'Monolithic' thinking and the threat to free speech

From Afternoons, 3:09 pm on 3 October 2017

There is an escalating battle taking place on university campuses across the United States over free speech and academic freedom.

Student protestors in Oregon shut down a humanities class, because the content was considered too European.

Some universities have created safe zones, where students are shielded from upsetting views.

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Photo: Sharkhats/Flickr

Earlier this year violent protests forced the cancellation of conservative speakers at the University of California at Berkeley - ironically where the free speech movement was born in 1964.

Professor Jack Citrin was a student at Berkeley in the 60s and was very much part of that free speech movement. He's a professor of the graduate school there now and says academic free speech is in jeopardy.

He says back in the 60s it was mainly voices from the left pushing for free speech against an authoritarian faculty - now he says regulation of free speech comes from the left.

"Groups on the left, including faculty on the left, are advocates of various kinds of regulation of free speech so that's a big change and frankly a disappointment to me given my past."

He says although the free speech movement of the middle 60s was controversial it's support for it came from a variety of political perspectives.

"In my view those were the glory days of Berkley, we had luminary after luminary in every department but nonetheless there was diversity in the points of view."

Professor Citrin is less worried about campuses restricting controversial speakers than he is intellectual conformity.

"It's not so much whether or not some controversial speaker can come and make extreme statements, I think there's tremendous overreaction to what the consequences of those speeches would be.

"What's more troubling is a kind of conformity and monolithic point of view among faculty has less diversity of opinion."

He believes a kind of "spiral of silence" is happening on campus that he would never have imagined in the 1960s.

"Their [faculty] opinions are more diverse in reality than they're willing to express … that is distressing and some of them admit to being intimidated by students.

"Students pick up on this and learn 'if I express my own opinion how will it go down when it comes to me being evaluated?' In any situation it takes a certain amount of courage to speak out against the dominant opinion - in the academic world our job should be to encourage that."

Left wing views were under attack at Berkley in the late 1950s and 1960s, he says.

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Photo: UC Berkeley

"Right wing opinions were dominant and if you were expressing very left wing views you were under attack. In fact Berkley before I came here in the early fifties had a loyalty oath if you didn't sign a loyalty oath you could lose your job."

That was in McCarthy era America and he says he knew academics who refused to sign and lost their jobs.

"Now I think the dominant point of view is on the left and it's very much bound up with identity politics certain groups are demanding safe spaces. What's ironic is these are highly privileged young people. You are a privileged person if you are going to Berkley or Stanford or Harvard and yet there is this kind of 'thin-skinnedness.'"

A safe space he says could be a place where a certain kind of student can go "and have their own kind of world and keep others out" or a demand that the university itself should be a safe space

"And that really amounts to the notion that the kinds of ideas one might feel hateful but nonetheless are constitutionally protected just cannot be spoken."

He says the John Stuart Mill notion that good ideas will outdo bad still holds true for him philosophically today. And by shielding ourselves from ideas we dislike, we lose the opportunity to refute them.

"I find courage is something that is in very short supply among university administrators and university faculty, they seem to not have the gumption to do what I think most of them believe is right."

And he says he never saw this coming.

"I did not think this would happen on campus. I had hoped that the norms of academic freedom and the values that should guide us as scholars - an openness to all points of view and a willingness to hear even if one disagrees - would prevail."