Battlegrounds of knowledge

In 1964, students at Berkeley brought the university to a standstill as thousands of students staged sit-ins and faced off against police. Their demands? Freedom of speech on campus. At a time when communists were being hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, students were banned from many forms of political speech and organisation, and faculty were required to take “loyalty oaths” affirming their allegiance to the state. Student activist Mario Savio made a now famous speech, declaring that students “don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!” 

Over half a century later, in 2017, students in Berkeley again took action, but this time, in the name of constricting political activity on campus. Violent protests involving masked activists saw speeches by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos cancelled. Not only conservatives, but British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins was cancelled for his allegedly “islamophobic” views. And loyalty oaths were back, in the form of “diversity statements” that had to be made by prospective staff members. What had happened?

Anyone trying to answer this question could have done worse than attend the Committee for Academic Freedom Conference, where Dawkins, along with a bevy of cancelled academics and free speech advocates congregated last week.

The conference is itself a show of strength. Those who face persecution from students or colleagues can now appeal to a range of advocacy groups, who are lobbying governments and institutions and representing victims in court. Particularly notable are the Free Speech Union in the UK, represented on the first panel of the day by its founder Lord Toby Young, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), represented by former ACLU president and FIRE senior fellow Nadine Strossen. We have come a long way from a time when even the existence of cancel culture was widely denied in the press, and the political and media consensus has swung away from the extremes of progressive dogmatism. 

But, as panelists made clear, universities have not moved on — if anything, they have pulled up the drawbridge. Strossen described self-censorship as “pervasive”, citing a FIRE survey which revealed that a majority of American students feel unable to discuss controversial topics, with the proportion rising to nearly the entirety of the student body in many of the most politicised institutions. Shockingly, 1 in 5 students said that they felt too afraid to even discuss free speech itself.

Ulrike Guérot, the German political scientist who was toppled from the heights of the European academy for daring to question the consensus on Covid and Ukraine, suggested that matters were no better in the German academy five years on. “Debanking” is a widespread phenomenon for dissident political and media organisations, and even the academic free speech organisations are themselves politicised.

In Britain, progress made under the previous Conservative government was stymied by the incoming Labour Party. Lord Young described how the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act due to come into force in 2024, was delayed and gutted by the incoming Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. 

The state of scientific research under this regime, as a panel including Richard Dawkins explored, is dire. Chemist Anna Krylov, based in Berkeley, described how considerable portions of scientific funding is channeled into politicised research about diversity, gender and bias. According to Krylov, in a number of domains such as climate change, Covid and gender, politically incorrect data is simply suppressed or excluded. Many areas are simply not researched at all, or only by ideologues, because they are too controversial, and researchers fear harassment or cancellation. 

How to fend off this dark future? The answer is by again rooting liberty in a robust conception of the good

There was a feeling of immense frustration, both amongst speakers and the audience, that although they had won the political debate on many of these questions, academia itself was continuing as if the backlash had never occurred — and even intensifying their progressive, politicised approach. Debates that are being held and resolved in the public sphere have not even begun within the ivory towers.

This imbalance between public feeling and the academy is becoming increasingly dangerous. The populist Right, long excluded by universities, increasingly sees them as a chief target for state control, defunding or outright destruction. Many panelists noted that right-wing cancel culture is now on the rise, especially in America.

Trump has defunded universities which push “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), and has come down hard on institutions where the most controversial pro-Palestine protests have taken place. The Charlie Kirk killing unleashed a wave of cancellations as those who criticised or expressed insensitive remarks about the slain pundit were subject to attempts to inform their employers and publish their personal information.

In Britain, as Arif Ahmed, Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students, laid out in his keynote speech, the new regulations introduced under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act offer an off-ramp to the censorious norms of the modern academy. The Office for Students that Ahmed heads is a welcome watchdog, but like bars on the window of a ground floor window, it is indicative of an intractable social problem.

In 1964, students and younger staff were willing to go to prison in the cause of free speech. Now supporters of free speech won’t speak out for fear of offending their peers. In fact, all the zeal is on the other side, with the most activist staff and students backing censorship. We are hoping law and regulation will compel universities to do something that they desperately do not want to do.

For all the talk of a neutral right to free speech, regardless of creed, it is very clear what views current free speech advocates want to be able to express — on transgenderism, Covid, race, sex or sexuality. Having been excluded from the academy, conservatism is now the movement that has taken on the championing of academic freedom and free speech. Is this conversion to free speech sincere, or cynical?

The answer is complex. It is natural that groups and individuals advocate for their interests, and such self-interest does not void the validity of their claims. The irrationality and cruelty of progressive cancel culture is undeniable. But is the crime merely against liberal neutrality, or does it inhere in the moral dubiousness of the ideas themselves. Transgender ideology, for example, as the panel on the sciences explored, involves denying biological reality and distorting the scientific process. Is this a perspective that should be given equal weight and dignity to those that are more objectively grounded?

The problem is that the language of free speech on campus was covertly politicised from the outset. Those students in 1964 were not advocates of dispassionate viewpoint neutrality. They agitated for “equal rights” and “free speech” because these were socially compelling arguments borrowed from the Civil Rights movement. Yet the aim of securing these liberties was not to platform conservatives (who were well established in the academy) but to give scope to more radically progressive politics, and in fact to have the scope to further politicise curricula and classrooms. These same activist tactics were employed to denounce professors as reactionary, and dictate the terms of what was taught. In Germany, even Adorno was denounced as a reactionary by students interrupting his lectures wielding megaphones.

Far from the enlightenment ideals of genteel free enquiry, the intentions of groups like the Students for a Democratic Society were straightforwardly revolutionary: “We’re giving notice today, all of us, that we reject the notion that we should be patient and work for gradual change. That’s the old way. We don’t need the Old Left. We don’t need their ideology or the working class, those mythical masses who are supposed to rise up and break their chains. The working class in this country is moving to the right. Students are going to be the revolutionary force in this country. Students are going to make the revolution because we have the will.”

Continuing to employ civil rights as a mechanism for imposing ideological change, it was precisely through human rights and civil liberties legislation and language that the entire mechanism of EDI/DEI was imposed on universities. Once progressive ideas went from marginal to mainstream, the emphasis shifted from free speech to censorship. This is a pattern that has continually repeated itself in revolutionary movements. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks were all for free speech until the day they seized power.

As the political Right scratches at the closed door of cultural institutions, gently mewing about free speech, should we view them with equal scepticism? Does anyone really believe in free speech?

We keep returning to these problems because the West has hollowed out the significance of political liberties in the name of a false and duplicitous neutrality. Free speech cannot be defended in sheerly negative terms, but must be oriented towards some concrete good.

One reason that the activism of the 60s led to such dark outcomes was not only the radicalism of the ideas, but the degree to which they were readily subverted and channelled into a very different sort of revolutionary project. Whilst Savio raged against the idea of universities authorities as “managers of a firm”, the activism of the 60s was folded into a new managerial liberal establishment. Civil rights, progressive politics and liberation movements proved helpful handmaidens in the destruction of academia as a free and independent profession, with the reduction of scholars to staff, and students to consumers.

The language of “harm” and the dangers of “safetyism”, rightly attacked by panelists, go back not to the 1990s, but the 19th century, and the writing of free speech advocates like John Stuart Mill: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” But the paradox of this libertarian stance is that what is set out as a limiting principle will, inevitably, transition towards an authorising principle.

Whereas in classical political theory political authority exists for the good of the citizen, in liberal social contract theory it exists to limit harm, either from the state or between free individuals. Classical liberty is authorised by the good that flows from a freedom, whereas modern liberty is restricted to that which is harmless, regardless of what goods it embodies.

The implication of this for academic freedom quickly becomes clear as we regard our current context. The cancelled academic intuitively defends their speech in terms of classical liberty: what I said was true, or at least defensible, and added to public debate and the search for the true, good or beautiful. But they are cancelled in the terms of Mill: what you said harmed another, even if what you said was true or grounded in fact. The definition of harm, and who is said to experience it most acutely (or at all) becomes an intensely high stakes ideological topic, one that sets the term for social, economic and political advancement.

The present situation, as so clearly sketched out in the CAF conference, is one in which the dominant victimhood narrative of the academy is being substantively challenged in the political sphere, yet in the process, a rival victimhood of the right is already a well-advanced narrative. Dissident thinkers and spheres of debate that have nurtured and championed free speech are at risk of capture. At the same time, the academy itself is in a siege mentality, setting up a context for speech to become only ideological violence by other means. The search for truth will be forgotten in this context, and an Orwellian paradigm will assert itself.

How to fend off this dark future? The answer is by again rooting liberty in a robust conception of the good, rather than a theory of social contract and self-serving calculation. Once we understand a question like academic freedom in relation to the good means, habits and ends that this freedom embodies and serves, we start developing a more robust and durable model. If academic freedom is at its most basic about the search for truth and the education of good citizens, then any number of “harms” can be dismissed, or defined relative to the central purpose of research and education. Likewise, following classical conceptions of freedom, academics must again become a self-governing “guild” of scholars, rather than managerial organisations whose only concerns are proceduralism, ideological conformity and institutional self-perpetuation.

The good news is that so many of those pushed out of the academy and rejected by mainstream liberal culture, including so many of those attending the conference, are going back to the classics and re-engaging with religious faith. The classical education movement is well advanced in America and starting to gain traction in Britain. There has never been a better time or a more fruitful or necessary context for renewing and rediscovering ancient and medieval ideas of liberty. A more classically oriented free speech movement would be about building institutions and living out freedom as a positive, truth-seeking culture, rather than as a creed of relativism and harm-reduction.