The increased media focus on canceled conservative campus lectures is bringing out new defenses of those disinvitations from the academic Left. Though observers from across the ideological spectrum have joined conservatives in championing free speech, substantive arguments in favor of barring speakers from campus are less common.
Amid the controversy over Ann Coulter’s canceled UC-Berkeley lecture, Colby College professor Aaron Hanlon took to the New Republic this week to argue: “Disinviting right-wing provocateurs isn’t a suppression of free speech. It’s a value judgment in keeping with higher education’s mission.”
Rather than referring to canceled conservative lectures as acts of censorship on behalf of the liberal students who shut them down (sometimes by threatening violence), Hanlon prefers to call them “no-platforming,” arguing that it is important for students to make judgments about the quality of a perspective offered by given campus speakers and act accordingly. The marketplace, he believes, rewards controversy over substance, justifying attempts to keep out speech perceived as less valuable.
“Though the knowledge and skills we deem essential have changed over the years,” Hanlon says, “the practice of curating and prioritizing them is still crucial to the mission of a classically liberal education.”
Thus, his argument essentially asserts that keeping out certain speakers is part of the process of curating and prioritizing essential knowledge and skills.
On public campuses, of course, there are clear constitutional rights that do not allow schools to revoke people’s platforms in the name of that process. Hanlon declined to address that issue or argue why there is no constitutional right to speech on public campuses, though it is central to the dispute over Coulter’s Berkeley lecture, which he used repeatedly as a point of reference and included in the headline.
Furthermore, he compares the act of disinviting a speaker to selectively leaving authors or thinkers out of a syllabus due to “immediate practical limitations.”
“If I end up leaving off James Madison in favor of Edmund Burke, I’m hardly ‘censoring’ Madison,” Hanlon writes. “And if I deem it important to bring underrepresented voices into my course — like poet and former slave Phillis Wheatley — I’m judging Wheatley more appropriate for that platform.”
That’s good as far it goes, but its relevance to the debate over disinvited conservative lecturers is not clear. If Hanlon had included Madison on a syllabus and then been forbidden from teaching him by, say, a university authority, that would be different. And that’s more like what is happening on campuses.
Don’t forget students are also increasingly threatening physical violence upon the arrival of lecturers they disagree with, using force to block speech. It is hard to see that as “no-platforming.”
In fairness, Hanlon does argue that the process of selecting speakers is what causes those reactions, contending that because students get speakers approved without the campus community providing input, backlash over the public announcement is understandable.
As a former conservative student who often invited speakers to my campus, I can say with confidence that we never would have been able to invite anybody to speak if our liberal peers were given input at the outset of the process. Administrators, who almost always cave to outrage from progressives (who are almost always outraged about any speaker, no matter how reasonable), would have blocked our efforts. I also say that as someone who just spent the past two years assisting conservative college students around the country with this very process as well.
All that aside, Hanlon’s assertion that schools should assess the subjective educational value of speakers who come to campus inevitably grants the predominantly liberal academic bureaucracy veto power over conservative students seeking to bring new ideas to their peers. That is not just, nor will it result in a fair presentation of conservative thought on our campuses.
“No-platforming may look like censorship from certain angles, but from others it’s a consequence of a challenging, never-ending process occurring at virtually all levels of the university: deciding what educational material to present to our students and what to leave out,” Hanlon writes.
And that’s exactly the point.
Because higher education has failed for decades to conduct that very process with any semblance of balance, conservative students feel compelled now to invite speakers to campus so their peers have an opportunity to hear alternative viewpoints. Why should they surrender one of the few processes that allows them to provide balance to a process that has for years failed to do so?
Women’s studies professors, for instance, already do not teach the work of non-conforming feminists such as Christina Hoff Sommers or Camille Paglia, so students bring thinkers like them to their campuses. Hanlon is suggesting the very people who have for years “no-platformed” someone like Sommers in the classroom exercise their power to determine whether or not she gets the opportunity to share her views with students for an hour.
In the specific case of Coulter, I suspect Hanlon and many others believe her voice is of no value to students. But, regardless of her view or her style, Coulter is a popular 12-time New York Times bestselling author whose recent work seemingly influenced the president of the United States. Why shouldn’t students have the opportunity to hear from her? Isn’t that an educational benefit?
Again, this is the problem. Who can be trusted to make these judgments when most academics have consistently refused to provide balance? Most research shows college students, like their professors, are far more likely to identify as liberal than conservative as well. Who is capable of fairly assessing the worth of non-liberal speakers? Like certain sectors of the economy, the marketplace of ideas on campuses is so rigged, we can’t accurately evaluate whether controversy is outperforming substance. And if it is, there are no “practical limitations” that prevent professors and administrators from inviting “substantive” conservatives to campus either.
The arbiters of “valuable” knowledge spent the last half century developing a system of higher education that now demands the importation of conservative speakers to campuses. If people want conservative students to stop inviting speakers, they should spend more time repairing the system that necessitates those invitations, not boosting its control over the exchange of ideas.
The simplest answer is almost always to facilitate more speech, not less.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
