{"id":14726,"date":"2015-01-09T08:52:59","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T13:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14726"},"modified":"2015-01-09T08:52:59","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T13:52:59","slug":"charlie-hebdo-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=14726","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Hebdo, American academia, and free speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Brooks begins today’s column<\/a>: “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let\u2019s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn\u2019t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.”<\/p>\n

It’s critical to distinguish between two questions: 1) How should I (or a small group) manage a forum of communication that is under my or our\u00a0control? and 2) What rights do people have to run their own fora?<\/p>\n

A forum might be a newspaper or a magazine, a course, a speaker series, a website, or the wall outside my office. If I (either alone or with colleagues) am\u00a0responsible for that forum, then\u00a0I must\u00a0decide how it should be run. It can be an\u00a0open forum in which anyone may\u00a0post anything. But that is a choice, not an obligation, and often it’s a bad one. I much prefer the edited and curated homepage of the New York Times to an unmoderated\u00a0chat. Assuming we choose to manage a\u00a0space, we must\u00a0make constant decisions about what and whom to include and exclude. It is appropriate to consider questions of relevance, quality, impact on various people, diversity, consistency, fairness, and more.<\/p>\n

A society, however, should not be a<\/em> forum with one set of rules and values. It should include\u00a0an enormous array of quasi-autonomous fora under many different managers, rules, and value-systems. Individuals and voluntary groups should have very extensive rights to create and run their own fora in their own ways.<\/p>\n

Thus there is no contradiction at all between saying (a) I would rather not post\u00a0an anti-Islamic cartoon on my\u00a0website or invite an anti-Islamic speaker to address my class, and (b) the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff was a fascistic assault on human rights and liberty.\u00a0These are actually closely related ideas, because both stem from the fundamental principle\u00a0that forums of communication must be plural and autonomous.<\/p>\n

Thus I am not concerned or embarrassed that American academic institutions may\u00a0be reluctant to invite inflammatory anti-Muslim speakers. That’s a\u00a0reasonable judgment by the\u00a0organizers of those\u00a0particular fora.<\/p>\n

One thing that does worry me is the gradual\u00a0evolution of each American\u00a0university from a plural array of\u00a0fora into a singular forum. In some ideal world, a\u00a0university would be\u00a0a space in which tenured faculty and students can exercise a high degree of free speech, creating their own mini-fora: diverse classes, speaker series, associations, and publications. To be sure, certain\u00a0aspects of the university–such as the annual\u00a0commencement address<\/a>–must be chosen by the institution and thus must be\u00a0governed\u00a0by uniform\u00a0criteria and processes. But\u00a0in a healthy university, those centralized fora do not crowd out all the diversity.<\/p>\n

I see increased centralization of\u00a0control over a university’s discourse and inquiry, due to: the influence of external donors, the severe shortage of tenured positions, the rising share of contingent faculty, IRB review<\/a>, multiplying\u00a0layers of administration (so\u00a0writes an\u00a0associate dean for research),\u00a0increasingly sophisticated PR efforts, and the growing role of metrics and assessments. Campus speech codes and other explicit regulations of speech may also play a role–and I am skeptical of these interventions–but I don’t think they represent\u00a0the main\u00a0threat to pluralism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Brooks begins today’s column: “The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let\u2019s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn\u2019t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-deliberation","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14726"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14740,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14726\/revisions\/14740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}