By Carolyn Rouse
In 2017, I gave Princeton University’s Constitution Day Lecture. The title of my talk was F**k Free Speech: An Anthropologist’s Take on Campus Speech Debates. Animating my lecture were concerns about the push, by conservative and liberal academics, for “absolutist free speech.” At the time, I had been watching a reembrace of sociobiologists like Charles Murray who, over decades, opined about the cultural and biological deficiencies of poor people, particularly black folks. In The Bell Curve (1994) he, along with his co-author Richard Herrnstein, rehashed soundly debunked genetic arguments for economic inequality.
Twenty years after The Bell Curve, in the name of absolutist free speech, scholars and universities were welcoming speakers promoting racism, sexism, and Nazism. From my vantage it looked like a slow train wreck. I knew that most well-meaning supporters of free speech couldn’t see what the hard right was doing. What I saw was the creation of a permission structure to call black people the “N” word again, women the “B” word, and to reclaim white, male superiority as the natural outcome of Darwinian evolution. My caution that speech was more complicated than simply words spoken out loud was no match for people representing their defense of offensive speech as heroic.
Freedom of speech is a set of laws protecting people from imprisonment, but not liability for speech.
My problem with the speech being defended was not that it was offensive, it was that it was bad science, bad social science, or just factually wrong. Why should professors be forced to waste class time on nonsense?
Do not get me wrong, debate in class is critical. In my classes I ask students to defend positions they find detestable and interview people with whom they passionately disagree. These exercises are meant to teach students not to measure other people’s values by their own, an approach known as cultural relativism. And sometimes they learn that the other side might have a point.
The mistake I wanted universities to avoid was the conflation of freedom of speech with absolutist free speech. Freedom of speech is a set of laws protecting people from imprisonment, but not liability for speech. Freedom of speech comes with rules, for example, comedians can say things that news organizations cannot. When news organizations misrepresented information, viewers misconstrue lies as fact. This is why news organizations promoting the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election were successfully sued. For freedom of speech to work in a democracy, law must be attuned to the destructive power of speech given the context.
Academic freedom is different from freedom of speech or absolutist free speech. Academic freedom offers tenured faculty protections against punishment for stating arguments that challenge the status quo. Faculty are afforded this right only after academic peers have judged them to be experts in their field. This is akin to law students passing the bar or medical students passing their boards, where the right to represent oneself as an expert is granted by accrediting bodies.
Over half a century ago, legal anthropologist Sally Falk Moore described institutions as semi-autonomous social fields that operate under explicit rules of evidence, procedures, and methods for censure. And like law or medicine, institutions of higher education should be afforded the authority to manage speech based on disciplinary best practices.
In contrast, demands by free speech absolutists for no rules decoupled speech from ethics and evidence making language essentially meaningless. In its place we now have authoritarian speech which is not open to interpretation, debate or requests for clarification because facts do not matter. The demand is simply for listeners to mirror nonsensical speech as a test of fealty to the leader – Ukraine started the war with Russia, DEI caused a plane crash, there are only two sexes.
Language is an essential tool in a secular democracy supported by semi-autonomous institutions. Because institutions contribute different forms of expertise, their rules of evidence differ and therefore how they manage speech differs. Linguistic competence enables institutions to more effectively build on prior knowledge and protect the public from charlatans.
The institutional management of speech must not be equated with the suppression of free speech.
Around the time of my lecture in 2017, free speech became a red herring. Speech is always context bound, and therefore speech can never be free. Rather than protect speech rights, absolutists laid the groundwork for the current ban on words including “climate change,” “social justice,” and “culture” in public universities. I wish I were making this up, but the AAA had to write a letter to a chancellor to get a waiver for anthropology professors to use the word “culture.”
This is why I stand by my lecture which was meant as a warning. Many famous hard right conservatives went after me including Milo Yiannopoulos, the former editor of Breitbart News. For a few days, I was even the lead story on the American news aggregator Digg. I had embargoed the video of my talk, so none of these critics knew what I said. And none got that the title of my talk was oxymoronic (F**k Free Speech).
The institutional management of speech must not be equated with the suppression of free speech. I do not want my students to be punished, but I want to be able to let them know that relitigating the value of Nazism, slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese Internment, eugenics, or McCarthyism is not appropriate in a class on, for example, development. Those were all failed policies, so let’s move on.
What liberals did not understand in 2017 is that the destruction of rules around speech precedes the destruction of institutions. Now that higher education is on the precipice, reasserting institutional independence is the only way forward. This impending battle must involve conversations about what counts as appropriate speech in context.
Free speech is an unattainable ideal that we should strive to get close to but cannot touch; in this sense it is asymptotic. Because language changes and is context dependent, debate and contestation are inevitable and should be embraced. But the debate should be among experts who understand the vitality and value of higher education and its role in American innovation; scientific, cultural, and intellectual.
Carolyn Rouse is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality.