"FREE SPEECH BUT"

An identarian group at McMaster said “But freedom of speech doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, meant that we can or should be able to say whatever we like in public spaces regardless of the impact of our speech on others.”   Deborah MacLatchy, the president of Wilfrid Laurier University, is marginally more favourable free speech.  She phrased it this way “Academic freedom and freedom of expression are very central to the university.  We recognize that there will be challenging and uncomfortable conversations, but it's not okay for them to be threatening -- and that's the overall balance that we look for in every class and in every tutorial.”  So anything subjectively threatening, which in effect means something that another person does not like hearing, is no o’kay.

Retired professor Harriet Lyons in article in the Toronto Star says that the rule for free speech at universities is that “if one has a position on a social or intellectual issue, one should have the freedom, at a university, to advance it, in class or published research, using appropriate expertise and respectful language”

In Harriet Lyon’s opinion would the following statements sufficiently use appropriate expertise and respectful language such as to constitute allowable free speech”?  Which of these statements are not okay because they are “threatening”?

 “I believe that the cost of administration at this university is too great.  There are far too many people taking home a large paycheck but not providing any real value to the University. There is an urgent need for a major cull of administrative positions - perhaps up to 50% of the people employed in administration at this university are not necessary.”

 “I am strongly opposed to business administration being taught at this university.  Business administration is not a genuine academic pursuit.  It has no proper intellectual basis.  It teaches people how to manipulate other people for their own self aggrandizement.  In other words it teaches greed.  The kind of people that you find in Business Administration departments can properly be described as deplorables.  They should be removed from the campus.”

“People from wealthy backgrounds should be excluded from enrolment at this university, or if they are allowed to enrol, they should pay substantially higher tuition fees. In other words all applicants should have to provide a personal net worth statement and a net worth statement for their parents and based on such net worth statements a personalized tuition should be set which can be up to 1000% of the regular tuition.  The University plays an important part in perpetuating the class system.  It must be overhauled in a revolutionary way and if that means firing three quarters of the professors and not allowing it to be the playpen of coddled rich kids, so be it.”

     

“I believe that the people of England are profoundly disgusting.  Up until long after the Second World War they promulgated a culture and an economy which was based on the unlimited exploitation and often the hideous enslavement of various people in Asia and Africa.  I do not let believe that the English should be let off the hook for their past colonialism any more than we allowed the Germans to be let off the hook for their support of Hitler and Naziism.”

I suspect that none of these statements would be allowable speech if they were reviewed by an “unbiased” adjudicator scrupulously applying the Harriet Lyons test.

The Harriet Lyons opinion (and Deborah MacLatchy’s) is the classical “free speech but” approach so ably examined by Greg Lukianoff in Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.  “Free speech but” is free speech censorship expressed in a nicer way.

As George Orwell said some seventy years ago “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

Or to quote Chomsky from Manufacturing Consent “Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.  Or from the Common Good  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Keep free speech within respectful confines, keep it within limits, keep it within a spectrum of acceptability - that precisely summarizes the free speech perspective of Harriet Lyons and Deborah MacLatchy.  It is in other words the classical recipe that has always been used by tyrants to repress free speech.