This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Before reading You Can’t Teach That! I would have agreed with its author that the free speech of academics and students needs to be protected against the whims of pugnacious politicians and censorious legislators. Keith Whittington brings his prestigious legacy in legal scholarship to bear upon the ongoing academic freedom crisis in American universities. He defends the social value of the often “self-indulgent” academic in his “being able to tell people what they need to know and not necessarily what they want to hear”. 

The sentiment of “Don’t shoot the messenger” is one with which I tend to agree — more often than not because if there is a gun being levelled, it is being levelled at me. Yet, by the end of the book, I was left wondering if we should not be shooting the messenger a little more often.

Whilst the contemporary fight for academic freedom in Britain is founded on securing “freedom to” dissent from a tapestry of prescribed views, Whittington reveals that in the USA academic freedom is and has been about securing “freedom from” censorship laws that infringe upon their First Amendments rights.

Whittington details the complex legislative history by which “professors in the early twentieth century came to win some independence over what and how they taught in the United States”, with legal clarification shaping the relationship between the academics, students, the State and the tax-paying public. 

Persecuted academics and students in the United States have greater legal recourse to challenge restrictions imposed upon their freedom of expression, but Whittington argues the endless “exceptions” of the First Amendment have constrained pedagogical “play”. Play — high-spirited debate — is an integral part of academic life, but the game is being stifled by the players’ license to pull out the rule books every five minutes.

To the extent that I remain engaged in the culture war in universities in the UK, I am privy to the concern of senior academics who often envy Americans their (apparent) clear-cut First Amendment rights. They view the US as privileged in this regard, and, having been guided by Whittington through that amendment, I can safely say, “Colleagues, friends, be careful what you wish for.”

British academics exasperated by the lack of protection offered by Britain’s ambiguous freedom of speech laws — intersecting as they do with “hate speech” laws — do not recognise the smokescreen this ambiguity affords them to play around the edges of what is “permissible” and be subversive whilst remaining within the confines of the law. 

However, Whittington makes the case that the state-university relationship has been capitalised upon by politicians who endeavour — often at the demand of the general public — to advance their political agenda. He posits that “laws like the Stop Woke Act pose an almost unprecedented assault on American higher education”, adding that the only worse time for academic freedom was the censorship imposed upon teachers during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Cold War. 

Whittington is correct when he declares that “state universities could only accomplish their purpose if they were not restricted to repeating popular orthodoxies … insulated from the expectation of being a mere mouthpiece of incumbent politicians”. Yet whilst these academic institutions pronounce themselves to be free agents, concerned only with the pursuit of the true and the good, in practice they find themselves “government employees” motivated to secure taxpayer dividends from the state and beholden, as a consequence, unto public opinion.

Whittington reports the plummeting respect Americans have for universities: in 2015 nearly 65 per cent of respondents to a Gallup poll had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in US higher education. By 2023, those who have “little confidence” outnumbered those who have “a great deal of confidence”. 

Whittington attributes this in no small part to the explosion in consciousness around “woke” university campuses — something upon which right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump have built a platform, pledging to stamp “woke” out. The relationship between universities and the public has been commodified and ordinary citizens feel a greater claim than ever before to what goes on in public institutions. 

In times gone by, universities existed on the peripheries of society. Whilst their alumni played an integral role in running a country, the only evidence of their existence in daily life were the doctors in hospitals and the books on library shelves. If wider society thought about these elite institutions at all, it was with an implicit trust in their merit and momentum. 

They were perceived to provide some public good; and, so long as that continued, the public was content to leave academics to their own devices. This endowed academics with the privacy to discuss “difficult and controversial ideas” as “truth-seeking institutions”.

But what if these institutions stop producing public good and are perceived as contributing to public bad?

My temptation to shoot the messenger does not originate, as Whittington suggests, from a dislike of their message, although that certainly helps. My contempt for academics is directed against those who make a mockery of the profession. 

“Academics” delight at the disruption, valuing it for its own sake

Whilst I agree with Whittington that the worst extremes of the “culture war” have made a rule of the exception, politely asking those exceptions to calm down has only led to claims that “truth” is a racist, heteronormative social construct concocted for the supremacy of colonialist, straight, white penis-havers. At what point does one say, “I’m not going to dignify that response with an answer”?

If Whittington’s argument has a fatal flaw, it is this: he mistakes each of his fellow academics as being as honest and curious as he is. Most academics find themselves in universities because the free spirit of enquiry called to them across the murky waters. They believe in the honest pursuit of truth, even if, as Whittington acknowledges, this is easier said than done.

We need not trouble ourselves in questioning the integrity of these academics, for they make no discovery without a degree of sadness. They have disproven an esteemed colleague and disinherited the world of their legacy. Upon learning something new, I find myself a little grief-stricken that the world is not as I had known it to be. 

But I do not see this grief in those who claim chromosomes do not determine sex and who discount the contributions of geniuses on account of their skin colour. These “academics” delight at the disruption, valuing it for its own sake. For my part, I can no longer defend their recklessness. 

In the fashion of the lawyer, Whittington delivers a dazzling defence of his client’s argument that the transcendent ambition of the university should not be subject to the transient whims of State censors — but he forgets to offer a defence for his client’s soul.