Free speech is very hard to get right, especially on campus — as has been evident all fall at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach a course on the history of free speech and censorship. If colleges and universities are best understood as microcosms of the larger world, then they should be governed by the First Amendment alone. This would mean restricting only speech that directly incites violence, threatens specific individuals or constitutes targeted harassment.
But if colleges and universities — public or private — are better understood as special spaces with missions distinct from the world at large, then they need some special rules of operation, tailored to the classroom, the student club and the college green.
One problem is that neither the left nor the right knows which model fits, making it difficult to determine any fair boundaries for campus speech. The politics around free speech have also shifted. And norms about what counts as dangerous speech, and what ought to be done about its articulation, have been changing faster than any of us can keep up with them.
No wonder students are confused when it comes to speech on campus right now. Frankly, so are faculties, administrators and, yes, donors and trustees. This may help explain why university presidents are finding themselves in a bind, unable to articulate fully consistent positions — and in the case of the University of Pennsylvania’s now-former President Elizabeth Magill, being sacrificed in the process. (Full disclosure: Ms. Magill is a friend.)
But the answer to all this confusion can’t simply be to update campus bylaws. Rather, we need to come up with better forms of speech education, keyed to the very purpose of the university, that give students the tools to work through the hard cases themselves.
The treacherousness of the current moment has been building for some time. For much of the 20th century, free speech was a rallying cry for the left, a way of sticking up for Communists, anarchists, pacifists and student activists. In recent years, though, this hasn’t been the dominant story line. In the United States, it has been the political right that has taken on the absolute free speech mantle, at least rhetorically, and it is the left that been in the forefront of efforts to protect minorities from the harms of certain kinds of speech, from hate speech to microaggressions.
Now, abruptly, the sides have reversed once again. Left-leaning voices, in support of Palestinian liberation, have embraced academic freedom, demanding universities protect unpopular speech and speakers. Meanwhile, conservatives have gone all in for book bans; prohibitions on teaching critical race theory, among other ostensibly radical ideas; and now crackdowns on a range of pro-Palestinian expressions.
Charges of antisemitism (some accurate, others a cover for efforts to stifle criticism of Israeli government policy or the war in Gaza) have helped make this new censorship palatable. The congressional hearings with the presidents of Penn, Harvard and M.I.T. were primarily political theater, an hourslong episode in our continuing culture wars. But already a backlash to this brand of conservative censorship has set in, led by organizations like FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Through all the flip-flopping on both the right and the left, the unsettled question of what the university is actually for has gone unaddressed.
But the sky really isn’t falling. Twice a week in my classroom, 40 or so students from different racial, ethnic, national, religious and political backgrounds have been trying hard to understand debates about the boundaries of acceptable speech in various places and times. They have been grappling with what those boundaries should be now, including for hate speech, sedition and more. Even as the topics have crept steadily closer to home, focusing on college presidents’ statements about Israel/Gaza and the language of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, these discussions have gone remarkably well. Students have waited their turn, listened to one another and, often, disagreed respectfully.
My students also report that they are treading lightly outside the classroom as they take on the issues of the moment in their own spaces. They say they are more worried about causing offense with their choices of words or being found ill informed than they are about scoring points. Rather than digging in with dogmatic positions, most of them seem as unsure as the rest of us about just where the lines are.
Mainly, I think my students can remind us of the purpose of higher education and, consequently, the kind of speech culture it demands. What they have learned in my free speech class, I hope, is not just the history of laws around speech but also two different but complementary ways of navigating speech, each of them tied to a different function of the modern university.
Students go to college largely to gain knowledge that will be useful in the here and now: the workplace, the democratic public sphere and private life. Importantly, that includes how to think about all sides of a given problem. It also includes how to get along with others across differences. But neither of these tasks is done without some informal rules. In my classroom, when we are conversing about the history of speech, we are also following a series of speech protocols that we’ve worked out in practice. No one, for example, can speak on top of anyone else, and no one can personalize the conversation in ways that draw attention to individuals rather than arguments. Free speech was never imagined, even by its earliest advocates, as a free-for-all. This is something that needs to be instilled.
College, though, is also the place where one learns to question and to develop thoughtful critiques of the world one is being prepared to enter. If we think of the university as a training ground for imagining a better world — whether from a left, right, center or altogether different perspective — then a very wide latitude for speech is essential as well. Any position that has political salience in today’s discourse should be sayable on campus, whether formally moderated in a classroom or screamed on the quad. No, that does not mean we have to give space to pure expressions of hatred for any group of people or, in the example of last week, tolerate hypothetical “calls for genocide.” But it does mean we have to allow for, even encourage, the airing of varied positions on all unsettled questions, including those that turn on the expression “from the river to the sea” or the term “intifada,” like it or not.
This mixture of rules and freedoms makes for a difficult standard. It gets harder all the time as student bodies become more diverse, outside politics become more polarized and the internet amplifies the sensational and turns the local into the global in an instant.
But universities have to make it their mission to train students to think about these principles and, even more, the rationales behind this combination of speech rules and freedoms. Then we have to let students and others who are living in this environment — not outsiders, whether from Washington or Wall Street — try to work it out in practice. It can be done.
Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Democracy and Truth: A Short History.” Her book “The Choice Is Yours” is forthcoming in 2024. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
