[For this year’s annual post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight some current (and in most cases longstanding) trends that really gripe my cookies. Add your non-favorites to a crowd-sourced weekend airing of grievances that’s always one of my favorite posts of the year, ironically enough!]
On how “free
speech” so often seems to mean the exact opposite.
One potential
response to both of my last two posts—on defunding as the real crisis facing
public higher education and legislative, rhetorical, and actual attacks on
teachers and librarians as the real threat facing our educators—would be to ask
whether limits on (or even arguments for limiting) free speech in schools aren’t
another crisis and threat in and to our educational institutions. I tried to
engage thoughtfully with those free speech debates in the opening paragraphs of
the Saturday Evening Post Considering
History column to which I linked in Monday’s post, and which I’ll share
here again for convenience. The too-long/didn’t read version is that I do
think at times activists on campuses and at schools (or in related groups) can
go too far in limiting voices and debates, and/or otherwise changing speech
(the revised
version of Huck Finn being a
striking case in point). But I’d say those cases are the exceptions rather than
the rules, and indeed can serve as canards to distract us from what’s really
going on much of the time.
What’s
really going on when it comes to free speech debates is to my mind concisely
illustrated by what happened at Twitter in late 2022. When Elon Musk bought the
social media giant (which as I’ve discussed
many times in this space was my very favorite online community), one of his
chief promises what that he would return
“free speech” to the platform. He did indeed immediately set about allowing
various folks who had been banned from Twitter for violations of the site’s policies
to return, from former President Trump to alt-right
and neo-Nazi voices. Yet at precisely the same time—and I do mean precisely
the same time; the two articles hyperlinked in these two sentences are far from
the same day, November 29—Musk used
suspensions and deactivations to silence the accounts and voices of
left-wing critics of not only those extremists, but also and especially of
himself and his actions. He then took that one giant step further by suspending
a wide range of journalists who had simply reported on Musk’s actions and
words (among other important topics). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more overt
example of the old (and apparently quite true) adage “free speech for me (and
in this case my friends and fellow travelers), but not for thee.”
Twitter
isn’t itself an educational space, although I think there are important
parallels. But I would say that the same adage applies to many of those who are
pushing for “free speech” when it comes to including voices and debates in such
educational spaces. After all, if they’re advocating for inviting, hearing,
debating a voice that blatantly and systematically argues for eliminating other
people and communities, they’re fighting for free speech for such voices at the
direct expense of the speech (and existence) of others. A great case in point
was the invitation of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes to speak
at Penn State in the Fall—McInnes and the Proud Boys advocate
for hate and violence that targets numerous American communities and seeks
to eliminate them from not just our public sphere but I would argue our society
entirely. Allowing McInnes the “free speech” to express those views and goals
at an educational institution would be inviting a direct threat to many other
members of that educational community, which can’t help but make their ability
to speak freely fraught and endangered at best. That version of “free speech”
is a serious non-favorite trend of mine.
Next
non-favorite trend tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this non-favorite? Other non-favorites of any kind you’d share?
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