

This does not mean that campuses are powerless in the face of disruptive or hateful speech. Even though there is a First Amendment right to speak, that does not mean that protesters have the right to demonstrate in the middle of a freeway at rush hour. A campus surely could prohibit a large demonstration in a classroom building while classes are in session. Campuses can regulate when and where speech takes place in order to prevent disruption of school activities. Controversial speakers can be placed in auditoriums where it is easier to assure safety and prevent disruptions. Demonstrations can be placed in areas away from where classes are in session.

Although the First Amendment applies only to the government, including public universities, private universities should follow these same principles. They are essential to academic freedom, which is at the very core of a university’s mission.

There might be a point at which it is impossible to simultaneously protect public safety and allow controversial speech to occur. Then campus officials have no choice but to prevent the speech, given that they must provide for the safety of students, staff, and faculty. But canceling a speaker should truly be a last resort and never based on the viewpoint expressed.

At what point should a campus cancel a speaker because it cannot afford to ensure the safety of students, staff, and faculty? Chancellor Christ has estimated that already this semester, the campus has spent more than $2 million to protect free speech. I believe Berkeley campus officials made the right choice in protecting these speakers from harm, but I also know that such expenditures are not sustainable.

Although speakers have a right to express hateful messages on campus, that does not mean that campus officials should silently tolerate such speech. It is important that campus officials denounce hate when it occurs and explain why it is inconsistent with the type of community we desire.

freedom of speech in universities essay

Education is enhanced when there is more speech, not when speech is regulated by campus officials

The law is clear that a public university may not exclude a speaker based on his or her views, nor may students or faculty be punished for the views they express. In a separate piece for Vox , professor Robert Post challenges this by suggesting that usual free speech principles should not apply on campus. He argues that campuses must of course engage in content-based judgments in evaluating a faculty member’s scholarship or a student’s work. From this, he concludes that universities are justified in excluding outside speakers that do not serve the educational mission of the campus.

Post’s premise is undoubtedly correct: Universities must evaluate the content of faculty and student work. But it does not follow that outside of this realm, free speech principles do not apply on campus. It is a logical fallacy to say that because basic free speech principles sometimes do not apply on campus, they must never apply.

First, it is important to distinguish what the law is from what Post thinks the law should be. Under current First Amendment law, a public university clearly would be acting unconstitutionally if it excluded a speaker from campus based on his or her viewpoint. When Auburn University attempted to prevent white supremacist Richard Spencer from speaking, a federal court ruled against the university.

Second, Post ignores the distinction between the university’s ability to regulate speech in professional settings (such as in grading students’ papers or in evaluating teaching and scholarship) and its ability to regulate speech in other contexts. The former does not justify a university’s ability to restrict campus speakers based on viewpoint or to punish student or faculty speech in a nonprofessional setting.

Professor Post also argues that a primary purpose of a university is to educate students — so a campus would be justified in excluding speakers that it perceives as interfering with this mission. But the law says quite the contrary. It does not allow a public university to exclude a speaker by claiming that the viewpoint expressed would be so offensive to students that it would interfere with their education. Also, this would seem to give unlimited discretion to campus officials to exclude or punish any speaker that they deemed to be inconsistent with students’ education. The assumption of freedom of speech, and of academic freedom, is that education is enhanced when there is more speech, not when government officials have the power to censor and punish speech they don’t like.

Having seen the enormous amount of time and money invested by the Berkeley campus to deal with the appearances of Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos, I cannot help but wish this had happened someplace else. But I know that Berkeley, especially because of its history with the free speech movement of the 1960s, is a unique place for expression. This is why it is so important that the campus did all it could to ensure freedom of speech. It is also why this campus has the chance to be a model for other schools in upholding the principle that all ideas and views can be expressed at colleges and universities.

Erwin Chemerinsky is d ean and Jesse H. Choper d istinguished professor of law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He is the co-author, with Howard Gillman, of Free Speech on Campus (Yale University Press, 2017) .

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at [email protected] .

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freedom of speech in universities essay

Debating Free Speech on Campus

Free Speech or "Safe

In recent weeks, college campuses around the country have experienced major student protests. These students claim that colleges promote hostile environments that harm minority students and hinder their ability to learn. To solve these problems, students have demanded that college administrators and faculty create “safe-spaces” in which offensive or disagreeable speech is prohibited and punished. These demands have sparked debate about the nature of free speech, individual rights, and higher education.

In this eLesson, learn more about the protests at Yale University and the University of Missouri, and explore both sides of the free speech debate. You can also learn more about past Supreme Court cases that have ruled on the right to free speech.

Campus Protest Resources

  • The Bill of Rights: First Amendment
  • “ University of Missouri Controversy Highlights Academia’s Free Speech Struggle ,” USA Today
  • “ Why a Free Speech Fight is Causing Protests at Yale ,” TIME
  • Video: “ Campus Protests Stir Fresh Questions About Free Speech ,” PBS
  • Opinion: “ The New Intolerance of Student Activism ,” The Atlantic
  • Opinion: “ The Coddling of the American Mind ,” The Atlantic
  • Opinion: “ When Free Speech Becomes a Political Weapon ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Opinion: “ Mizzou, Yale and Free Speech ,” The New York Times

eLessons on Campus Speech and Offensive Speech

  • Freedom of Speech – Skokie and Brandenburg
  • Edwards v. South Carolina (1963)
  • Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)
  • Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982)
  • Bethel v. Fraser (1986)
  • Texas v. Johnson (1989)
  • Morse v. Frederick (2007)

Discussion Questions and Possible Activities

On the board, write “Should offensive speech be banned?” Conduct an anonymous poll by distributing slips of paper to students. Ask them to write yes, no, or maybe.  Have them place their votes in a basket or hat so that they cannot change their answers. Count the votes and write the results on the board. Lead a class discussion on the nature of free speech. Ask students to define what they believe free speech is. Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are those limits? Ask students to define, in their own terms, offensive speech. Is there such a thing as offensive speech? Who do they believe should determine what is and is not offensive? After explaining the ongoing campus protests against free speech and the leading arguments on all sides of the debate, ask students for their opinions. Do they agree with the college protesters that offensive speech ought to be prohibited and punished? Why or why not? Encourage students who voted “yes” in the poll to explain why they believe offensive speech should be banned. Ask those who voted “no” why they think speech should not be restricted. Encourage students who voted “maybe” to explain their vote. More questions for students to consider include: Do you think limiting free speech inhibits the free exchange of ideas? Is there a time, place, or context in which unlimited free speech is acceptable? Should some groups of people have more free speech than others? What does the First Amendment say about the freedom of speech? Why do students think that the Framers of the Constitution included this as an essential right? Conduct a final anonymous poll at the end of the lesson and class discussion. Write the votes on the board next to the original votes.  Did the vote count change? Ask if any students would be willing to share if they changed their vote, and what arguments persuaded them to do so.
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Freedom of Speech Essay

Free speech is a massive step in human civilization. The ability to say something without fear of persecution and/or death is a big step in human society and is something that only around fifty countries have. My essay is about free speech in US colleges and how it is rapidly declining at a frightening rate.

In the case of Sweezy vs. New Hampshire in 1957 the Supreme Court said, “Teachers and students must always remain free to enquire, otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.” Many would agree with that statement and consider it true, but in modern US colleges there is a massive restriction on free speech to the point where the comment made by the Supreme Court no longer applies in some places in the US. The US colleges are literally removing free speech from our futures by stamping it out in through what they teach younger people.

In 2010, there was a study by the Association of American colleges and universities. They found that over 70% of college students found it unsafe to hold unpopular positions on campus. This means they may have had opinions and thoughts about issues, but they did not feel safe expressing their thoughts in college.

Another troubling element of the 2010 is that the longer the student spends in the college, the less safe he or she feels about holding and expressing unpopular opinions. If we were to blame outside influences, then students would enter and leave college either as safe or unsafe as they like. However, it is clear that the longer a student spends in college, then the more restricted and repressed his or her freedom of speech is. The freshmen students feel safer using their freedom of speech, but they begin to feel less safe as they move through college.

To clarify, the feeling of safety is safety from repercussions and not from physical harm. The students feel safe from harm in college, but they do not feel safe from the penalization from professors. They feel uneasy about expressing their unpopular positions or opinions within their work and dissertations, and they do not feel as if they are free to speak their true feelings and opinions because they fear they will be marked down and/or looked upon unfavorably by the people that control their grades and ability to get their qualifications.

What is more worrying is the fact that colleges and universities in the US are blatantly restricting student’s freedom of speech. They claim they do it to help avoid people getting offended, which further proves the point that freedom of speech is less important to these colleges that the fear of people being offended. To cast freedom of speech aside for any reason, noble or not, is to shatter its very foundation and urinate in the faces of the people that died for it.

Speech codes are a common and blatant sign that students are having their freedom of speech restricted. The colleges and universities are not even hiding the fact that their speech codes are regulations that limit or bans expression. It literally says that in their regulations.

The first amendment in the US constitution states implicitly that people are allowed to speak and write what they wish, and yet colleges and universities are disregarding it when they set use speech codes. Yet, what is it that colleges are protecting students from? If it were from people writing instructions on how to build a bomb, then one could argue that the protection of life is more important than freedom of speech.

Yet, all of the speech codes in US colleges and universities are there to stop people writing or saying things that the college/university in question feels are offensive. They usually revolve around religion or political views. Colleges and universities in the US are banning students from speaking, writing and even holding opinions that contradict what the college likes, and that is a blatant middle finger to a US citizen’s freedom of speech.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Freedom of Expression — Freedom of Speech at College Campuses

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Freedom of Speech at College Campuses

  • Categories: College Students Freedom of Expression Freedom of Speech

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Words: 748 |

Published: Apr 29, 2022

Words: 748 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited

  • American Association of University Professors. (2018). Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes. Retrieved from [URL]
  • Bok, D. (1998). Universities and the Future of America. Duke University Press.
  • Chemerinsky, E. (2017). Free Speech on Campus. Yale University Press.
  • Fish, S. E. (1994). There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too. Oxford University Press.
  • Gould, J. B. (2018). Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Princeton University Press.
  • Lowery, R. (2019). Campus Free Speech: A Guide to Understanding the First Amendment. Routledge.
  • Mill, J. S. (2002). On Liberty. Penguin Classics.
  • Stanley, J. (2018). How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Random House.
  • Stone, G. R. (2005). Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. W. W. Norton & Company.
  • Tsesis, A. (2017). Free Speech in the Balance: Public Interests in Regulation. Oxford University Press.

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Student Opinion

Why Is Freedom of Speech an Important Right? When, if Ever, Can It Be Limited?

freedom of speech in universities essay

By Michael Gonchar

  • Sept. 12, 2018

This extended Student Opinion question and a related lesson plan were created in partnership with the National Constitution Center in advance of Constitution Day on Sept. 17. For information about a cross-classroom “Constitutional Exchange,” see The Lauder Project .

One of the founding principles of the United States that Americans cherish is the right to freedom of speech. Enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of speech grants all Americans the liberty to criticize the government and speak their minds without fear of being censored or persecuted.

Even though the concept of freedom of speech on its face seems quite simple, in reality there are complex lines that can be drawn around what kinds of speech are protected and in what setting.

The Supreme Court declared in the case Schenck v. United States in 1919 that individuals are not entitled to speech that presents a “clear and present danger” to society. For example, a person cannot falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater because that speech doesn’t contribute to the range of ideas being discussed in society, yet the risk of someone getting injured is high. On the other hand, in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, the court declared that even inflammatory speech, such as racist language by a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, should generally be protected unless it is likely to cause imminent violence.

While the text and principle of the First Amendment have stayed the same, the court’s interpretation has indeed changed over time . Judges, lawmakers and scholars continue to struggle with balancing strong speech protections with the necessity of maintaining a peaceful society.

What do you think? Why is the freedom of speech an important right? Why might it be important to protect even unpopular or hurtful speech? And yet, when might the government draw reasonable limits on speech, and why?

Before answering this question, read the full text of the amendment. What does it say about speech?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Next, read these excerpts from three recent articles about free speech cases that might affect your life:

In a September 2017 article, “ High Schools Threaten to Punish Students Who Kneel During Anthem ,” Christine Hauser writes:

The controversy over kneeling in protest of racial injustice moved beyond the world of professional sports this week, when a number of schools told students they were expected to stand during the national anthem. On Long Island, the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which runs a private Catholic school system, said students at its three high schools could face “serious disciplinary action” if they knelt during the anthem before sporting events.

In a June 2018 article, “ Colleges Grapple With Where — or Whether — to Draw the Line on Free Speech ,” Alina Tugend writes:

It has happened across the country, at small private colleges and large public universities: an invited guest is heckled or shouted down or disinvited because of opposing political views. And the incident is followed by a competing chorus of accusations about the rights of free speech versus the need to feel safe and welcome. It’s something those in higher education have grappled with for decades. But after the 2016 presidential election and the increasing polarization of the country, the issue has taken on a new resonance.

In another June 2018 article, “ Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Barring Political Apparel at Polling Places ,” Adam Liptak writes:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Minnesota law that prohibits voters from wearing T-shirts, hats and buttons expressing political views at polling places. In a cautious 7-to-2 decision, the court acknowledged the value of decorum and solemn deliberation as voters prepare to cast their ballots. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that Minnesota’s law was not “capable of reasoned application.”

Students, read at least one of the above articles in its entirety, then tell us:

— Why is the freedom of speech an important right? Why do you think it’s worth protecting?

— What is the value in protecting unpopular speech?

— The Supreme Court has determined that certain types of speech, such as fighting words, violent threats and misleading advertising, are of only “low” First Amendment value because they don’t contribute to a public discussion of ideas, and are therefore not protected. Even though the text of the First Amendment does not make any distinction between “low” and “high” value speech, do you think the court is correct in ruling that some categories of speech are not worth protecting? What types of speech would you consider to be “low” value? What types of speech are “high” value, in your opinion?

— What do you think about the free speech issues raised in the three articles above? For example:

• Should students be allowed to kneel during the national anthem? Why? • Should colleges be allowed to forbid controversial or “offensive” guests from speaking on campus? Why? • Should individuals be able to wear overtly political T-shirts or hats to the polling booth? Why?

— When might the government draw reasonable limits to the freedom of speech, and why?

— We now want to ask you an important constitutional question: When does the First Amendment allow the government to limit speech? We want to hear what you think. But to clarify, we’re not asking for your opinion about policy. In other words, we’re not asking whether a certain type of speech, like flag burning or hate speech, should be protected or prohibited. Instead, we’re asking you to interpret the Constitution: Does the First Amendment protect that speech?

Do your best to base your interpretation on the text of the amendment itself and your knowledge of how it can be understood. You may want to consult this essay in the National Constitution Center’s Interactive Constitution to learn more about how scholars and judges have interpreted the First Amendment, but rest assured, you don’t have to be a Supreme Court justice to have an opinion on this matter, and even the justices themselves often disagree.

— When you interpret the First Amendment, what do you think it has to say about the free speech issues raised in the three articles. For example:

• Does the First Amendment protect the right of students at government-run schools (public schools) to protest? What about students who attend private schools? • Does the First Amendment allow private colleges to prohibit certain controversial speakers? What about government-run colleges (public colleges)? • Finally, does the First Amendment protect voters’ right to wear whatever they want to the polling booth?

Are any of your answers different from your answers above, when you answered the three “should” questions?

— When scholars, judges and lawmakers try to balance strong speech protections with the goal of maintaining a peaceful society, what ideas or principles do you think are most important for them to keep in mind? Explain.

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

freedom of speech in universities essay

New ABA Rule Is a Step Forward for Free Speech at Law Schools (1)

By David Lat

David Lat

When it comes to free speech and intellectual diversity, US law schools continue to face challenges. On Jan. 23, the Law School Student Senate at Columbia Law School voted to deny official recognition to Law Students Against Antisemitism, or LSAA, a student group seeking to “raise awareness and educate about both historical and contemporary antisemitism.”

Nine organizations requested official recognition from the Senate this year, and Law Students Against Antisemitism was the first to get rejected. Why? According to a letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, to the Student Senate president, the rejection appeared to rest on objections to LSAA’s definition of antisemitism, which some pro-Palestine students opposed. It therefore was, in the words of professor Steven Lubet of Northwestern Law, “a blatant case of viewpoint discrimination.”

Columbia Law’s Student Senate later reversed itself and recognized LSAA. But the fact the reversal was even necessary—and didn’t happen until after the decision was widely criticized and FIRE intervened—reflects an ongoing free-speech problem in US law schools. (According to the Columbia Law School Senate Executive Board , the initial rejection of LSAA was based primarily on a problematic provision in the LSAA constitution pertaining to the removal of board members, not the constitution’s definition of antisemitism—and once this issue was addressed, LSAA was approved.)

This free-speech problem attracted notice of the American Bar Association, the leading accreditation body for law schools—and the ABA took action. On Feb. 5, the ABA House of Delegates passed a resolution adopting Standard 208 , “Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.”

Standard 208 requires law schools, as a condition of accreditation, to “protect the rights of faculty, students and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular, including through robust debate, demonstrations or protests.” It is, as noted in the ABA Journal , “the first accreditation standard to address free speech for the entire community within law schools”—not just for faculty, who were already covered by standards protecting academic freedom.

ABA accreditation matters greatly to law schools— all 50 states recognize graduation from an ABA-accredited law school as meeting the educational requirements to sit for the bar examination. And dozens of state bars require graduation from an ABA-accredited school for bar admission. Losing ABA accreditation would be a disaster for a law school.

Standard 208 was welcome news to FIRE, a leading defender of free speech on university campuses that has weighed in on a number of free-expression controversies at law schools.

“FIRE is supportive of the ABA’s Standard 208,” said Mary Griffin, senior program officer for policy reform at the Foundation. “We were pleased to see the House of Delegates approve the proposed standard at their recent meeting.”

I reached out to law school administrators and professors who specialize in free speech and First Amendment law, and they similarly supported the new requirement.

“Standard 208 is a desirable reaffirmation of free-speech principles,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a leading scholar of constitutional law. “It’s in accord with what almost all law schools already do. But especially in these difficult times, where so many free speech issues have arisen, it is desirable for the ABA and the law schools to make clear their commitment to freedom of speech.”

The standard requires law schools to “adopt, publish, and adhere to written policies” that “protect academic freedom” and “encourage and support the free expression of ideas.” It contains certain baseline requirements for what those policies must include—for example, they must “[p]roscribe disruptive conduct that hinders free expression,” like the ugly March 2023 protest against Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School. But the standard doesn’t provide specific language for schools to adopt.

And this is a good thing—as explained to me by Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union who taught constitutional law for many years at New York Law School.

“Law schools will need to propose their own specific policy language to comply with the standard—and I hope they use this as an important educational opportunity,” Strossen told me. “Faculty, students, and staff should study, analyze, and debate the details of proposed policies—which will give them a greater feeling of buy-in when the policies are finally issued, increasing their sense of legitimacy.”

Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School, another expert in First Amendment law, said Standard 208 will also help deans navigate free-speech controversies in the future.

Deans and other administrators often face considerable pressure—sometimes from the right, from politicians like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and sometimes from the left, from student activists—to suppress certain controversial or unpopular viewpoints. Standard 208 increases their ability to resist such pressure: caving to it would endanger accreditation, and losing accreditation would be a death sentence for many law schools.

“The standard is another tool in the toolbox of a dean who wants to protect free speech and academic freedom,” Volokh told me. “The dean can tell student activists, ‘Look, do you want us to lose our accreditation?’”

Despite all its virtues, Standard 208 is not a panacea. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t address the significant social pressures on faculty and students to engage in self-censorship on controversial issues.

“I’ve had a lot of students complain to me that they are reluctant to speak out in class—not because they’re afraid of discipline, but because they’re afraid their classmates will ostracize them,” Volokh said. “But you can’t have a rule to stop that.”

To take another example, several student groups at Berkeley Law adopted a bylaw that bans hosting speakers with Zionist beliefs. This fact is now part of a lawsuit against Berkeley Law—which accuses the school of violating federal antidiscrimination law by “fail[ing] to confront, much less combat, the antisemitic environment” on its campus.

But as Berkeley Dean Chemerinsky said, the “law is clear that student groups have a First Amendment right to choose speakers based on their views. Standard 208 does not address this, and it cannot override the First Amendment.” (Note that the bylaw bans Zionist speakers, not Jewish speakers—and there are some self-identified Jewish anti-Zionists, like the members of Jewish Voice for Peace .)

At the end of the day, while Standard 208 is a commendable step forward, free speech and academic freedom are ultimately about culture. Law schools must instill a culture of free speech and academic freedom, one in which people tolerate and even affirmatively seek out opposing viewpoints. And that can’t be done by rules and standards alone; it needs to be done by changing hearts and minds.

Updates third paragraph with statement from the Columbia Law School Senate Executive Board.

David Lat , a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction . He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”

Read More Exclusive Jurisdiction

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alison Lake at [email protected] ; Jessie Kokrda Kamens at [email protected]

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122 Freedom of Speech Topics & Essay Examples

Looking for exciting freedom of speech topics to write about? This issue is definitely worth studying!

🔝 Top 10 Freedom of Speech Essay Topics

⁉️ freedom of speech essay: how to write, 🏆 best freedom of speech essay examples & topic ideas, 🔍 simple & easy freedom of speech essay titles, 💡 most interesting freedom of speech topics to write about, ❓ research questions about freedom of speech.

In your freedom of speech essay, you might want to focus on the historical perspective, elaborate on the negative effects of censorship, or even share your personal experience. Whether you will choose to write an argumentative, persuasive, or narrative essay, our article will help! We’ve gathered a list of excellent topics, ideas, and questions, together with A+ freedom of speech essay examples.

  • Freedom of speech as an individual and a collective right
  • Freedom of speech and its limitations
  • Negative effects of censorship
  • The origins of freedom of speech
  • Freedom of speech as a negative right
  • Democracy and freedom of speech
  • Freedom of information in the era of Internet
  • Freedom of speech and academic freedom
  • Liberalism and freedom of speech
  • Freedom of speech in the US

Freedom of speech is an important topic because every person has a fundamental right to express their opinions freely. Our ability to express our thoughts allows society to change and develop.

Essays on freedom of speech can raise awareness of the significance of this issue. That is why it is vital to create powerful and well-developed papers on this cause.

You can discuss various topics in your freedom of speech essay. You can search for them online or consult your professor. Here are our suggestions on freedom of speech essay analysis questions:

  • The advantages and disadvantages of free speech policies
  • The struggle schools face from the perspective of free speech
  • The appropriate use of free speech
  • The link between the freedom of speech and yellow journalism
  • Speech as a personality trait: What the freedom of speech can reveal about people
  • Freedom of speech: Pros and cons
  • Freedom of speech in the United States (or other countries)

Once you have selected one of the titles for your essay, it is time to start working on the paper. Here are some do’s of writing the essay:

  • Select topics that you are most interested in, as your dedication can help you to keep the reader engaged too. You can select one from the freedom of speech essay titles presented above.
  • Develop a well-organized freedom of speech essay outline. Think of the main points you want to discuss and decide how you can present them in the paper. For example, you can include one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and one concluding paragraphs.
  • Define your freedom of speech essay thesis clearly. You should state it at the end of the introduction. The reader should understand the main point of your paper.
  • While working on a persuasive essay, do not forget to include a section with an alternative perspective on the problem you are discussing.
  • Remember that a concluding paragraph is vital because it includes a summary of all arguments presented in the paper. Rephrase the main points of the essay and add recommendations, if necessary.
  • Check out essay examples online to see how you can structure your paper and organize the information.

Remember that you should avoid certain things while writing your essay. Here are some important don’ts to consider:

  • Do not focus on your personal opinion solely while writing your paper. Support your claims with evidence from the literature or credible online sources.
  • Do not ignore your professor’s requirements. Stick within the word limit and make sure that your essay meets all the criteria from the grading rubric, if there is one.
  • Avoid using personal blogs or Wikipedia as the primary sources of information, unless your professor states it in the instructions. Ask your instructor about the literature you can use for the essay.
  • When checking other students’ essays online, avoid copying their ideas. Remember that your paper should be plagiarism-free.
  • Make sure that your paper is mistake-free. Grammatical mistakes may make the reader think that your opinion is not credible. It is better to check the essay several times before sending it to your professor.

Don’t hesitate to explore our free samples that can help you to write an outstanding essay!

  • Human Nature and the Freedom of Speech in Different Countries The paper will look at the human nature that necessitates speech and expression, freedom of speech as applied in different countries and limitations that freedom of speech faces.
  • Why Free Speech Is An Important Freedom Freedom of speech is an important aspect of social life in a civilized and democratic society. Although there has been debate on the justification of freedom of speech, it is important to realize that society […]
  • Freedom of speech, religion and religious tolerance As stipulated in Article 19 of the Universal Human Rights Declaration, the pastor has the right to share ideas and information of all kinds regardless of the periphery involved and in this case, he should […]
  • Freedom of Speech: Exploring Proper Limits In this respect, Downs mentions the philosophy of educational establishments, where “the function of the University is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train student in the process whereby truth is to be […]
  • Government’s control versus Freedom of Speech and Thoughts One of the most effective measures that oppressive regimes use the world over is the limitation of the freedom of speech and thoughts.
  • Controversies over freedom of speech and Internet postings It must be noted though that despite the Freedom of Speech being a first Amendment right, subsequent amendments to the constitution as well as various historical acts such as the Sedition Act of 1798 and […]
  • Freedom of Speech in China and Political Reform Although the constitution of China has the provision of the freedom of speech, association, press and even demonstration, the freedom is not there in reality since the constitution forbids the undertaking of anything that is […]
  • “The Weight of the Word” by Chris Berg From this analysis therefore, we see that, state interference in the wiki leaks saga was unwarranted, and it amounted to a breach of the freedom of the press.
  • Freedom of speech in the Balkans Freedom of speech in Montenegro In Montenegro, the practice of the freedom of speech and press were restricted to some issues by the law.
  • Freedom of Speech in Social Media Essay Gelber tries to say that the history of the freedom of speech in Australia consists of the periods of the increasing public debates on the issue of human rights and their protection.
  • Freedom of Speech and Expression This implies that autonomy is the epitome of the freedom of expression in many ways. Perhaps, this is the point of diversion between autonomy and restriction of the freedom of expression.
  • Advertising and Freedom of Speech According to Liodice, the marketer should provide the best information to the targeted consumer. The duty of the marketer is to educate and inform the consumer about the unique features of his or her product.
  • Freedom of Speech: Julian Assange and ‘WikiLeaks’ Case Another significant issue is that the precedent of WikiLeaks questions the power of traditional journalism to articulate the needs of the society and to monitor the governments.
  • Freedom of Speech in Modern Media At the same time, the bigoted approach to the principles of freedom of speech in the context of the real world, such as killing or silencing journalists, makes the process of promoting the same values […]
  • American Student Rights and Freedom of Speech As the speech was rather vulgar for the educational setting, the court decided that the rights of adults in public places cannot be identic to those the students have in school.
  • Canada’s Freedom of Speech and Its Ineffectiveness In the developed societies of the modern world, it is one of the major premises that freedom of expression is the pivotal character of liberal democracy.
  • The Importance of Freedom of Speech In a bid to nurture the freedom of speech, the United States provides safety to the ethical considerations of free conversations.
  • Freedom of Speech and International Relations The freedom of speech or the freedom of expression is a civil right legally protected by many constitutions, including that of the United States, in the First Amendment.
  • Freedom of Speech on Campus The primary issue identified by the case study is the extent to which free speech can be used and is protected regarding sensitive social aspects and discussions.
  • Freedom of Speech and Expression in Music Musicians are responsible and accountable for fans and their actions because in the modern world music and lyrics become a tool of propaganda that has a great impact on the circulation of ideas and social […]
  • The Freedom of Speech: Communication Law in US By focusing on the on goings in Guatemala, the NYT may have, no doubt earned the ire of the Bush administration, but it is also necessary that the American people are made aware of the […]
  • Newt Gingrich Against Freedom of Speech According to the constitution, the First Amendment is part of the United States Bill of rights that was put in place due to the advocation of the anti-federalists who wanted the powers of the federal […]
  • Freedom of Speech and the Internet On the one hand, the freedom of expression on the internet allowed the general public to be informed about the true nature of the certain events, regardless of geographical locations and restrictions.
  • Value of Copyright Protection in Relation to Freedom of Speech The phrase, freedom of expression is often used to mean the acts of seeking, getting, and transfer of information and ideas in addition to verbal speech regardless of the model used. It is therefore important […]
  • Supreme Court Decision: Corporations and Freedom of Speech The Constitution is the framework for the Government of the United States that protects and guarantees the basic rights of the people.
  • Freedom of Speech: Is Censorship Necessary? One of the greatest achievements of the contemporary democratic society is the freedom of speech. However, it is necessary to realize in what cases the government has the right to abridge the freedom of self-expression.
  • Freedom of Speech Comes With Responsibility In Australia, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are highly valued accomplishments nowadays. According to Conroy, the present Press Council, and the current ACMA, the two existing establishments aimed to […]
  • Protesting as a Way of Exercising Freedoms of Speech and Expression However, this department will be very careful in monitoring the behavior of the protestors and engaging in dialogue to solve issues that may lead to conflicts.
  • The Internet and Freedom of Speech: Ethics and Restrictions Because of a lack of security technology, across the board prohibition is justified under the law, a concept that is in itself considered unlawful by a strict definition of the First Amendment of the Constitution […]
  • Why Defamation Laws Must Prioritize Freedom of Speech The body of the essay will involve providing information on the nature of defamation laws in the USA and the UK, the implementation of such laws in the two countries, and the reason why the […]
  • Freedom of Speech as the Most Appreciated Liberty In the present-day world, the progress of society largely depends on the possibility for people to exercise their fundamental rights. From this perspective, freedom of speech is the key to everyone’s well-being, and, in my […]
  • Freedom of Speech in Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech Even though the First Amendment explicitly prohibits any laws regarding the freedom of speech, Congress continues to make exceptions from it.
  • Privacy and Freedom of Speech of Companies and Consumers At the same time, in Europe, personal data may be collected following the law and only with the consent of the individuals.
  • Teachers’ Freedom of Speech in Learning Institutions The judiciary system has not clearly defined the limits of the First Amendment in learning institutions, and it’s a public concern, especially from the teachers.
  • Freedom of Speech in Social Networks The recent case of blocking the accounts of former US President Donald Trump on Twitter and Facebook is explained by the violation of the rules and conditions of social platforms.
  • Twitter and Violations of Freedom of Speech and Censorship The sort of organization that examines restrictions and the opportunities and challenges it encounters in doing so is the center of a widely acknowledged way of thinking about whether it is acceptable to restrict speech.
  • Freedom of Speech and Propaganda in School Setting One of the practical solutions to the problem is the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy for balanced free speech in the classroom.
  • Freedom of Speech as a Basic Human Right Restricting or penalizing freedom of expression is thus a negative issue because it confines the population of truth, as well as rationality, questioning, and the ability of people to think independently and express their thoughts.
  • The Freedom Of Speech, Press, And Petition
  • How The First Amendment Protects Freedom Of Speech
  • The Freedom Of Speech, And Gun Ownership Rights
  • The Misconception of Hate Speech and Its Connection with the Freedom of Speech in Our First Amendment
  • Limitations On Constitutional Rights On Freedom Of Speech
  • Teachers’ and Students’ Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression
  • Internet Censorship Means No Freedom of Speech
  • Freedom of Speech Part of America’s Constitution
  • An Examination of the Disadvantage of Freedom of Speech in Slack Activism
  • A Description of Freedom of Speech as One of the Most Important Freedoms
  • How Censorship In The Media Is Taking AWay Our Freedom Of Speech
  • An Analysis of Freedom of Speech and Its Punishments
  • The Effects Of Technology On The Right Of Freedom Of Speech
  • Freedom of Speech: Missouri Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. Kansas City
  • Problems with Limiting Freedom of Speech
  • How The Freedom Of Speech And Its Interpretation Affects
  • Giving Up Freedom Of Speech – Censorship On Hate Sites
  • Freedom Of Speech, Religion, And The American Dream
  • The Freedom Of Speech Across The World Wide Web
  • Freedom of Speech: Should There be Restrictions on Speech in the U.S. Democracy
  • An Argument in Favor of the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press in Schools
  • Freedom Of Speech And Violent Video Games
  • The Importance of Freedom of Speech to the Progress of Society
  • The Amendment Is Not Protected Under The Freedom Of Speech
  • Should There Be Restrictions to Freedom of Speech
  • Why Should Myanmar Have Similar Freedom of Speech Protections to United States
  • An Analysis of the Freedom of Speech and the Internet in United States of America
  • Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment
  • Free Speech : The Benefits Of Freedom Of Speech
  • Comparison of Freedom of Speech: Malaysia vs China
  • The Fine Line between Freedom of Speech or Hate Speech
  • Freedom Of Speech : One Of The Core Principles Of A Democracy
  • Prevent Internet Censorship, Save Freedom of Speech
  • The Importance of the First Amendment in Providing Freedom of Speech in America
  • How the Freedom of Speech Is Possible Through the Internet in China
  • The Importance of Freedom of Speech in Higher Education
  • Hate Mail and the Misuse of the Freedom of Speech on the Internet
  • A Comparison of Freedom of Speech and Private Property
  • Importance Of Freedom Of Speech In Colleges
  • Freedom Of Speech and Its Legal Limits
  • Freedom Of Speech As An International And Regional Human Right
  • The Importance of Protecting and Preserving the Right to Freedom of Speech
  • An Overview of the Importance of the Freedom of Speech in the United States
  • The Communication Decency Act: The Fight for Freedom of Speech on the Internet
  • Freedom Of Speech On Students’s Rights In School
  • How Far Should the Right to Freedom of Speech Extend
  • Journalism and Freedom of Speech
  • The Constitution and Freedom of Speech on the Internet in U.S
  • ‘Freedom of Speech Means the Freedom to Offend.’
  • Does the Law Relating to Obscenity Restict Freedom of Speech?
  • Does New Zealand Have Freedom of Speech?
  • How Far Should the Right to Freedom of Speech Extend?
  • Does South Korea Have Freedom of Speech?
  • How the First Amendment Protects Freedom of Speech?
  • Does Freedom of Speech Mean You Can Say Anything?
  • How Do You Violate Freedom of Speech?
  • What Are Mill’s Four Main Arguments in Defence of Freedom of Speech?
  • What Violates the Freedom of Speech?
  • What Are the Disadvantages of Freedom of Speech?
  • Does Freedom of Speech Have Limits?
  • Why Does Australia Not Have Freedom of Speech?
  • What Are the Three Restrictions to Freedom of Speech?
  • How Is Freedom of Speech Abused?
  • Who Benefits and Loses from Freedom of Speech?
  • Is There Freedom of Speech in Media?
  • What Are the Limits of Freedom of Speech in Social Media?
  • Does Social Media Allow Freedom of Speech?
  • How Is Freedom of Speech Negative?
  • Where Is Freedom of Speech Not Allowed?
  • Is USA the Only Country with Freedom of Speech?
  • Does India Have Freedom of Speech?
  • Who Made the Freedom of Speech?
  • Why Was Freedom of Speech Created?
  • Who Fought for Freedom of Speech?
  • Chicago (A-D)
  • Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 9). 122 Freedom of Speech Topics & Essay Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/freedom-of-speech-essay-examples/

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Colleges Are Cracking Down on Free Speech in the Name of ‘Inclusion’

American University’s new, draconian policies on campus protests and activism show that DEI, Inc. is a dead-end.

Amna Khalid

Jeffrey aaron snyder.

A photo illustration of a college cap, diploma, and speech bubbles in a cage.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

“Recent events and incidents on campus have made Jewish students feel unsafe and unwelcome.” That’s how the President’s Office at American University justified sweeping changes to the university’s policies governing student organizations and campus protests for the spring semester.

These new rules make a mockery of the university’s “ commitment to free expression and civic engagement .” And they point to the fatal flaws of a Disney -fied vision of campus “diversity” and “inclusion” where everyone feels entitled to be “welcomed, respected, supported and valued” at all times.

Framed as upholding the university’s core value of “inclusivity,” the revised regulations ban all indoor protests and mandate that all student clubs—as well as all posters for university-sponsored events—be “welcoming and build community.” Those who violate these directives are subject to disciplinary action, while student organizations that refuse to comply risk losing their official status and funding.

AU’s new policies are a response to controversies that have gripped college campuses nationwide in the wake of Hamas ’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack, including skirmishes about Israeli hostage posters , confrontational student protests and polarizing student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Citing safety concerns and community belonging, many schools, including Columbia , Cornell , and Lehigh University , have tightened the rules governing events, demonstrations, and student organizations—but AU’s changes are some of the most drastic.

To “ensure compliance” with the requirement that student clubs and organizations “will be welcoming to all students,” AU has already started the hiring process for a new “leadership position in student affairs.”

Picture this administrator’s duties: attending a Pride at AU meeting to make sure that evangelical Christians would feel at home there; combing through the materials of the College Republicans, lest campus Democrats feel excluded; or, encouraging the leaders of the Women in Science club to expand their purview to include men.

Student clubs are organized around shared interests, beliefs, and identities. They will no longer be genuine affinity groups if AU administrators are going to intervene with a program of heavy-handed surveillance.

The actions taken by American University represent the triumph of a safety-and-security model of learning that prizes the avoidance of psychological harm above all else. This educational approach is based on the notion that some ideas are so dangerous—so damaging to individual psyches, so detrimental to society at large—that they must be banished from classrooms and quads altogether.

It has gained such widespread influence, thanks in part to what we call DEI, Inc. This is the conventional campus diversity, equity, and inclusion framework that treats education as a product, students as consumers, and diversity as a public relations enterprise that needs to be managed from the top-down.

DEI, Inc. has helped to erase meaningful distinctions between physical safety and psychological discomfort. That poses a real problem when it comes to protecting free expression, especially in terms of student activism. Political protests are designed to make you uncomfortable, to grab you by the lapels and, in the words of the late Harry Belafonte , “snap you out of your indifference!”

AU students seem to have a better grasp of this elementary fact than the AU administration. “The basis of a protest is disruption,” freshman Haider Zaidi observed at a recent campus demonstration where student speakers called for the new restrictive policies to be repealed. In a letter to President Sylvia Burwell, members of the AU SJP chapter pointed out that the administrative directives “not only target SJP, but all of student speech and thought at AU.”

To be clear: When Jewish students, or any other students, say that they have been targets of discrimination or harassment based on their ancestry or national origin, colleges and universities have an obligation to take the allegations seriously—and, if they are verified, discipline the perpetrators, accordingly.

While standing firm by this commitment, we must also acknowledge that some colleges and universities are invoking the fight against antisemitism to crack down on criticism of the state of Israel . Over the past several months, we have seen too many textbook examples of students, administrators, trustees, donors, politicians, and other higher education stakeholders confusing condemnations of Israeli government policies with anti-Jewish bigotry.

In our view, even the most contentious assertions —that Israel is a “settler-colonial state,” an “apartheid state” or guilty of perpetrating “state-led genocide” —are clearly directed at Israel as, well, a state. They are not instances of egregious antisemitism , as many prominent figures , including 412 members of Congress in a House Resolution , have claimed.

Writing in the 1960s, Ralph Ellison made the following observation: “The diversity of American life is often painful, frequently burdensome, and always a source of conflict but in it lies our fate and our hope.”

Hear, hear! While colleges and universities have attempted to impose a happy-clappy, frictionless model of diversity in the name of “community” and “belonging,” Ellison reminds us that the default setting for a pluralistic, democratic society is conflict.

Students are alert to the hypocrisy. Colleges and universities “love to plaster our faces on posters and promotional material,” Yale law school student and Yalies4Palestine member Chisato Kimura said in a recent interview. But they struggle to accept that “if you have diverse faces on campuses, you’re also going to have diverse voices and opinion.”

To the extent that colleges and universities enshrine “inclusion” as a sacrosanct value, which runs roughshod over academic freedom and free expression , higher education is in a world of trouble.

How are students meant to develop the skills to navigate the complex, often challenging, realities of living in a multicultural democracy if they can’t exercise their rights to protest? (At AU, they don’t even have the freedom to design their own posters without the administration looking over their shoulders!)

Under these chilling conditions, colleges and universities can’t fulfill their most vital educational missions—to teach critical thinking skills and to help students become informed, engaged citizens.

Amna Khalid

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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  1. The importance of free speech on college campuses

    Devotion to an open-minded atmosphere on college campuses has been embraced, by and large, by students and faculty for generations, says Ben-Porath, who both believe freedom of expression is imperative for constructive learning and research.

  2. Why we need to protect free speech on campuses (essay)

    The common narrative about free speech issues that we so often read goes something like this: today's college students -- overprotected and coddled by parents, poorly educated in high school and exposed to primarily left-leaning faculty -- have become soft "snowflakes" who are easily offended by mere words and the slightest of insults, unable or...

  3. What Should Free Speech Mean in College?

    "Words are dangerous. That's why we should always choose them with care." That's my way of preparing my law students for the discussion of controversial and polarizing topics—abortion, same-sex marriage, capital punishment, affirmative action.

  4. College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech

    A 1938 essay in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science described academic freedom as the professor's "special need of elbowroom in his work"; with apologies to ...

  5. Is Freedom of Thought Curbed on Campus?

    March 27, 2022 Ms. Camp with her fellow U.Va. students Abby Sacks, left, and Stephen Wiecek. Eze Amos for The New York Times To the Editor: Re " Self-Censorship Is Stifling Campuses ," by Emma Camp...

  6. PDF Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus

    Amendment, the Supreme Court has clearly struck the balance in favor of free speech. Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus by Derek Bok This 1991 essay by Derek Bok, then president of Harvard University, was prompted by the display of Confederate flags (symbols of the South during the Civil War) hung from a window of a Harvard dormitory.

  7. Writing In Defense of Free Speech in Universities

    This guest post is by Amy Lai, author of In Defense of Free Speech in Universities: A Study of Three Jurisdictions, which is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access. Choice wrote that the book is "A valuable read for graduate and law students and general readers."You can read more by Amy Lai on her blog.. The idea of this book took root in the summer of 2018, a few months ...

  8. Free Speech on Campus

    — FIRE has the answer. Free speech on campus: Why is it important? Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right, and there's no place that this right should be more valued and protected than America's colleges and universities.

  9. Debating Free Speech on College Campuses

    Greene: Freedom of expression is the ability to decide for one's self what one wants to say, what one wants to believe and be able to communicate that with others. That's a very broad definition. There are lots of ways in which we see limitations on freedom of expression that sometimes might be appropriate.

  10. The Relation between Academic Freedom and Free Speech

    The standard view of academic freedom and free speech is that they play complementary roles in universities. Academic freedom protects academic discourse, while other public discourse in universities is protected by free speech. Here I challenge this view, broadly, on the grounds that free speech in universities sometimes undermines academic practices. One defense of the standard view, in the ...

  11. Navigating freedom of speech vs. discrimination and harassment on

    Freedom of speech is the right of a person to articulate opinions and ideas verbally or symbolically without threat or reprisal. Unless it rises to the level of discrimination or harassment, as described below, speech that is hurtful, biased, or offensive in nature is generally protected by the First Amendment.

  12. The Fight Over Academic Freedom

    Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions. For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities ...

  13. Freedom of Speech

    Bibliography. Alexander, Larry [Lawrence], 1995, "Free Speech and Speaker's Intent", Constitutional Commentary, 12(1): 21-28. ---, 2005, Is There a Right of Freedom of Expression?, (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law), Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Lawrence and Paul Horton, 1983, "The Impossibility of a Free Speech Principle Review Essay ...

  14. A Tale of Two Arguments about Free Speech on Campus

    Freedom of expression, we are often told, is democracy's lifeblood, the medium through which even the most contentious viewpoints can pass. Free speech, according to this view, is debate's condition of possibility; it is not, in principle, meant to be the subject of debate itself.

  15. Hate speech is protected free speech, even on college campuses

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  16. Overview of First Amendment, Fundamental Freedoms

    The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 1 Footnote U.S. Const. amend. I. viewed broadly, protects religious liberty and rights related to freedom of speech. Specifically, the Religion Clauses prevent the government from adopting laws respecting an establishment of religion—the Establishment Clause—or prohibiting the free exercise thereof—the Free Exercise Clause.

  17. Debating Free Speech on Campus

    Conduct an anonymous poll by distributing slips of paper to students. Ask them to write yes, no, or maybe. Have them place their votes in a basket or hat so that they cannot change their answers. Count the votes and write the results on the board. Lead a class discussion on the nature of free speech. Ask students to define what they believe ...

  18. Freedom Of Speech In Universities

    Freedom Of Speech In Universities 1498 Words6 Pages Free Speech and Censorship on College Campuses Vashton Smith Georgia Gwinnett College Abstract Free speech is an essential right guaranteed by the Constitution.

  19. An Essay on Freedom of Speech: The United States versus the Rest of the

    Wayne State University Law Faculty Research Publications Law School 1-1-2006 An Essay on Freedom of Speech: The United States versus the Rest of the World ... Robert A. Sedler, An Essay on Freedom of Speech: The United States versus the Rest of the World, 2006 Mich. St. L. Rev. 377, 384 (2006)

  20. Freedom of Speech Essay • Examples for Students • GradesFixer

    Essay topics General Overview 43 essay samples found 1 Social Media and Freedom of Speech: Combating Misinformation and Hate Speech 2 pages / 833 words In recent years, social media has become an integral part of our daily lives, with billions of users globally.

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    My essay is about free speech in US colleges and how it is rapidly declining at a frightening rate. In the case of Sweezy vs. New Hampshire in 1957 the Supreme Court said, "Teachers and students must always remain free to enquire, otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.". Many would agree with that statement and consider it true ...

  22. Freedom of Speech at College Campuses

    I say yes but, others might say no because everyone deserves to use their right of the First Amendment, which is the freedom of speech. They could also say that if a campus is fully open for anyone to go on campus then their shouldn't be any limits on free speech on college campuses. Furthermore, they could say that putting limits on college ...

  23. Freedom Of Speech In Universities Essay

    215 Words | 1 Pages In the story "Should This Student Have Been Expelled?" by Nat Hentoff was a very good argumentative passage. Hentoff argues that freedom of speech should be valued no matter how offensive it is interpreted by others.

  24. Why Is Freedom of Speech an Important Right? When, if Ever, Can It Be

    A protester interrupted a talk by the author Charles Murray at the University of Michigan last year. ... or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably ...

  25. The Importance of Freedom of Speech in College Essay

    The Importance of Freedom of Speech in College Essay Decent Essays 812 Words 4 Pages 1 Works Cited Open Document Freedom of speech is more than just the right to say what one pleases. Freedom of speech is the right to voice your opinion on certain topics or dilemmas around you.

  26. New ABA Rule Is a Step Forward for Free Speech at Law Schools (1)

    When it comes to free speech and intellectual diversity, US law schools continue to face challenges. On Jan. 23, the Law School Student Senate at Columbia Law School voted to deny official recognition to Law Students Against Antisemitism, or LSAA, a student group seeking to "raise awareness and educate about both historical and contemporary antisemitism."

  27. AAUP Starting Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom

    Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer in the AAUP's Department of Research and Public Policy, told Inside Higher Ed that he thinks the grant will primarily go toward hiring "maybe 12 to 15" fellows, likely to be faculty members, before the start of summer.The fellows "will make recommendations about how to best defend academic freedom in the future," Tiede said.

  28. 122 Freedom of Speech Topics & Essay Examples

    Develop a well-organized freedom of speech essay outline. Think of the main points you want to discuss and decide how you can present them in the paper. For example, you can include one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and one concluding paragraphs. Define your freedom of speech essay thesis clearly.

  29. Colleges Are Cracking Down on Free Speech in the Name of 'Inclusion'

    To the extent that colleges and universities enshrine "inclusion" as a sacrosanct value, which runs roughshod over academic freedom and free expression, higher education is in a world of trouble.