Noah D. Arney

Tag: free speech

  • Academic Freedom or Politics?

    Following on my post the other day I was reading Ben Britton’s post  and it got me thinking more about one specific part of the petition about the university being “political”, and that is the question of who gets academic freedom. Now at a lot of universities in Canada full academic freedom, such as that laid out by CAUT, is restricted to faculty. Here’s CAUT’s definition:

    Academic freedom includes the right, without restriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom to teach and discuss; freedom to carry out research and disseminate and publish the results thereof; freedom to produce and perform creative works; freedom to engage in service to the institution and the community; freedom to express one’s opinion about the institution, its administration, and the system in which one works; freedom to acquire, preserve, and provide access to documentary material in all formats; and freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies. Academic freedom always entails freedom from institutional censorship.

    But I’ve now been informed that UBC isn’t one of these, instead they grant academic freedom to all members of the community who engage at UBC:

    The members of the University enjoy certain rights and privileges essential to the fulfilment of its primary functions: instruction and the pursuit of knowledge. Central among these rights is the freedom, within the law, to pursue what seems to them as fruitful avenues of inquiry, to teach and to learn unhindered by external or non-academic constraints, and to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion.

    This freedom extends not only to the regular members of the University, but to all who are invited to participate in its forum. Suppression of this freedom, whether by institutions of the state, the officers of the University, or the actions of private individuals, would prevent the University from carrying out its primary functions.

    All members of the University must recognize this fundamental principle and must share responsibility for supporting, safeguarding and preserving this central freedom. Behaviour that obstructs free and full discussion, not only of ideas that are safe and accepted, but of those which may be unpopular or even abhorrent, vitally threatens the integrity of the University’s forum. Such behaviour cannot be tolerated.

    Back to my post on What is Political, one of the demands in the petition is that people who could be seen to speak for the university must not be political.

    My main conclusions there were:

    1. That isn’t what the act means by ‘political’;
    2. The entire argument rests on asserting that someone means something different than their stated (and the standard dictionary) definition.

    But another conclusion I had that I didn’t explore fully was “asking a judge to restrict the free expression of a group of faculty is a bad look from a faculty member.”

    Who gets academic freedom?

    In order to explore this argument properly I will consider this as if the university is supposed to not be political, and their definition of political is valid, but also that academic freedom is presupposed.

    The petition asks that a judge restrict the ability for other members of the university from being able to, as the UBC academic freedom policy says, “engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion” because doing so may limit the same right being exercised by the petitioners.

    In fact, if the petition were to succeed and the University would need to prohibit people from being able to share something that was political, that would be the “suppression of this freedom… by… the officers of the University”.

    Now as I identified, most of their concern was around university administrators exercising their academic freedom. I’m aware that UBC is in the process of revising their academic freedom policy, and so perhaps that may change in the future, but right now the policy seems to grant academic freedom to administrators at UBC.

    The petition also requested that groups, including groups made up of predominantly or entirely of faculty, not be able to be political. This would mean that an individual faculty member can be political, but as soon as there is a group of them in a university approved grouping they are no longer allowed to be political.

    I summarize these two things as (a) despite policy, administrators shouldn’t have academic freedom, and (b) academic freedom applies only to individuals and not to groups of individuals.

    The reasons given for this is that an administrator or group of faculty exercising their academic freedom to do or say something limits the academic freedom of an individual who chooses not to.

    How does this work? Here I want us to consider the difference between hard power and soft power. Hard power is a person being told that they must not say x, soft power is people choosing not to associate with a person because that person says x. In the first we have “the suppression of this freedom” quite clearly. But what about the second? I think we need to consider both the academic freedom of an individual, and that if they did not have academic freedom they still have freedom of expression (more limited as it is).

    If an administrator makes a statement which is fully within their academic freedom and their freedom of expression, and by making that statement it makes someone else feel that they cannot express their own statement what we have is a belief by the second person that academic freedom will not protect them. That is a very different statement than was first proposed though. If academic freedom does protect them, then what is the concern? Is it the concern of ostracization such as John Stuart Mill discusses? Is not academic freedom the intended defence within academia? Why then call for the removal of academic freedom from those who you disagree with? The petition does not claim that they have been silenced, rather it seeks to silence others. I feel I must disagree here with the petitioners. For academics especially, “the best response to “bad” speech is more speech, not censorship“. Claiming instead that someone’s speech limits yours because they are an administrator implies that you lack academic freedom.

    The second part is that a group of faculty members, who the petitioners would not claim individually lacked academic freedom, stating something together should not have the protection of academic freedom. I am aware that UBC’s academic freedom policy doesn’t explicitly list it, but it implies that CAUT’s line “freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies” applies when it says “to engage in full and unrestricted consideration of any opinion”. If you cannot make statements as part of a representative academic body, do you have true academic freedom to participate in it?

    Conclusion

    If the petitioners succeeded in their request then instead of upholding academic freedom, it would result in the violation of the academic freedom of a large number of faculty and administration at UBC. At most other institutions those administrators wouldn’t have academic freedom, but the faculty members most assuredly do. To be fair to the petitioners, the affidavits to be filed still may include specific incidents of their being forced to not speak, but as it stands, claiming that your words “are not welcome at UBC” is very different from being prevented from saying them. However, their request of the judge is to stop others from being able to speak specific words.

    I want to finish off with a quote from the BC Civil Liberties Association “Freedom cannot exist alongside oppression.”

  • When the opposing protest is the speech

    It was interesting to read this article in Inside Higher Ed today:

    Shouting Down Speakers Who Offend
    Over the course of a month, students on several college campuses shut down speakers they disagreed with. Why is it so hard to forge a consensus on what protecting free speech really means?

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/04/13/shouting-down-speakers-who-offend

    The article portrays using crowds and shouting down speakers vs providing a platform for a speaker some consider controversial portrayed as a left-right division of free speech. The specific example is the SUNY Albany students protesting Ian Haworth at a Turning Points USA student event. To me this all seems more in line with the American understanding of free speech that loud group free speech is an appropriate response to something that is harmful (side note, I’ve seen similar confusion a lot from US academics as they conflate academic freedom and free speech in odd ways, I don’t know if that’s the case here).

    We see this when groups try to shout down a right wing speaker, we see this when groups try to protest an abortion clinic, we see it when groups try to shut down drag story time at a library. In all cases those protesting see the thing they are protesting as being harmful and therefore the protest is a legitimate display of free speech. In two of the cases it’s a matter of free speech vs free speech. In all cases those on the other side of the political spectrum see it as too likely that the protesters will resort to violence (as has recently happened in some of the library protests) and therefore consider it illegitimate protest. But that’s not what this article is critiquing. It seems to be saying that controversial (non-illegal) hate speech at an event is an exercise of free speech, but shouting down the speaker is not. And that seems strange because of how the US views protest on public property.

    In the US most state universities would be considered public property, so the bar for stopping these protests is very high (similar to trying to stop them in libraries, though because they are protesting events targeted to children instead of to adults there may be nuance I’m missing), which means that shouting down a speaker as long as you don’t bar them from accessing the venue (they didn’t in the main case used here) and you don’t stop them from speaking (they could speak but it would be hard to be heard over the crowd) would be legal. Of course when the event was moved to a private area of campus that disallowed the protestors the laws would have changed.

    That leaves us with a question, because if we put two events up against each other we have left and right both protesting in public buildings to stop events they feel includes harmful speech. My basic understanding of US law is that the government isn’t supposed to shut down a speaker just because the hecklers *might* get violent in response, neither are they supposed to stop non-violent protestors in public spaces. However, at this point nearly everyone (though maybe not in a legal sense) has agreed that if the actions of the protestors include violence then that is a threat that prohibits the speech.

    Context is important

    This event didn’t happen in a vacuum. Although TPUSA is a big national organization it took about ten seconds to find that their last big event on campus brought in just under 30 students and no protestors, it was held in a closed room that wasn’t open to a public space. This second event then was in a larger room fitting over 100 people and directly connected to a public space, meaning two things: 1) they expected over three times the number of people from their prior event 2) they held this event specifically in a space that would be considered public property. Finally when they did move to a closed private space for the event, none of the media coverage or even their own comments, mention not fitting their attendees in, and all of the photos of the event show that the space was nearly entirely filled with protestors.

    The other thing to know is that the first event gathered no press at all, I didn’t even see something in the local paper. The second event had a week of national media coverage over it.

    Which implies to me that there was intent here. The meta speech of the event by the hosts *was* the protest. That is what publicized and amplified their speech, it’s what made people listen to them, see them, and pay attention to them. Thus there are three speech items at play, not two.

    • Group A held event (speech)
    • Group B peacefully protested event in a way that made the speech impossible to hear at the time (counter-speech)
    • Group A was able to have broader and louder speech because of the protest (counter-counter-speech)

    So if group A got what they wanted and intended out of the event then is this actually a crisis of free speech, or is it exactly how the US system of free speech operates? No one was directly violent, and the closest thing to violence reported is that someone destroyed a bible. Which brings me back to the beginning. How should universities respond to this?

    If the protest was prevented from happening not only would the speech of the protestors have been stopped by government actors, but the speech of the hosts would not have been as public as they wanted.

    I think I’ll end off here by bringing up the idea of violence. Violent acts change the equation, but legally violent implications without immediate action isn’t supposed to. However, in the US it is difficult because it is so easy for things to change from implication to action because of their lax firearms laws. At what point of the violent spectrum should we step in?

    • Violent potential (where this protest was)
    • Violent implication
    • Violent possibility
    • Violent threat (where most of the anti-drag protests are)
    • Violent past actions
    • Violent preparation
    • Violent action

    I think that’s a much more important discussion for us to have, and one that completely sidesteps any discussion of academic freedom but instead focuses on when we should shut competing speech down.

    Post event story changes

    In the immediate reporting by one of the hosts it’s clear that the event moved and proceeded. In the post event reporting it was said (by the same person) that the event had to be canceled. In addition, no one claimed the bible, which makes me unclear whether it was a protestor bringing it to destroy it, or a protestor taking it from an attendee and destroying it. Since grabbing a bible out of someone’s hand would clearly be something that would be reported in the media since it fits a certain narrative of the event I’m suspicious. Mostly it lends credence to the idea that the counter-counter-speech wasn’t only a benefit for Group A, but was in fact the point of the event.