Against Campus 'Debate'

Later in the week, I’ll be at Villanova University for a talk on The Art of Governance from Adam Smith to Michel Foucault. I love the poster, so reproduce it with pride (and gratitude to the folks at Villanova):

Today’s digression is an attempt to begin to articulate a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate (but not only it).

Thesis [A]: lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards; occasionally necessary in politics, and sometimes (even if rarely) lauded by public opinion. By contrast, thesis [B]: lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom.

Since few of my readers are Kantians, I’ll take [A] as common ground. And before you are worried that I am setting a trap for you, even if you accept [A], you are not required to sign up for my Platonic skepticism — which holds that democratic political speech is usually in the realm of opinion, not truth — about political discourse.*

Since most of my readers are academics and contrarians, you may have doubts about [B]. You may, for example, think that lying and deception are permitted when used instrumentally to discover truth, say, in a social psychology or a behavioral economics experiment. Since the replication crisis, I won’t concede such examples because the nay-sayers (mostly my friends from experimental economics) turned out to be prescient: those used to lying to their subjects also got in the habit of less than forthright truth-telling to each other (and the wider public). And while I grant that lying to subjects probably didn’t cause the replication crisis, it was, in fact, manifestly part of a more general corrosion of academic norms.

Either way, ‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers; for it always involves disciplined and accountable speech. This is one of the great original lessons from Kuhn’s account of science. Science is disciplined by general norms of intellectual life (including the norm against deception and lying) and by ones particular to a given scientific field (involving ethics approval, citation practices, how to present graphics and data, authorship protocols, etc.)

As an aside, of course, these norms of disciplined academic speech are never quite stable. For example, at the moment, thanks to the widespread availability of cheap AI, we’re clearly in a period of norm transition. The AI apparatus fails to give proper credit to the sources in the training data, and it is also used by (some or many?) academics in ways that would have been censured not so long ago.

I don’t mean to deny that there is a form of liberty in academic freedom—the freedom to pick a topic of one’s own; the freedom to come to one’s own conclusions; the freedom to tell a Dean they are wrong about the curriculum for one’s field, and so on. Although in practice, the freedom is often less than it seems since there are hard constraints (of funding, of time, of academic consensus, etc.). Be that as it may, one can be expelled from the academic community for plagiarism, academic fraud and so on. One cannot be evicted from one’s political community for plagiarism and academic fraud or other forms of lying and deception.**

That politicians, lawyers, and journalists are not especially familiar with or prefer to ignore the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech is regrettable, but not surprising given their incentives and the many other obstacles to tracking important distinctions in complex societies. Somewhat oddly during the past decade (or so) universities are incredibly recalcitrant to inform outsiders and members of their own communities about the difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech. (In many places it should, thus, not surprise that the law barely recognizes a difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech.) Even most of the great recent declarations on institutional neutrality find it difficult to articulate a principled distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Instead, universities willingly participate in the fiction that they are important to facilitating and generating public debate. When the fiction is not simply taken for granted (or overshadowed by consumption of social media), it is embraced as true and defended as educative to the student-body (and the wider community). We are often reminded of this fiction when during a campus controversy a visiting speaker is (say) heckled and some group of students, we are told, prevents another group of students to ‘educate themselves.’ Even allowing that heckling or preventing visiting speakers from speaking is against the campus rules for such occasions and a lack of hospitality (and politeness, etc.), a necessary distinction between the nature of education and being (say) informed or entertained is also being effaced in such attitudes.

I don’t deny that there is an educative function to bringing speakers to campus; but in so far as there is education it is usually more in the planning and organizing of the event than in what was said or debated at the event itself.+ (Visiting speakers in a class or a department can be genuinely educative.) In fact, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò recently emphasized in a different context, a lot of what passes for campus ‘debate’ is very far removed from the minimal norms of rational inquiry and basic standards common to a true education. Even leaving aside culture war issues, usually the campus wide visiting speaker program reflects honoring academic achievement of the past not advancing knowledge or transferring skills or knowledge. Campus visitors and campus ‘debate’ are not a proper part of education; they are at best focal points for starting or acknowledging topics worth attending to. That may be useful in education and politics, but no more than that.

Let me close with a final thought. I suspect part of the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech is encouraged by how during the last half century the influential and expansive American free-speech doctrines associated with the first Amendment came to be very closely associated with a mythical, misreading of On Liberty. (I have railed against it so many times that I won’t repeat the evidence here.) This misreading of On Liberty claims that in a free marketplace of ideas truth will or might emerge over time. (Lurking in the misreading is also a kind of ascription of providentialism wholly foreign to Mill & Taylor.) The misreading ascribes to political speech a function more fruitfully and less controversially associated with academic freedom, and so effaces the boundaries between them.

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*Not all lying is permitted under freedom of speech, but the exceptions usually do not involve political speech or (as in political defamation) have to pass a very high bar.

**In some countries one’s political ambitions may be hurt; but these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

+This is not the whole of my position. As regular readers know I do think that some kinds of student protesting with ‘teach-ins’ can be a form of social experimentation and collective learning that may educate a campus or a wider society.