Should Controversial Speakers Be Invited to Speak on University Campuses?

Should Controversial Speakers Be Invited to Speak on University Campuses?

My theme for this post is the topic of inviting controversial speakers to give talks on college campuses. I will begin with two types of case, whose commonality should be obvious to anyone who is even mildly aware of what is occurring on many campuses of American, Canadian, Australian, and other universities and colleges.

(1) A university invites a speaker with whose views a student group (or a specific student population) disagrees. Some of the students in question go to the event and drown the speaker with shouts in such a persistent way that the speaker is not able to deliver the lecture.

(2) Some faculty members in a university get wind of the fact that the university is thinking about inviting (or tentatively planning to invite) a famous person whose political views are opposed to those of the members of the university. (Although not all members of the university share the same political views, the majority of them does, and this is reflected in the university’s explicit and publicized values.) The faculty members in question urge the administration to not go ahead with its plans.

Let’s start with (1).

(1) I recently watched on YouTube an episode of a Canadian show whose host had four people debate the theme of shutting down speakers on campuses. One panelist, who is opposed to such silencing, said that freedom of speech ought to be respected. Another panelist—to my horror, a philosopher, and one who even used John Stuart Mill’s views in On Liberty to support her claim—replied that it was also the students’ right to free speech to go and shut down the talk. Now, obviously, such logic won’t take us very far, because it can be used to shut down any event whatsoever: my students (and I hope I’m not unwittingly giving them any ideas) can shut down my class by screaming over my words, and then justify their action as a form of free speech. Then what?

I don’t imagine for a second that Mill had in mind such potential chaos, even though he does not address in his book the specifics of regulating opposed, simultaneous speech, or cases in which a group shouts down a speaker. If I were to venture a guess, I bet that Mill would decidedly align himself with the speaker given his argument that even if the opinion and views that the speaker expresses are false or abhorrent, we gain by allowing them to be expressed—by contesting them, by arguing against them, or by testing our own views against them.

In any case, I will assume the truth of something similar to what the philosopher on the show said, namely, that students who silence speakers should be able to do so under some circumstances, even if it is not their right to do so. I will also assume that a moral principle of free speech is operative on universities, even if, legally speaking, private universities (as in the United States, e.g.) are not bound by the laws of the state (e.g., the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution). How should we tackle the above types of situations?

I propose that we imagine the university or college to be a community composed of various parts that are supposed to work, learn, and live together—parts such as academic departments, administrative academic offices (e.g., Office of Student Affairs) and positions (e.g., the Dean of Curriculum), student groups, research centers, and libraries. My use of “community” in this context implies no looser or stricter standards than those by which we usually understand what a community is: a group of people, with shared interests or goals, a shared history and (usually) physical space, and governed by an explicit or implicit set of regulations. I propose that when a part of the university invites a speaker, call him or her “X,” the other parts and individual members of the university have the (defeasible) obligation to respect the decision to invite X. This obligation stems from the fact that all the members and parts belong to the same community, and that they trust that every part of the university has the educational good of the community as its goal, even if every now and then a part makes, from the perspective of another part, a mistaken decision in inviting a particular speaker. So, for example, if the Department of Political Science invites speaker S, who advocates for a reunification of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the Indian (or Pakistani, or Bangladeshi) Student Group on campus, who believes that because of S’s views the decision to invite S was mistaken, would still have the obligation to respect the decision.

This obligation—which is moral-cum-educational—implies many things, one of which is that no member or part of the community will act in such a way as to derail the invitation (by, say, shouting the speaker down), and another of which is that the university is entitled to use campus security to remove any persons who are derailing the event. The obligation does not imply, obviously, that all the members or the other parts of the university must attend the lecture, and it certainly does not imply that those who do attend cannot ask the speaker critical questions, or object to X’s lecture at the venue (say, outside the hall) by, for example, distributing leaflets about X’s views.

I wrote that this obligation is defeasible, which means that it can be overridden in some cases. Which cases? Perhaps the speaker is not intellectual enough—is a rabble rouser, a political demagogue, not someone of a caliber to be invited to a university (though here the lines are fine indeed between who has, and who has not, enough intellectual caliber to be invited to a university). Perhaps the speaker has a case or two (or a history of) of alleged sexual harassment. Perhaps the speaker has a history of making racist remarks, of speaking in favor of ethnic cleansing of a particular group (though here we also have to be careful not to police political speech, for even racist speech contains ideas, albeit nasty or wrong ones).

At this point, we should distinguish between two avenues of stopping a lecture: formal channels and taking it into one’s own hands. I will explore the first in (2) below, but it basically involves that part of the university who objects to the speaker going through the proper channels of convincing the inviting party to not issue the invitation or to rescind it (if it was already issued). Such channels could include directly talking to the inviting party, going to the relevant dean, and so on. The second, taking matters into one’s own hands, would involve something like blocking the entrance to the venue of the lecture, shouting the speaker down, etc. And it seems to me that the only case in which this should happen is when the university has prevented a part of itself from inviting speakers whose views are opposed to other speakers it has been inviting.

To illustrate, imagine a university inviting a series of speakers all of whom are pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian (so they are not only pro-Israeli), and such that the university consistently prevents some departments or student groups from inviting pro-Palestinian speakers. Such groups would then be justified to shut down a pro-Israeli speaker from speaking. It is crucial that in this case the aim of shutting down the speaker is not to suffocate what S has to say, but to send the message to the community that as long as pro-Palestinian views are not heard, neither will pro-Israeli ones. It would be to shut down a speaker not by targeting their right to speak, but by targeting the university’s actions of prohibiting the opposite speech.

The above discussion indicates that there should be some university-wide process, regulations, or procedures about inviting speakers and challenging such invitations. Such regulations should not be difficult to create and maintain, and they can be created by the university itself, through a proper representation of its various parts. Moreover, the regulations need not be set up in such a way as to micro-manage every decision to invite a speaker. But they should contain a way to appeal decisions and to allow a part of the university to make a case for its own speakers. Thus, in the above example, the pro-Palestinian student groups should be able to use existing channels in the regulations that allow them to make their case to invite particular speakers.

This brings me to (2).

(2) The just-mentioned process can be devised in such a way so as to contain restrictions on what type of speaker would be invited. For instance, the university can decide that only speakers with a certain type of view (radical leftist, e.g.) will be invited to campus, on the ground that such views align with the university’s values. Or that certain topics will not be addressed by speakers—no speaker shall be asked to address sexual issues of any kind, because, say, the university is super Catholic or super Muslim. (Or that no speaker with a history of sexual assault or harassment would be invited. Note how the third type of restriction has nothing to do with the the speaker’s views or the topic, but with the speaker’s moral actions—the university might decide to not give a platform to people with problematic moral histories. I will not discuss this third type of restriction.) Such decisions are well within the rights of the university, especially since the university is a community and the various members of the community have come to agree to these restrictive decisions.

But there is a problem. The problem is that these restrictive decisions (the first two types) might very well rob the students and other members of the university from opportunities to have their points of view challenged and discussed, in a setting to which all members of the community are invited. Here, we are back to Mill’s reasons for why false views (or what members of a community consider to be false views) should be heard—to test one’s own truths, to keep these truths fresh in one’s mind, to remind oneself of the reasons why one holds these views, and most importantly for educational purposes, to allow each new generation of students to make up its own mind about these topics. And all this is best done by exposing students and other members of the community to opposite points of view, and by allowing these opposing points of view to come from the horses’ own mouths; that is, to be articulated and defended by the people who espouse them, not only by teachers who present both sides of an issue in a classroom setting. (As we all know, teachers often ridicule or do not present the strongest case for views with which they disagree, especially views of social and political import.)

Indeed, the points in the previous paragraph strongly support the idea that universities, especially small ones whose members tend to share and accept a common set of values and beliefs, might have a general moral-educational obligation to invite speakers whose views do not align with the university’s, so that their members can test their beliefs and values against opposed ones for the reasons stated above. So, for example, a strongly Christian school should every now and then invite speakers whose secular views would challenge and (perhaps) help strengthen the school’s Christian values. A strongly left-leaning college should every now and then invite speakers with conservative views for the same reasons. The students and other members of the community can hear these views, challenge them, hear questions and answers, and thereby benefit from the intellectual exchange.

This does not mean that any speaker should be invited. Just because, say, a famous celebrity has conservative views does not mean that she can articulate and defend them well. After all, the point of such invitations is intellectual exchange, not controversy for the sake of controversy. So the university (or whichever part is inviting a speaker) should ensure that the invited speakers can argue for their views and defend them. And although there is a fine line between who is able to argue and who is not (owing not only to the speaker’s abilities but also to our own views of what it means to argue well), this vagueness is no reason to sink the general idea of inviting speakers who are clear and articulate.

One might ask whether there are any topics at all that are off the table. Should a university invite a speaker who believes in the moral or intellectual inferiority of a group of people on the basis of their race or ethnicity? After all, it is impossible to find a single college whose values (explicitly, at least) do not agree on the equality of all human beings. My answer is that no topic is off the table, period, no matter how abhorrent the view is. But we must keep in mind that, first, this answer does not imply that people with such views should be invited, only that there is no reason to not invite them; and, second, that such speakers would have to be able to defend and articulate their views—not just any foaming-at-the mouth racist would fit the bill.

Today, many colleges and universities are witnessing an interesting phenomenon: more and more students, supported by some faculty, are becoming so sure about the truth of certain doctrines that they have become not only self-righteous and smug about them, but have taken it upon themselves to shut down views with which they disagree (often citing in defense a stretched-to-over-the-limit concept of “harm”). A university’s insistence that such actions are not only unacceptable but also go against the point of what it means to be in college is the right thing to do. I have proposed in this post a justification for such insistence.