Debates on the lack of debate

All over the United States, there are extraordinary debates about whether you can have a debate. People say there’s no debate going on, and they’re debating that. Some people who think of themselves as left-wing liberals or moderates feel like they’ve been outflanked by students they call “woke”, which means students who are very concerned about racism and racist oppression. Some people on the right think that universities have become centres of indoctrination and nobody can disagree. Recently, I did an interview with an education publication that asked: ‘Isn’t it true that academic freedom has declined precipitously in recent years because people are self-censoring – people are afraid to speak their minds?’

Is self-censorship a problem?

Photo by Bodgan Khmelnytskyi

I don’t think self-censorship is that bad. Actually, I do it all the time. When I became a graduate student and then a professor, I had to stop talking with lots of curse words. I learned not to say certain things that friends of mine found offensive. There are things that people used to say that some people find really hurtful. Stop saying them. It’s not so bad.

The idea that there’s less freedom to speak in universities or public culture today than when I was a student is absurd. When I was a student, people weren’t talking about queer people. They weren’t talking about racist oppression everywhere. They weren’t talking about the history of women. I was a graduate student at Princeton, which had a great history department in the late 1970s, and you couldn’t study the history of women. Natalie Davis did, but most people didn’t. There were no documents. So there wasn’t censorship and there wasn’t political correctness. There was just good old-fashioned sexism and racism that kept some people from speaking at all.

Today, white people feel they have to be careful of what they say. To me, it’s not the biggest problem. We have not enough but more women professors, more professors of colour. We’re more sensitive to the idea that good colleges and universities shouldn’t just be finishing schools for the wealthy. They should have diverse student bodies, so you hear opinions that you might not have heard before, because there are people who have different life experiences on campus than was the case 50 years ago.

Engaging with different experiences

I teach a class in which we read James Baldwin, and we watch a film about James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro. In the text that we read with that film, James Baldwin – a great writer, an extraordinary intellectual – uses the N-word. We say that – “the N-word” – but he doesn’t use that phrase. He uses the word.

I said to my students, and we had debates about this: we’re not going to say the word in class, but I’m not going to censor James Baldwin. He writes the word; he says the word in the film. That’s fine. Many people today think it’s inappropriate, especially for a white guy like me, to say that word. I won’t say it, but I’m not censoring the great James Baldwin. I have Black students, white students, Asian students, Native American students; everybody seems fine with it.

We read a memoir about sexual assault. People find it extremely troubling, as they should, but they’re fine with it. Giving people warnings about what they’re about to study when those things are extraordinarily intense is fine. It’s a good thing to do.

In my film class, we watch a documentary about childhood sexual assault. I tell the students about this in advance, because in a class of that size there will be people in the room who have had some experience in their family with this issue and I want them to be prepared. I say, ‘If you can’t handle it, let me know.’ In 13 years of teaching, no one has ever opted out. Some people have said they might have to, but they don’t. The freedom to engage with difference is there, but sometimes you have to prepare people for that engagement. The freedom to disagree is there, although there are people who are afraid of disagreement.

Why we need others to disagree

Sometimes when people are afraid of disagreement they say: ‘I am being silenced.’ But I don’t think they’re being silenced; I think they’re just afraid to disagree. Disagreement can become very nasty, especially in our times of intense polarisation. Yet the freedom to disagree is so fundamental to education, because how else are you going to find out you’re wrong unless someone feels free to disagree with you?

We often say: ‘I want to feel free to disagree.’ But that’s not the issue. Instead, it should be: ‘I want people to feel free to disagree with me. If they don’t feel free to disagree with me, I’ll never learn that I’m wrong.’

That’s how we should phrase this problem, in order for us to discover the error of our own ways. If we’re going to find the capacity to discover the errors of our own ways, it’s going to be through other people pointing them out and disagreeing with us. So I don’t worry about self-censorship. I worry about other people censoring themselves because they don’t want to show me that I’m wrong.

Freedom of speech and freedom to disagree

FREEDOM OF SPEECH between 1941 and 1945 National Archives at College Park. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Freedom of speech is about freedom of expression. I want to be able to express myself, in dance, or in painting or in speech, because I should be able to tell you what I think. Freedom to disagree should be: I should be able to hear your disagreement with me. I have to have the freedom to hear you disagree with me.

I’ve written a book called Safe Enough Spaces in which I argue that freedom of speech, freedom of expression, is fundamental to education. But it’s not the only thing that’s fundamental to education, and there are limitations to freedom of speech. There are salutary dimensions of inhibiting speech, and it happens all of the time.

People say stupid things, and you tell them they’re stupid things; they may not say those things again. They may say: ‘You’re interfering with my speech.’ We’re saying: ‘No, we’re helping you to stop saying stuff that’s not backed by facts,’ for example. If you give the wrong answer in math and somebody tells you that’s a really dumb answer, you may not give answers for a while because you’re afraid. But that’s not a principled issue of freedom of speech. It’s just that in education you have filters at times, whether it’s in math, or biology or philosophy.

When expression is intimidation

The freedom to say whatever you want has never been that important at a university campus. What we want is the freedom to say things that are contenders for our attention, our sympathetic imagination and that may turn out to be true. There have always been limitations.

Freedom of expression is fundamental, but at times that expression can be simply a tool of intimidation or harassment. In such cases, people with authority, be they faculty or administrators, have to protect the continuation of the conversation by keeping some people from using the conversation to intimidate and harass others.

There will be fuzzy cases, and one should err on the side of more freedom. But there are some cases where it’s very clear that it’s harassment and intimidation. People with authority on university campuses, or in the press, should keep the action of intimidation and harassment from taking place, even if that action is also an expression.

Protecting the conversation

In Europe there are many laws that curtail certain things from the public sphere because they are racist, or antisemitic or other forms of hate speech. This is fully appropriate. It’s not a slippery slope where if you ban some things, you can ban everything. We have to protect the ongoing conversation so that people can continue to find ways of disagreeing, of agreeing, of sharing ideas and of disputing ideas because they’re not subject to harassment and intimidation.

Sometimes there will be judgment calls, but there isn’t a formula for this. I don’t think you could say: we always let everyone say everything they want whenever they want. There are times in which, given the historical situation and the particular context, you have to protect people from intimidation and harassment in order to keep the conversation going and to have the full participation of people who have been marginalised or excluded.

Does absolute free speech work?

How does the freedom to disagree intersect with debates on vital issues like vaccination or national security? The free speech absolutist says we just need more speech. But that’s like the market fundamentalist who says: ‘I don’t want any economic regulation. You can pollute the air or the soil, and we just won’t buy from the polluters.’

But we know that some pollution is irreversible, and we need some regulation of the market in order to protect the Earth and protect people so they can continue to engage in the market. Market regulation is not the end of the market. It’s just a way of protecting the market so that it continues to flourish.

Combatting organised disinformation

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Similarly, in the age of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other modes of rapid-fire dissemination, we need to think carefully about how to curate against organised disinformation, so that the organised disinformation doesn’t hide under the cloak of the freedom to disagree. Again, there will be hard cases but there will be easy cases in which it’s clear that people are using contemporary modes of dissemination to encourage violence or to put people at greater risk of harm.

We should not allow that form of intimidation or harassment to persist on platforms that depend on the good graces of the governments where the platforms operate. In other words, if a newspaper publishes disinformation in an organised way they can face consequences. We have to find ways to hold social media platforms responsible for some curation that protects the freedom to disagree, and also protects the public from organised disinformation which we’ve seen in recent years in the United States.

Discover more about

the freedom to disagree

Roth, M. S. (2019). Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. Yale University Press.

Roth, M. S. (2014). Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Yale University Press.

Nossel, S. (2020). Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Dey Street Books.

Critical feeling and the limits of critical thinking