It’s safe to say that no topic in universities provokes more debate than academic freedom, especially the attempt to define it in a universally acceptable way. The official Policy Statement on academic freedom from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) declares the following:
[D]isseminating knowledge and understanding…cannot be achieved without academic freedom. All academic staff members have the right to academic freedom.
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; 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.
The CAUT statement adds that “Academic freedom does not require neutrality on the part of the individual” and “Institutions have a positive obligation to defend the academic freedom rights of members….”
Much is packed into this statement, but I will focus on several points that are either shunned or given only short shrift by most commentators.
The first—perhaps foundational—consideration is the question of balance regarding what one speaks and what another hears. It’s a struggle to allow enough freedom for individuals to speak about controversial matters without inciting hatred and violence. But communication is not a one-way street: there needs to be a constant to-and-fro between speaker and listener. This requires a delicate balancing act that generates another difficult question: How much responsibility about the discussion rests on the speaker and how much on the listener?
Most discussions focus on the responsibility of the speaker when it comes to difficult or controversial subject matters—as if the problem only lies with the speaker—but the listener also has responsibilities. The speaker must be truthful, the listener tolerant.
Connected to these questions—and this is especially important for campus communities—is the more specific question of academic freedom. How far must one insist on that question? This is to ask: Can the academy even exist—properly exist—if we are constrained in our speech? If we cannot ask difficult questions, can we honestly hope to generate honest answers? Can we hope to discover the negotiated in-between space of bold but acceptable discourse if the twain that speak with one another fail to engage in a dialogue, that is, a back- and forth, with roles for speaker and listener? We must not overlook the responsibility of the listener.
In a dialogue between two divergent perspectives, the question becomes, how much restraint must we exercise when we attempt to communicate new ideas? Can new ideas even be contemplated if we are restrained from speaking about them? This question challenges us to differentiate between free speech and hate speech. My quick definition of hate speech is speech that incites violence or discrimination against people or groups. Free speech is the right, without interference, to express opinions that are not hate speech. Offending someone is not the same as hate speech.
Must listeners, especially those in the academy, be willing to hear ideas they’re not comfortable with? Is the right to offend in the production of knowledge—knowledge, not dignity—not central to learning? In other words, when one signs up for university, is one not signing up to have one’s views challenged? If students leave university after having only heard the same perspectives they had when they entered it, have they learned anything?
These are questions that we must struggle with daily if we are to challenge ourselves with new ideas and perhaps discover new solutions to our many concerns. The key, however, is to choose to listen to one another. We are not mandated to accept another’s ideas, nor are we mandated to listen to them, and nor are we mandated to challenge them. But if we are going to be authentic in our belief that we should express ideas that may offend others, then it is our duty to place ourselves in a position to be offended, too.
The problem we are wrestling with is that we seem to have been caught in a moral vacuum which we are afraid to fill with anything that may be perceived as value-laden and offensive to anyone else whose views do not align with ours. And yet our institutions seem to have concluded that everyone must align with whatever the current paradigm or metanarrative (or grand narrative) is. The law is that “Thou shalt not question the current paradigm.” Of course, we all know that paradigms change, and that a new paradigm always displaces the old one.
The new age we are in is a consequence of the postmodern age, famously defined by Jean-François Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (The Postmodern Condition xxiv). A metanarrative is totalizing in its effort to define meaning or give a comprehensive account of an experience, a historical event, or a cultural or social phenomenon. Lacking grand narratives means that we now have only “language games.” By this, Lyotard means that meaning is no longer containable, that only meanings exist. Language games, he argues, are “heteromorphous” and their rules “must be local” (PMC 66, original emphasis). This means that the formerly narrative function of the university—or of any institution today—has become “dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements [that are] denotative, prescriptive,” but locally determined (xxiv). The problem is that they remain tribal, belonging only to whichever group has posited its narrative.
To put it bluntly, we now equate truth with our own ideologies. This is why people claim my truth instead of the truth. This has become more problematic because the prevalent belief now is that one view must become the accepted view, and no other language game can be played by any other speaker. In a most ironic sense, we are back to demanding only one metanarrative to replace all others. Not even consensus is desirable because, as Lyotard proclaims, “consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value” (PMC 66).
More ironically, we accept “individual” truths even as we demand entrenched tribalism through which we seek to suppress the individual completely. Tribalism means that only the tribes themselves can determine the values acceptable to them. Problems arise when these values are confronted by different values, or when they are challenged by an institution or members of the tribe who individuate themselves from the tribe. One need not oppose a specific value, but only question it. These points of contention remind us that defining ourselves strictly through the tribe, or defining tolerance for ourselves in general, is an irrational exercise because we cannot know if we are correct in our assumptions when we do not allow our assumptions to be questioned.
But I would like to focus more on the individual. Allowing one to be subsumed by the tribe means that one’s tribe is privileged over the individual, and therefore one’s rights cannot be considered. Not speaking openly and rationally denies not only speakers’ rights to state what they wish to state, but also denies hearers’ rights to hear what is spoken. This denial has consequences beyond simply the suppression of the speaker’s moral right to speak. The denial does not only deny the listener’s right to hear a potentially uncomfortable statement which is important; the denial also denies the hearer’s community the potential of choosing another opinion or course of conduct.
Suppressing the right of the speaker to say uncomfortable things also denies the listener’s right to autonomy because the suppression assumes that the listener does not want to hear the speaker’s opinion. This suppression or unwillingness to engage in uncomfortable criticism, be it from the speaker or listener’s side, is like hiding in the proverbial mouse hole. Hiding from criticism, or opposed opinions, is a declaration of one’s unwillingness to estrange oneself from one’s own, comfortable perspectives. While we might at first state that to reject contemplating opposing opinions is our right—and it is—not willing to contemplate an opposing opinion actually makes a mockery of the whole educational and democratic edifice because the purpose of free academic speech, and of true education generally, is to estrange us from ourselves, or as Harold Bloom phrases it, “to make [us] feel strange at home,” what Freud called “the Uncanny.” Ironically, becoming estranged from one’s home is a healthy practice because it allows us to understand others’ worlds, and our own. In Hannah Arendt’s words, it is a process of taking “one’s imagination to go visiting,”1 which allows one to be an “other to [one]self,”2 and which allows one to look at the world from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Arendt insists that we must learn the art of “representative thinking,” which is not a thinking that “blindly adopt[s] the actual views of those who stand somewhere else....”3 It is a way “of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.” It is an attempt to “imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their [others’] place.” It is a form of “anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement.”4 This is tantamount to what Arendt calls “acting in concert,” which is a synonym for negotiating differences.
This process of visiting someone else’s perspective is, in Tom Darby’s words, a form of “hospitality, [which] is the germ of politics.” Hospitality, however, ironically opposes homecoming, which is a return inward to our own comfortable ideas, which “is the germ of utopia—a home that is nowhere.”5 And utopia, of course, is the eradication of politics, the attempt to eliminate pluralism, to make everyone the same as me in thought and action. The birth of this utopia would generate the final action of stamping sameness on everyone. With sameness, difference—the motivation for action—dies, and with the death of action, politics dies.
One’s unwillingness to hear an uncomfortable message brings about another, bigger problem: the attack not on the content of the message but on anyone who has the audacity to speak the message. It is also an attack on the audacity of anyone who has the courage to listen to this uncomfortable message. The suppression of speech often attacks the very legitimacy of the speaker making a claim that listeners who belong to a different tribe do not wish to have spoken by or to anyone. The suppression of speech becomes a stance about reinforcing an intolerant attitude, one that does not tolerate different attitudes, opting instead for a meta-attitude that only one universal attitude, which everyone must conform to, must exist.
Ironically, the postmodern dream of doing away with metanarratives has become a nightmare implemented by an all-engrossing metanarrative. This universal attitude is “Thou shalt be exactly the same as me.” Even more frightening is that this new universal attitude demands that thou shalt be exactly the same as my tribe, and thou shalt only belong to my tribe and none other. The great irony is that by insisting on sameness one destroys difference and therefore one insists on one overarching metanarrative. In sum, we argue for diversity while enforcing sameness.
The extent to which the suppression of speech has manifested itself on university campuses is itself quite menacing, where the fear of reading literature that may offend readers is considered a right of the students.6 This belies the very goal of education, which is not, as Searle writes, “to make the student feel good about himself or herself. On the contrary, if anything, a good education should lead to a permanent sense of dissatisfaction. Complacency is the very opposite of the intellectual life.”7 This complacency was perhaps best captured when many Western intellectuals and religious leaders gave only tepid support to Salman Rushdie following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s order to kill the author for having written The Satanic Verses. Christopher Hitchens summarizes the responses well: “In considered statements, the Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with—the ayatollah [sic].”8
Claiming possession of truth, especially with the unwillingness to acknowledge opposing beliefs, is a form of fundamentalism, which most wrongly believe is about religion, but it is not. Fundamentalism, first and foremost, is about ideology; it is about simplifying reality and believing in one flawless ideal; it is about suppressing the contemplation of any other perspective or belief and dumbing it down according to some template. It is, to use Tom Darby’s definition of ideology, a “fraudulent excuse for the use or abuse of power.”9 Fundamentalism, the belief that “I, and only I know the truth and therefore decide what is right,” is a form of “epistemological pacifism” that allows one to enjoy “the products of critical inquiry while righteously condemning any unpleasantness which they see in the products’ manufacture.”10
But this epistemological pacifism is not just about language and its abuse; more than anything, it is about the destruction of our ability to connect with one another, to travel the world of ideas. This disconnectedness suppresses the aporetic nature of conversation and dialogue, the very practice that allows us to seek new ideas and, possibly, the truth of whatever question we are asking. Without a listener to challenge our ideas, we simply posit not opinion but ideology.
I certainly do not want to suggest that one ought to go around accusing people of barbarism or racism, or anything else that is hateful, but I do argue that everyone must be allowed to speak rationally and freely, and that everyone who does so deserves a dignified response or counterargument. The belief that only one narrative exists, and no other narrative is allowed, is antithetical to an open and free society, and to education generally. But Mikhail Bakhtin speaks to this better than I can. As he put it,
“The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naïve self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. Socrates called himself a ‘pander’: he brought people together and made them collide in a quarrel, and as a result truth was born…. But Socrates never called himself the exclusive possessor of a ready-made truth.”11
In fact, as Socrates puts in the Theaetetus, engaging in dialogue makes “you…full of better things on account of the present review [discussion]. And if you’re empty, you’ll be less hard on your associates and tamer, believing in a moderate way that you don’t know what you don’t know” (210 c).12
Endnotes
1 Hannah Arendt. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1982, 43.
2 Lisa Disch. Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, 160.
3 Disch, 168.
4 Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books, 1968, 241, 220.
5 Tom Darby. “Odysseys Ancient and Modern: On Spiritual Crisis and Thought and Action.” Unpublished MS, 2015, 2.
6 See Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic. September 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/.
7 John R. Searle. “Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education?” Eds. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips. Our Country, Our Culture: The Politics of Political Correctness. Boston: Partisan Review Press, 1994, 243.
8 Christopher Hitchens. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Hachette, 2007, 2009. 30. See also Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
9 Preface to paperback edition of The Feast: Meditations on Politics and Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982; revised second edition, 1990.
10 Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors, 127.
11 Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Introd. Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 110.
12 Plato’s Theaetetus. Trans. Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.