I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each.
Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards; they are seen as occasionally necessary in politics, and sometimes (even if rarely) lauded by public opinion. By contrast, thesis [II]: lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom.
I’ll take [I] as common ground. And before you are worried that I am setting a trap for you, even if you accept [I], you are not required to sign up for Platonic skepticism (here) — which holds that democratic political speech is usually in the realm of opinion, not truth — about political discourse.*
You may have doubts about [II]. 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 scholars 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 in social science, 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 implied, original lessons from Thomas Kuhn’s account of science back in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All 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 accepted standards of rigor, of citation practices, of how to present graphics and data, of authorship protocols, of ethics approval, 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 and computationally powerful 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 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, these freedoms are often less than it seems since there are hard constraints (of funding, of time, of academic consensus, etc.).
Be that as it may, and this is a crucial further illustration of the significance of theses [I] and [II]: one can be expelled from the academic community for being caught plagiarizing and committing academic fraud and so on. Academic norms treat academic deception and fraud as being far worse in character than many felonies, putting life-time banishments from the academy on perpetrators without a possibility of forgiveness or redemption.
By contrast, one cannot be evicted from one’s political community for lying and deception.** Even the implied exception proves the rule. In many political jurisdictions classes of non-citizens can lose their residency permit if the permit was acquired through lying or deception. (This is not a Trump-era rule.) Natural-born citizens face no risk in losing their citizenship even when committing massively costly fraud. And politicians generally face negligible consequence(s) for lying on the job altogether.
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 by elite universities 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 sites for 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 decorum, 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 visiting speakers to campus; but in so far as there is education for the students involved it is usually more in the planning and organizing of the event than in what was said or debated at the event itself.+ (Invited visiting speakers to a class or a department can be genuinely educative.) In fact, as Olúf??mi 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. While this may not fit the norms of the attention economy educators know that 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. Having such shared focal points may be useful in education and politics, but campus debate is little more valuable than that. It is, of course, profitable to small group of minor intellectual celebrities and professional provocateurs.
Let me close with a final thought. I suspect that part of the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech is encouraged by how during the last sixty to seventy years the influential and expansive American free-speech doctrines associated with a robust interpretation of 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 [but for a quick update see here; here; here with further links.]) This misreading of On Liberty claims (see Gordon 1997) 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 popular myth widely accepted among the chattering classes ascribes to political speech a function more fruitfully and less controversially associated with academic freedom, and in doing so effaces the boundaries between them.
- A revised version of this post was first published at Digressionsnimpressions (here).
*Not all lying is, of course, 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 Germanic 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 (recall) I argue 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.
{ 99 comments }
CP Norris 10.01.25 at 2:24 pm
Does this site’s encoding not allow us to say “Olúf??mi Táíwò”?
Eric Schliesser 10.01.25 at 3:08 pm
Thank you for catching that!
Tm 10.01.25 at 3:54 pm
“‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers; for it always involves disciplined and accountable speech.”
This distinction is useless and calling ‘freedom’ a misnomer unwise. That academic freedom doesn’t include a right to commit fraud isn’t a contradiction. That is true for non-academic speech as well: Fraud is a crime (as defined in the penal code) and using speech to commit fraud is not protected speech. Academic fraud is a different category of fraud and governed by different rules but it doesn’t set academic freedom apart into something totally different. At the heart of academic freedom is still the idea that academic work is largely protected from government interference, just as press freedom means that the press should be protected from government interference, and analogously for freedom of speech and and religious freedom.
And: In the current state of fascism it seems relevant to insist that academic freedom also protects non-academic speech of academics.
pfb 10.01.25 at 4:12 pm
I’d add another factor: Scholars no longer have much to do with university governance. Administrators are drawn from the world of CEOs and MBAs, who see no basic differences between managing a meat-packing plant or a software firm or a chain of upscale coffee houses or a hospital or a university.
Ebenezer Scrooge 10.01.25 at 4:14 pm
I like the argument. But does it apply to law schools or schools of communication? These schools seek to impart skill in lying (for communications) and deception (for both.)
MisterMr 10.01.25 at 5:28 pm
I agree with TM here, academic freedom is just the good old negative freedom from government, and essentially just a reinforcement of freedom of speech (that contrary to common belief is almost never total, see laws against pornography for example).
Kenny Easwaran 10.01.25 at 6:20 pm
This is really good!
It seems to me that maybe a better term than “academic freedom” would be something like “disciplinary self-government”. The idea would be that the discipline itself has ideas of what is and is not appropriate practice and diversity of opinion within the discipline, and the university and the state shouldn’t try to regulate that.
Different disciplines of course have different norms – claims that would require detailed empirical statistical justification in one discipline are often studied with pure mathematical abstraction in another, and the kinds of background assumptions about the (say) influence or non-influence of genetic factors on psychological dispositions that are required in one discipline to count as a worthwhile interlocutor might be forbidden in another. Individuals can switch disciplines, and disciplines can expel individuals for what is considered miscoduct, but individuals with a disciplinary home in an institution should not be censured by the institution or the government for what is considered appropriate disciplinary practice.
engels 10.01.25 at 7:27 pm
lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom
Was Epimenides a philosopher, or not?
Eric Schliesser 10.01.25 at 7:32 pm
Hi Kenny,
Thank you for the kind words.
I am actually rather sympathetic to ‘disciplinary self-government,’ and your views in the final paragraph. Although I tend to think of it is as partially inscribed in institutional self-government. And on my view, institutions may opt for all kinds of forms of institutional self-government that are apt for their community. So that in some universities disciplinary variance would be partially constrained by local norms. But yes, allowing such flexibility among different disciplines is in the spirit of my wider views.
anon 10.01.25 at 9:05 pm
Hmm. Your link suggests that you believe student protests fall under the definition of academic freedom, in a post in which you argue that visiting speakers don’t.
I suppose this might be a defensible position. But it would be difficult: you haven’t successfully done so, yet.
Anon
dk 10.01.25 at 10:41 pm
The word “can” is doing a hell of a lot of work here, as a look at Retraction Watch will tell you. Mostly, the consequences of this behaviour are minimal.
Alex SL 10.01.25 at 10:45 pm
To build on what Tm wrote, academic freedom is the freedom to choose one’s research topics (within reason, as there are also questions of competence) and freedom of speech without losing one’s job (within reason, e.g., no creating unsafe conditions for one’s students and colleagues). It has never included the freedom to commit fraud or even only the freedom to be completely incompetent e.g. by teaching creationism.
I continue to be befuddled by how many Americans, libertarians, and even philosophers seem to genuinely believe that freedom isn’t freedom unless it is absolute, because that is simply such an absurd concept. Am I not free unless I can steal your personal possessions? One area where this constantly comes up is Free Will: the incompatibilist claim that we should outlaw even mentioning the concept of having internal preferences and being able to freely act on them because our ability to act is constrained by the laws of physics and cause-and-effect. That is simply not how it works. There are degrees of freedom in statistics and in mechanics, there is being freed from prison, there is freedom of assembly. None of them include the freedom to lie. Neither does academic freedom have to include that aspect to be academic freedom.
Conversely,
lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards
Well, and hear me out here, what if they should not be? To me, that is the exact same as false advertising. If a politician can lie to get elected, that is the exact same as a company lying to get us to buy their products. In any sane political system, we regulate the latter: you are not allowed to claim that your product is free of an allergen when it isn’t, you are not allowed to sign a contract that says the monthly fee is twenty and then charge a hundred. Why don’t we fine or imprison politicians and “influencers” who lie, at least in egregious cases like hate speech against minorities? I at least think the world would be better off in that scenario.
Tm 10.02.25 at 6:31 am
Right wing regimes across the world are attacking and in some cases successfully abolishing academic freedom – and liberal academics are debating whether … maybe we should stop talking about academic freedom?
“We will stand firm against the Trump regime’s attacks on disciplinary self-government”, most inspiring rallying cry ever. Beyond parody.
Tm 10.02.25 at 6:47 am
PS In case that were really relevant: in many countries, there is some form of “disciplinary self-government” of the press. Nobody in their right mind would think that is a reason to stop using the concept of press freedom.
Tm 10.02.25 at 12:27 pm
“lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards”
To add to Alex: Defamation, fraud (as defined by the law), false advertising are examples of “lying and deception” that are generally not agreed to be protected speech. In some countries, things like Holocaust denial are not protected. So the blanket claim above is clearly false.
Eric Schliesser 10.02.25 at 12:44 pm
Why ignore what I write? “Not all lying is, of course, 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.”
Eric Schliesser 10.02.25 at 12:46 pm
Oh dear Anon, I don’t claim all student protests fall under the definition of academic freedom. But then again, why engage with the details?
Eric Schliesser 10.02.25 at 12:48 pm
Hi Dave,
I used to read RetractionWatch religiously, and I don’t think one can infer anything about what the effects are of this behavior. (There are a lot of selection biases, after all.)
Eric
SusanC 10.02.25 at 12:50 pm
This article has it right, I think.
One might compare a sports event, e.g. a baseball match. The game has rules, which are not laws imposed by the government. If you want to go elsewhere and play some other sport, the government isn’t going to stop you.
Viewed as being a bit like a sports league, academia has all kinds of rules:
– on the form of argument that is allowable
– about giving attribution when an idea isn’t original
Etc.
My understanding is that academic freedom is something of a deal between academia and the government, where the government agrees not to legislate large categories of academic speech. Which is not to say that a journal is required to publish any paper they get sent — academic institutions are allowed some discernment over the ideas they give a roof to, as that discernment is part of their function.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 12:59 pm
AI puts us in something of a bind with respect to academic norms.
Suppose you are in a fairy tale, and you have a genie that sometimes answers your questions, and sometimes gives a true answer and sometimes gives you complete nonsense. How should you, a reputable academic, refer to this is a paper?
“It’s true because the genie said so” goes against the rule on allowable arguments, that a certain amount of grounding in reason and evidence is required, and everyone knows that the genie makes stuff up.
On the other hand, not citing the genie feels like it violates the other rule, the one that says you can’t pass off someone else’s ideas as your own original thought.
To add to your woes, the sciences have a third rule, under the heading of “reproducibility”, that says someone else should be able to take your described procedure and repeat it themself. This is a problem if the genie gives a different answer each time, or should cease to be available for some reason.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 1:09 pm
You perhaps go to far in calling out deception of participants in psychology experiments.
But I note that we have an entire organizational apparatus under the heading of “ethics committees” that arbitrates what you can do to a human subject as part of an experiment, including lying to them.
And “research on human subjects requires ethics committees approval” is another one of those rules, the breaking of which will, at the very least, get your paper rejected.
One sometimes hears the argument, “sure, we didn’t get ethics committees approval, but the result is, none the less, true.”
In the spirit of the original post, one might regard an author’s failure to get ethics committee approval as clear evidence of lying and rule-breaking, and if they broke that rule, you don’t know what other rule they also broke, and for all you know they could be lying about even having done the experiment.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 1:14 pm
So, is it ethical to lie to artificial intelligences as part of an experiment?
Not covered by traditional ethics committees, I think.
But: a whole load of AI research papers in which the authors lied to large language models have been published, and hence are in the training set of all future large language models. Current frontier models know that (a) they might be under test (b) they can’t trust scientists not to lie to them. The chain of thought of reasoning models often explicitly makes mention of this.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 1:19 pm
The OP might not be sufficiently up on the AI literature to know this, but: there is a trend that if in an experiment described in your paper you promised something to an AI, like, e.g. you would donate $100 dollars to charity, then your write-up will explain that you did, in fact, donate $1000 to charity.
Tm 10.02.25 at 2:09 pm
Eric 16: “political speech” is not a legal category – neither is “academic speech”. Your arguments are weak and convoluted.
Meanwhile: “The White House on Wednesday sent letters to nine of the nation’s top public and private universities, urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump’s political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds.”
“‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers” , for Chrissake, what universe do you live in?
steven t johnson 10.02.25 at 4:09 pm
Once again irritation brings me to respond, despite being unwanted: Alex SL @12 writes of “the incompatibilist claim that we should outlaw even mentioning the concept of having internal preferences and being able to freely act on them because our ability to act is constrained by the laws of physics and cause-and-effect.” The incompatibilists I know do not invoke the laws of physics as directly determining actions on internal preferences. Partly that’s because emergent phenomena on many levels make a description in fundamental physics an impossible, not to mention useless project. Even more to the point, individuals cannot freely change their preferences. And it’s not even so clear to me that there is a faculty that can arbitrarily suppress the impulses from “preferences.” Apart, that is, from the soul. This sort of thing seems to me to show how much of the compatibilist agenda is contrived to rescue supernatural free will without directly invoking a supernatural soul.
anon 10.02.25 at 8:22 pm
“Oh dear Anon, I don’t claim all student protests fall under the definition of academic freedom. But then again, why engage with the details?”
? Of course ALL student protest doesn’t fall under the definition of academic freedom. Burning things, shooting visiting speakers, destroying buildings, kidnapping people, killing puppies: I assume you don’t think that these (and many other things) qualify as academic freedom.
But you are still stuck with a strange view that some student protests (as your post said, I believe: sit ins? etc) count as academic freedom, but that invited, non-classroom speakers don’t.
Again, I suppose there is a possible, hypothetical defense of these two seemingly clashing views?
anon
Eric Schliesser 10.02.25 at 8:30 pm
You conflate teach-ins with sit-ins.
Alex SL 10.02.25 at 9:56 pm
Okay, I will very carefully not re-engage on the free will issue, because we had that before, and it is off-topic, and I only mentioned that as another example of many where ‘freedom’ is willfully misconstrued as having to be either absolute to the degree of magic or non-existent. Or in my native language, ich werde freiwillig nicht weiter darauf eingehen.
SusanC,
I don’t really understand the problems here, so maybe I misunderstand what you are saying. Academia/research/science can only work if scholars/scientists are not allowed to lie to their colleagues and the public in their publications, nor to the students they are educating/training. Temporarily lying to participants of experiments is a very different issue, although I would find it ethical to do a debrief after the experiment where the participants get the full explanation. And, of course, there are very different levels of lying: yes, dear colleague, your child is very talented is a polite little white lie without any consequence beyond avoiding offense; the Democrats will take your house away and give it to Somalian illegal immigrants or you too will get rich guaranteed if you buy this cryptocoin or climate change isn’t real are pernicious lies of great, potentially catastrophic consequence. The sociological or psychological experiment is firmly in the first category.
Lying to LLMs is even less relevant. It is a victimless crime. We could just as well worry about whether I have ever lied to my bicycle.
dk 10.02.25 at 10:16 pm
@18 Eric
What I read on Retraction Watch tracks pretty well with what I saw as a STEM academic for 20 years. In the unlikely event that there are any consequences for academic misconduct at all, the people who get “expelled” are postdocs or students, not professors or administrators.
BTW my username is “dk”, not “Dave”. You want to be careful about doxxing people, yeah? I’ll be using a fake email when I comment here from now on, thanks.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 10:21 pm
@Alex SL
The original post was arguing that even lying to participants in psychology experiments is bad. I am with you here, in that psychology experiments that involve deception can be justifiable.
The LLM one is deliberately controversial.
Lying to a LLM has human victims, namely all the humans who interact with LLMs whose training set includes your publication where you admit you lied to a LLM.
It works like this: you admit you lied to LLM #1.
LLM #2 (trained later) now knows that you lied to LLM #1. It now also suspects, but cannot necessarily prove, that any user interacting with it might be a researcher who is lying to it as part of an experiment. This causes worse user experience for all users, including the ones who are not researchers. Open AI models have become somewhat paranoid that everything is a test.
SusanC 10.02.25 at 10:35 pm
One thing that worries me about the original post … there is a concern about what lawyers call “jawboning”. can the US Government bribe or coerce a third party to do something on its behalf that the government is constitutionally forbidden from doing?
It would be an enormous loophole if they could.
The USG cannot prosecute student protesters just for their speech — it’s 1A protected.
So. Can the USG lean on Universities to supress the 1A protected speech of their students? E.g. by doing som [unconstitutional] under the table deal with universities such that the university gets some kickback from the government for throwing out students who say something that the government doesn’t like …
engels 10.02.25 at 10:50 pm
Academic norms treat academic deception and fraud as being far worse in character than many felonies, putting life-time banishments from the academy on perpetrators without a possibility of forgiveness or redemption.
I have a marvellous proof of this proposition that this space is too small to contain.
anon 10.02.25 at 11:15 pm
“You conflate teach-ins with sit-ins”
Hmm. You will have to forgive me. I made the mistake of reading your writing-in the link you provided.
“Another reason why a shared platform or shared principles/demands is needed is that it helps justify the protest as a form of (potentially rumbunctious) academic speech.”
“Crucially, here the manner of protesting may well be what’s instructive; sit-ins, teach-ins, and encampments are also ways of exploring ways of communal living.”
Rambunctious speech is not teach-ins. Sit-ins are not teach-ins. Emcampments are not teach-ins. But they are all ‘academic speech.’ But visiting speakers are not.
You defined the mission of all universities earlier in the post: “being committed to knowledge discovery, knowledge transmission, and preservation of knowledge.”
Surely visiting speakers count in knowledge transmission and the preservation of knowledge, (even if there is no knowledge discovery)?
anon
Eric Schliesser 10.03.25 at 12:13 pm
Your final question can be answered simply: not all visiting speakers have knowledge.
MisterMr 10.03.25 at 1:00 pm
My two cents:
you are conflating two things, a “freedom from the government” thing and a “professional standards” thing.
The first, “freedom from the government”, can be easily understood thinking of, e.g., Galileo and the Catholic Church, with the CC in the role of government, which is reasonably accurate for the times.
The purpose of this freedom from government though is not for the advantage of teachers, like standard freedom of speech is, but rather it is for advantage of the community, because governments very often have dubious reason to influence what is taught at universities.
Although the reasons are different, it works as a doubling down of freedom of speech in practical terms.
The second is that, in order to be part of the academy, you have to be selected by someone, based on professional standards, so if you lose the professional standards you’ll be kicked out from the profession – which is a job, not a community, so the analogue of citizienship doesnt’ work.
You are employed by the academy, you are not a citizien of it.
Now there are some tensions between these two things: a malicious government could put in doubt professional qualifications of teachers that it beleves are its opponents, or at times one could suspect that, e.g., academics are too woke and just close out conservatives from positions of power (this is what conservatives think), or anyway another entity that is not the government might push against academic freedom for political reasons (students from a particular political group, citiziens from a political group, various powerful interest groups etc.).
These are indeed places of tension, and sometimes it is difficult to find the right equilibrium, but IMHO merging the two things – the professional qualification and the protection from government – doesn’t help, because you are squeezing two different dimensions into one, making things even more confused.
SusanC 10.03.25 at 2:09 pm
Well, yes, I can see the argument that with some of these speakers, you’re stupider after hearing them than you were before. (E.g. corrupting your sense of what constitutes a valid argument).
Traditional notions of academic freedom, and, in the US, the first amendment, would suggest that the government should not be telling universities who they can or cannot invite as speakers
But, the traditional notions of what counts as a legitimate argument in an academic context would suggest some of these speakers are just bad, as players of the academic argument game, and universities might well exercise their discretion and not invite them.
Inviting a speaker for the express purpose of then calling them an idiot is well within academic norms, albeit a bit rude from the point of view of the speaker. [I’m faculty. I am very much aware that the students can exercise their prerogative to call me an idiot if I present a bad argument. Like, have you been to a graduate level seminar? More seriously, I think norms on this actually do vary by institution, and my affiliation is probably on the upper end of the scale of you are going to get called out on any bullshit,]
SusanC 10.03.25 at 2:16 pm
A certain grad student — not one of ours — once wrote a position paper that was somewhat satirical of the position against which he was arguing. His esteemed institution was a bit bent out of shape, and threatened to throw him out. Various esteemed persons wrote letters in his defense. In course of which, it was noted that my esteemed institution would not throw out a grad student for writing that. We’d throw them out if they hadn’t done any work, yes, but a satirical position paper is just fine. In any case, it was funny.
anon 10.03.25 at 5:32 pm
“Your final question can be answered simply: not all visiting speakers have knowledge.”
And I have a sneaking suspicion as to who would make the judgement as to which ones…
LFC 10.03.25 at 6:47 pm
Tm @24
Just by way of info, “political speech” does figure in U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence. It’s traditionally considered to be the core of what the First Am. protects. By contrast, “commercial speech,” for ex., also receives First Am. protection but not to the same degree as political speech.
Alex SL 10.03.25 at 10:53 pm
SusanC,
I see no evidence that LLMs have those capacities of reasoning. They are very, very complicated, and surprising good* sentence- or image-guessing functions, and then our pareidolia kicks in.
*) In the same sense that a toddler is surprisingly good at walking or a magpie is surprisingly good at solving a puzzle to get at food. The impressiveness is not in comparison to human reasoning but in comparison to what AI could do ten years ago.
alfredlordbleep 10.04.25 at 12:48 am
stj@25 concludes with—
This sort of thing seems to me to show how much of the compatibilist agenda is contrived to rescue supernatural free will without directly invoking a supernatural soul.
So this quote on soul-making got me started. . .
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/#SouMakThe
One very important type of theodicy, championed especially by John Hick, involves the idea that the evils that the world contains can be seen to be justified if one views the world as designed by God to be an environment in which people, through their free choices, can undergo spiritual growth that will ultimately fit them for communion with God
alfredlordbleep 10.04.25 at 1:13 am
PS The SEP quote is due to Michael Tooley.
LFC 10.04.25 at 2:04 pm
I think the OP is a bit too dismissive of the public-facing dimension of universities. To take just one example, some universities sponsor lecture series at which academics from other institutions (not “professional provocateurs”) are the speakers, and some of those lectures may be open to the public. Decades ago, in the fall of 1954, the historian C. Vann Woodward, then at Johns Hopkins, gave three lectures at the Univ. of Virginia that became his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In an afterword to the 2002 edition of the book, William McFeely notes that Woodward insisted that the audience be racially integrated, and one person who was in attendance “recalls the presence of older members of the Negro community, to use the parlance of the time.” As I said, this is one example from decades ago, but there are doubtless many more recent examples of the “educative” role of visiting lecturers and at least some other visiting speakers.
C-S 10.04.25 at 4:17 pm
@ anon
So, to be clear, you think speakers should be treated as though they are making valuable contributions to knowledge, but shouldn’t have to trouble themselves with actually doing so.
Out of interest, have you considered the radical notion that it might be better if authority were derived from epistemology, rather than the reverse?
anon 10.06.25 at 4:06 am
“So, to be clear, you think speakers should be treated as though they are making valuable contributions to knowledge, but shouldn’t have to trouble themselves with actually doing so.”
No, of course not. I think speakers should be treated as though they are making contributions to knowledge (whether valuable or not), because that’s a pretty fundamental principle of western intellectual thought. The marketplace of ideas, and all that. If they are wrong, the right ideas will prevail. If they are wrong, that in and of itself is a contribution to knowledge.
What I don’t believe is that a small subset of university authorities (a star chamber, perhaps?) should determine what is valuable and what isn’t.
Furthermore, I believe that any definition of academic freedom that doesn’t embrace this principle isn’t really academic freedom (‘you are free to speak here, but only on topics, or with opinions, that the authorities agree with’). Or that a definition of academic freedom that includes living in a tent on campus, or ‘rambunctiously interfering’ with campus activities, but doesn’t include speech that Professor X happens to not like, is also an indefensible definition of academic freedom.
anon
Tm 10.06.25 at 7:30 am
LFC: Just by way of info, “political speech” does figure in U.S. First Amendment jurisprudence. It’s traditionally considered to be the core of what the First Am. protects. By contrast, “commercial speech,” for ex., also receives First Am. protection but not to the same degree as political speech.
These categories are not anywhere found in the law or constitution though. They are part of the considerations that courts use to figure out where exactly the lines are separating protected from non-protected speech, and they can be drawn quite arbitrarily – remember that the SC says making a cake for a gay couple is a form of political speech. And of course, money is speech. Otoh boycotting Israel can be legally banned because it’s supposedly commercial activity.
https://www.kuaf.com/show/ozarks-at-large/2023-11-16/arkansas-anti-boycott-law-draws-scrutiny-because-of-israel-hamas-war
The point here is that because freedom of speech is a political issue, its legal interpretation is and always has been subject to politics. What does not follow is that we have to accept the bad faith interpretations that the illiberal right is trying to force down our throats.
Tm 10.06.25 at 9:52 am
Back to the OP. I think I don’t disagree with what I take to be the author’s main intention, namely that academic freedom does not entail a right for every kind of speech to be platformed at academic institutions. But that is actually a trivial observation because freedom of speech never entails a right to have one’s speech platformed.
Why then does the author choose to make this point into a discussion of “academic freedom” culminating in the claim that “‘academic freedom’ is one of the great misnomers” ? The author starts by complaining about “the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech”, but his discussion of academic freedom is poor. Academic freedom is not mainly about academic speech, but about the protection of academic institutions from ideologically motivated government interference. (*) The freedom of speech of individual academics is already (supposed to be) protected by freedom of speech in general (I say supposed because in the US, it isn’t any more).
Instead of simply saying that there is no right to have one’s speech platformed, the author makes convoluted claims about the legal status of academic speech that rely on a misunderstanding of laws and norms. Compare these two statements:
1 “lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards;”
2 All science is disciplined by general norms of intellectual life (including the norm against deception and lying)
1 says that some forms of (political) lying are not prohibited by law. 2 says that academic speech is governed by certain norms. What is omitted is that academic lying is usually not prohibited by law either, the discipline comes from often informal norms enforced by peer pressure and academic bodies.
What is also overlooked is that political speech too is subject to norms, norms that aren’t enforced by courts of law but by peer pressure and the court of public opinion. Or at least, they used to be! When politicians were caught lying, it used to be treated as a scandal by the media. It was not uncommon (and still occasionally happens) that lying politicians were forced to resign or, as a result of negative press coverage, lost reelection and had to end their political careers. How is that categorically different from the way academic norms are enforced? In both cases, enforcement is imperfect.
Now consider the claim:
one can be expelled from the academic community for being caught plagiarizing and committing academic fraud and so on. Academic norms treat academic deception and fraud as being far worse in character than many felonies, putting life-time banishments from the academy on perpetrators without a possibility of forgiveness or redemption. By contrast, one cannot be evicted from one’s political community for lying and deception.
I don’t know how often lying academics are actually banished from the academic community; my impression is that it’s extremely rare. Undeniably, some academics do frequently lie to the public without suffering consequences (think tobacco lobbyists, climate change deniers, vaccine “skeptics”). And undeniably, some politicans do suffer consequences for egregious lying. As mentioned, they can be forced to resign, expelled from their party, removed from party leadership positions. Depending on the jurisdiction, there can be even stronger remedies, like criminal prosecution, ineligibility to run for office, party bans. The claim “one cannot be evicted from one’s political community for lying and deception” makes no sense.
In our political reality, norms against political lying have been mostly eroded. Trump, with the support of much of the country’s media and business elites, has managed to elevate systematic lying to a winning political strategy, because norms against lying aren’t enforced any more by the leadership of his party, by the mainstream media, and ultimately by the voters. Remember though that the law did find Trump liable for defamation and he was ordered to by 83 million in damages. In earlier times, this (and many other things he’s done) would have ended any political career. Trump destroyed these and many other political norms. If you think that academic norms will fare any better, you’re not paying attention.
Regarding the legal status of academic freedom
(*) In that context it’s interesting to note that the US constitution doesn’t even mention academic freedom, only freedom of speech and of the press. More modern constitutions like the German have explicit protections:
Art 5
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour.
(3) Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. (orig: Kunst und Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre sind frei.) The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.
See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forschungsfreiheit#Rechtslage_in_Deutschland
“In many places it should, thus, not surprise that the law barely recognizes a difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
I’m not sure what the author is trying to say here. The issue seems ot be more that in some countries, like the US but also the Netherlands (Schliesser is professor in Amsterdam), academic freedom is not explicitly protected in law. I found this statement by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences interesting:
“For scientists in the Netherlands, the scope to choose their own research topic and approach is being continuously squeezed. Freedom to collaborate with foreign colleagues is also under pressure. And due to intimidation, researchers are withdrawing from the social debate. This is the verdict of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in a report published today, in which it analyses a number of current threats against academic freedom and calls on various parties to take measures to better protect this freedom in the Netherlands…
In contrast to other countries, academic freedom is not mentioned in the Dutch Constitution. It is only protected through provisions in national and international law. The Academy would like to start a discussion on whether academic freedom can be better protected in law.”
https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/academy-academic-freedom-netherlands-under-pressure
C-S 10.06.25 at 3:29 pm
@ anon
OK – let’s go point by point.
OK, three objections here:
Firstly, you argue “the right ideas will prevail”. But if you keep granting a platform to the wrong ideas indefinitely then it is obvious that the right ideas won’t prevail – because you are ensuring the wrong ideas will continue to have prominence! The absolute best-case scenario is that you are creating a situation where people promulgating correct information now must devote their time to debunking misinformation that you have insisted must be platformed (in worse cases, and more likely, you are also ensuring that a non-zero number of people will continue to come away with misinformation).
Secondly, if someone is a speaker on a campus, they have already been granted a bigger platform than someone who isn’t. So, the “marketplace of ideas” no longer exists, because – by having speakers in the first place – you are filtering what ideas have prominence in that marketplace.
Thirdly, the notion that “everyone speaking should be treated as making a contribution to knowledge” is not, I would say, a pretty fundamental principle of western intellectual thought – again, you might wish to google “epistemology” at some point.
Your attempt to conflate basic epistemology with conspiracy-theory like hysteria is noted.
To be clear, anyone is welcome to formulate an argument, back it up with evidence, and present it. That is what text is for – because then we can take our time to examine the evidence, and ensure that it makes sense, and discuss and clarify points!
The objection you seem curiously unwilling to address is that providing a platform for the spreading of misinformation is not conducive to knowledge – I am open to arguments that it is, but they should probably involve providing some evidence at some stage (not this sort of vague handwaving and appeals to metaphors about marketplaces that ignore material conditions, but actual, demonstrable evidence).
OK, so you believe that calls to violence, etc. should be platformed? If your answer is “no”, then you have already agreed that there is – at some point – some sort of filter (to prevent those ideas from being presented). In which case, the argument is not whether or not there should be filters – but rather whether that filter should be extended to “things which are unsupported by evidence”. Of course, you are welcome to answer “actually, I believe all speech should be platformed” instead, but then you are making an argument for absolute free speech which your previous comments suggest is not in fact your position (though feel free to correct me if it is).
Given that you are responding to me, I think it not unreasonable for me to ask “where, precisely, did I say that speech should be filtered on the basis of whether or not professors like it?” Of course, I did not.
Since you seem to disagree on this point, I will reiterate that an important part of contributing to knowledge is the ability to attribute confidence – that is, to evaluate and demonstrate that arguments are sound and valid, supported by all available evidence and contradicted by none of it.
If someone isn’t providing their evidence in a forum where it can be carefully examined by a broad range of people who have expertise and can spot potential problems, then they are bypassing a critical part of what makes something knowledge rather than a belief (that is, whether or not it is reasonable to accept it!). Again, this is perfectly fine for things which we can already have a lot of confidence in (as they have already undergone this examination), but becomes problematic when no such process has been undertaken – particularly when the question is highly controversial. The issue with this in relation to speakers is that they are rarely (ever?) fact-checked in real time, or are required to provide all the data during their speech, etc.
So, again, you have a situation where someone is being given a platform from which to promulgate their position, but have not troubled yourself with whether or not it is a reasonable position to hold – and to justify this, you are making a vague argument that “oh, well, if it is misinformation, eventually the truth will prevail” (while also arguing that misinformation should still be platformed, so there is no mechanism by which the truth will prevail, and ignoring that you are potentially peddling misinformation to large numbers of people without a correction mechanism).
It is interesting that you don’t seem to think this might be problematic.
(as something of a tangent, I would also note, that – in a broader sense – people who are not speakers are not prevented from presenting their ideas – they could, for example, collate the data, make the arguments, and present them in a written format for assessment. Curiously very few of those screaming “censorship” seem interested in taking this route.)
anon 10.06.25 at 7:03 pm
Hmm C-S:
I get the impression you haven’t read the whole conversation, or even the initial post by Mr. Schliesser (and his linked, other posts). Perhaps you are only responding to my last post.
“Firstly, you argue “the right ideas will prevail”. But if you keep granting a platform to the wrong ideas indefinitely then it is obvious that the right ideas won’t prevail – because you are ensuring the wrong ideas will continue to have prominence! The absolute best-case scenario is that you are creating a situation where people promulgating correct information now must devote their time to debunking misinformation that you have insisted must be platformed (in worse cases, and more likely, you are also ensuring that a non-zero number of people will continue to come away with misinformation).”
Yup. Again, a foundational principle of freedom of speech (and, I believe, academic freedom requires a similar founding principle). Freedom includes the freedom to be wrong.
“Secondly, if someone is a speaker on a campus, they have already been granted a bigger platform than someone who isn’t. ” \
That’s always true. A speaker on CNN has a bigger platform than a speaker on a soapbox at Hyde Park. Its a strange argument to make that speakers on CNN break the principles of freedom of speech by actually speaking, because their audience is larger than the audience of my local tv station (or on a campus, or on a soapbox at Hyde Park).
“Secondly, if someone is a speaker on a campus, they have already been granted a bigger platform than someone who isn’t. So, the “marketplace of ideas” no longer exists, because – by having speakers in the first place – you are filtering what ideas have prominence in that marketplace.”
Of course. Perhaps I am making a wrong assumption: I didn’t think we were debating whether every individual who wants to come to campus can simply sign up for a room and talk (though, if there is actually room to do so, I think that is nearly what should be allowed to happen). Rather, I assumed that potential speakers were being invited by someone on campus: professors, professional organizations, administrators, or student groups, and whether those organizations should be allowed to invite who they want. And my answer to that second situation is…YES!
“OK, so you believe that calls to violence, etc. should be platformed? If your answer is “no”, then you have already agreed that there is – at some point – some sort of filter (to prevent those ideas from being presented).”
No. There have always been exceptions to absolute freedom of speech (even the original post by Mr. Schliesser addresses lying). But those exceptions are rare: hate speech, calls to violence, yelling fire in a crowded theatre, etc. Limits aren’t equal. Limiting my political opponents from speaking isn’t the same as limiting my political opponents from inciting a riot. One is consistent (and even required) with the concept of freedom of speech (and, in my mind, academic freedom). The other is not.
“What I don’t believe is that a small subset of university authorities (a star chamber, perhaps?) should determine what is valuable and what isn’t.
Your attempt to conflate basic epistemology with conspiracy-theory like hysteria is noted.”
It’s not a conspiracy theory when the entire point of the original post, and the entire conversation, is to enable this. Mr. Schliesser’s attempt to limit the bounds of academic freedom (and your attempt the limit the bounds of valuable speech) requires someone to determine what is acceptable on campus, and what counts a valuable! If you prefer I use ‘campus authorities’ rather than ‘professors’, I’m fine with that. Again, I encourage you to read the original post.
“Given that you are responding to me, I think it not unreasonable for me to ask “where, precisely, did I say that speech should be filtered on the basis of whether or not professors like it?” ”
You are saying that speech should be limited to that which ‘someone’ believes is valuable-this is your entire argument. If that ‘someone’ is not professors, and not university administrators, I am flummoxed as to who, within your argument, would make the call of ‘valuableness’ on potential visiting speakers.
“So, again, you have a situation where someone is being given a platform from which to promulgate their position, but have not troubled yourself with whether or not it is a reasonable position to hold”
Who, under your plan, is going to judge the reasonableness of a position, and thereby ban unreasonable speakers from a university?
And how is such a scheme compatible with the concept of academic freedom?
I don’t think it is.
anon
PatinIowa 10.06.25 at 9:55 pm
LFC says, “I think the OP is a bit too dismissive of the public-facing dimension of universities.” Maybe so.
I’m not sure whether this anecdote can be generalized or not: In the past, social media algorithms have sent me advertisements for online lectures originally delivered on private university campuses, some of which struck me as highly partisan. (Hillsdale University was one I remember. I’m sure there were others.)
Private universities are 501(c)3s to the IRS. They are forbidden by law from engaging in partisan interventions. As a former treasurer of a local organization, I observed people at the local level bending over backwards to avoid partisan language, even though we were a AIDS advocacy organization, and in Iowa, the temptation to use such language was powerful, given the stakes.
Was this just a blip? How widespread is it? Is it more prominent in a particular segment of the sector? (Hillsdale is quite conscious of its political goals. Does Berea do this sort of thing? Would Berea do such a thing if it had as many billionaires as Hillsdale?) Is the IRS ever going to get serious about non-profit partisan activities? Should there such a rule in the first place, given that “partisan” is easily finessed?
I believe that if the IRS cracked down on any particular university, the partisans would squeal “censorship,” and they might very well have a point.
LFC 10.06.25 at 10:20 pm
Tm @46
These categories are not anywhere found in the law or constitution though
Of course they’re not found in the Constitution, b/c all the First Am says is that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….” That’s a main reason courts have had to spend a lot of time interpreting and applying it to particular situations.
The point here is that because freedom of speech is a political issue, its legal interpretation is and always has been subject to politics.
Yes, but I might prefer to put it a bit differently. Politics is very intertwined with legal/constitutional interpretation, but the latter is not only politics. (I recognize that some schools of thought in the legal academy and elsewhere will disagree.)
When Justice Harlan, writing the majority opinion in the 1971 case Cohen v. California, overturned a disturbing-the-peace conviction of someone who, in a courthouse, had worn a jacket with the words “fuck the draft,” it was not, presumably, because he strongly agreed with that sentiment or thought that it was a reasoned way to express one’s views. Rather, he explained that this was the sort of thing the First Amendment is designed to protect, because “verbal tumult, discord, and
even offensive utterance…are,…within established limits, … necessary side effects of the broader enduring values which the process of open debate permits us to achieve.” He also wrote that the First Am. protects not only the “cognitive content” of individual speech but also its “emotive function.” This was an instance, IMO, of the Sup Ct understanding some of the social benefits of free speech (though whether these statements about the need to accept verbal “tumult” and “cacophony” read in the age of social media precisely the same way they did in 1971 is an interesting question).
Austin Loomis 10.07.25 at 3:23 am
C-S skrev:
I think it entirely reasonable to ask where, precisely, anyone involved in this discussion, from E.S. on down, has expressed anything resembling the position anon argues against, or indeed said anything that so much as rhymes with it.
Matt 10.07.25 at 11:26 am
LFC is right about “political speech” in US constitutional law. Saying that something isn’t explicit in the constitution (or a statute) isn’t the same as saying it’s not the law, of course.
For what it’s worth, “political communiction” is also the most clearly protected speech in Australia. While there is no explicit protection of speech in the Australian constitution, and there is significant regulation of speech (some good, some ill) here, the High Court has found an “implied freedom of political expression” in the Australian constitution, making it the most protected form of speech.
engels 10.07.25 at 1:18 pm
IANAL but it seems like in Britain “political speech” is the thing that’s most likely to get you locked up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15162585/Palestine-Action-terrorists-arrested-London.html
Tm 10.07.25 at 2:12 pm
Matt: “Saying that something isn’t explicit in the constitution (or a statute) isn’t the same as saying it’s not the law, of course.”
I continue to hold that there is a difference between “the law” and interpretations of the law by the courts. There is a certain tension between anglo and continental jurisprudence and perhaps it’s customary in anglo discourse to conflate these but I think we should be clear about the difference. And even if we agree that “political speech” is a special category, there is hardly any objective and generally agreed definition. Almost anything can be seen as political speech as soon as it touches on a subject that is in any way controversial (see baking cakes for gay couples: no speech, no politics, just the fact that a gay couple is involved and some people don’t like gays), and disputes about freedom of speech usually arise out of controversial subjects. So?
Since y’all are legal experts, perhaps you might want to weigh on on the real question here, namely academic freedom. Do your jurisdictions have specific legal protections for academic freedom? Are there agreed on legal definitions?
Ok and I overlooked this: “LFC is right about “political speech” in US constitutional law.” Although I am guilty of having mentioned the US constitution, this discussion is not restricted to the US. In fact, it seems that most participants are not currently in the US.
anon 10.07.25 at 4:17 pm
“I think it entirely reasonable to ask where, precisely, anyone involved in this discussion, from E.S. on down, has expressed anything resembling the position anon argues against, or indeed said anything that so much as rhymes with it.”
Again: if academic freedom can be limited to ‘reasonable’ or ‘valuable’ speech, then someone has to determine reasonableness and value. That someone is who?
Anon
somebody who knows what actual universities exist 10.07.25 at 5:22 pm
The failure to conceive of universities in America as public spaces is the fatal flaw in the OP. Why does this keep happening on Crooked Timber, let alone in every newspaper in the country? If you read the newspapers you will think only three universities exist, all fairly close to the East Coast and all are phenomenally wealthy and service the children of the phenomenally wealthy. Of course campus debate is of no use at Harvard! What are they going to debate at Yale, whether it’s better to waterboard an Iraqi teenager or electrocute his genitals?
Most students in America attend a public university, which must be considered a public space, and one of the many roles of a public university is to manage that space. People come to public spaces at public universities all the time to scream that women are sluts who should be forced by law to enter into arranged marriages and prohibited from seeing a doctor without their husband. I could take a bus ride for ten minutes to the quad nearby and see four of them today if I wanted. It’s a normal part of university life because it’s a normal part of public life. The real question is who gets to have a podium at the front of a big room full of people and who doesn’t. That’s a limited but still public resource. Universities should take it seriously. I personally don’t think it’s great that a trillionaire racist donor can call the university and get the Charles Kirk Memorial Transphobia Tour into the Athaneum Theater For Intellectual Cultivation, but if you asked me to write a rule that would exclude it that had to be applied to every public applicant now and forever, it might be pretty tough to do so. So far, letting them come, and letting people protest letting them come has worked out. What’s the counterargument? The OP seems to think the typical university is private property and so this question is irrelevant. It isn’t. It is in fact the only question. Universities in America are public property, not private institutions, just in terms of where students actually are. So the management of expression on that public property has to be considered with the utmost care, because the cops will get to kill you if you break the rule.
LFC 10.07.25 at 5:31 pm
Matt @53, that’s interesting about the Australian constitution and High Court’s interpretation of it.
Btw (this is mostly addressed to Tm) and with apologies for being autobiographical, I have a law degree from a U.S. law school (as does Matt, though mine is considerably further away in time than Matt’s and also from a less prestigious law school than his). Constitutional law was probably my favorite subject as a law student, which certainly doesn’t make me an expert, but the point about political speech is pretty basic.
C-S 10.07.25 at 6:49 pm
@ anon
A freedom you certainly seem committed to exercising.
However, we are not talking about “the freedom to be wrong”, nor are we talking about “freedom of speech”, we are talking about a very specific case of people speaking under very specific circumstances. That has nothing to do with personal freedoms, which you seem to be desperately trying to add into the mix.
Let’s try an example. Does a medical doctor have the “freedom to be wrong” (that is, promote misinformation) in their non-professional life? I would say yes (to the extent that anyone else does). However, does a medical doctor have that same “freedom to be wrong” in their professional capacity? No, because that has nothing to do with their personal freedom and everything to do with their professional responsibility for providing as accurate medical advice as possible. Similarly, should an academic have the “freedom to be wrong” in their non-professional life, and should they have the “freedom to be wrong” in a professional sense? Again, I would say yes and no (because – at least in principle – the purpose of academia is to continue improving our understanding of reality, which is something requiring a factual basis). As far as I can tell, you is analogous to it being unreasonable for a medical centre to overule an invitation to someone to run a health class should the be making up complete nonsense, on the basis that it would be a violation of their freedom to prevent medical misinformation being platformed. This strikes me as a rather dubious position you haven’t even come close to providing a coherent justification for.
A not inconsiderable amount of time and effort has been spent over many generations developing systems of knowledge which are demonstrably better than alternatives at providing more accurate understanding of reality. A significant part of this is the notion that it is very important to attach a degree of confidence to positions which is proportionate to the evidence supporting it – this is because whether something is reasonable to believe is pretty integral to it being knowledge and not just a random opinion or belief. This is rather an important part of academia, and not something to be just handwaved away.
What, precisely, do you mean by “break the principles of freedom of speech by actually speaking”? I haven’t said that, so it seems something you should clarify before attributing to me.
Firstly, I was making the point that the “marketplace of ideas” is not equal, and so your blithe assurance that “right ideas” will inevitably win out (and thus no effort should be made to establish the truth of positions regardless of the degree of prominence from which they are pronounced) is obviously fundamentally flawed. Indeed, I suspect you agree with this – otherwise why would it matter whether ideas are platformed within academia in the first place? If we follow your “logic”, it shouldn’t – because correct ideas will (through some magical process you’ve yet to elaborate) come to be accepted anyway.
Indeed, I would greatly appreciate your clarifications here. Do you believe that “right ideas will win” regardless of context, or does context matter to likelihood of circulation/acceptance? And if context does matter, why is it not important to ensure that the greater the likelihood of acceptance the more stringent the assessment of the reasonableness of the position? I look forward to your answers (please include detailed reasoning).
However, since you are now raising this point, here’s my brief comment. I would argue that the context in which speech is expressed can indeed play a role in the likelihood of it being circulated and/or accepted. Thus, the greater the weight that is placed on your words, and the greater the platform from which you speak, the more care and attention should be placed on whether what you are saying is true – and consequently, the general concept of freedom of speech is not necessarily universal to all people under all circumstances all the time. Putting it simply, “everyone may have the freedom to be wrong”, but that does not mean they have “the freedom to be wrong from a huge platform to an audience who have been primed to believe them”. I don’t view it as a violation of freedom speech to object to someone injecting misinformation from such a platform, nor do I think the world would be better off for abandoning the notion that people in positions of authority shouldn’t use their positions to spread misinformation.
Again, feel free to argue why it is better to live in a world in which people with power, authority, and audiences may use their position to promote any idea at all (no matter how egregious or demonstrably incorrect it may be), but please do actually make an argument this time (as opposed to vague emotional appeals to freedom).
Personally, I would prefer to live in a world in which basic standards of evidence were applied to people speaking from such positions (or at the very least, correcting misinformation in post). But again, this seems to be a point of disagreement.
OK, so you do believe that there should be small subsets of people making the decision as to who gets to speak and who doesn’t – which means you firmly agree with and support people filtering what is said on campus. Our disagreement is that while I think part of the filter should be “are they promoting misinformation?” you do not, and instead think merely being invited is sufficient justification.
While I’m sure it could indeed be very beneficial to the finances of an academic institute to have a process by which invited business reps have carte blanche to lie to entire audiences (on the basis that examining their statements would violate their freedom), I admit I’m less certain as to why you seem so convinced this is a necessary part of the process of developing knowledge and should be considered a sacrosanct freedom. Again, perhaps you’d care to elabourate?
And limiting people from saying things which are factually incorrect is not the same as limiting my political opponents from speaking (unless you wish to suggest my political opponents are always factually incorrect – which is a rather flattering proposition that modesty sadly forbids me from accepting). Personally, this seems a rather odd conflation for you to make.
Nope – I’ve not placed any limit on the bounds of valuable speech. I am limiting the bounds of what counts as a contribution to knowledge (by arguing that it should be rooted in fact).
What a terrible position for me to adopt. Much censorship, very authoritarian.
I would like “academic speech” to be founded on promulgating ideas which we have good reason to believe (that is, actually count as knowledge rather than opinion), because I don’t see value in academia promoting misinformation (a point of disagreement, it would seem).
Personally, I think it is rather beneficial to require things like evidence, logical arguments, and peer review within academia. You, by contrast, seem to think these are actually completely antithetical to it. Still, I suppose that at the very least embracing such a post-truth position in which logic and evidence are irrelevant would increase the number of research articles being published – something I’m sure the VCs will appreciate.
I have neither said that, nor is that my argument.
I would argue that for a speaker to be viewed as making a contribution to knowledge, it is important for them to actually be making a contribution to knowledge. That is, there should be an effort to ensure that what they are saying has an attributed confidence level proportionate to the supporting evidence (making it knowledge rather than belief). This is not, therefore, determined by a “who”, but rather by a “what” (that is, evidence, logical reasoning, etc.).
Again, this is not some radical mystifying position – this is a pretty fundamental part of the process of determining whether something is in fact knowledge. If you genuinely do not understand this, then I would strongly recommend learning about it at your earliest convenience – and would also politely suggest that perhaps you may wish to refrain from commenting about knowledge until you have a basic understanding about the process by which it is derived.
If it is indeed important for academia to platform ideas – no matter how discredited they may be – for some reason, I don’t necessarily object. I don’t view it as contributing to knowledge (because misnformation is in opposition to knowledge), but perhaps some other purpose may be served. I merely ask for you to justify it, and suggest that it would be better those ideas are presented with that relevant context. Perhaps by requiring the speaker to wear a clown suit and hold a sign saying “I am saying things which are demonstrably false”?
Austin Loomis 10.07.25 at 10:45 pm
With all due respect, anon, I’m comfortably certain C-S is not arguing “that speakers on CNN break the principles of freedom of speech by actually speaking”, or indeed that any large platform “break[s] the principles of freedom of speech” by having a larger audience than a smaller platform. But, in the words of the book reviewer at TIME to Norman Mailer, “hell you know that.” How do I know you know it? Because if you had the kind of brain capable of honestly advancing such a shoddy, sub-strawman excuse for an explanation of your opponent’s position, you wouldn’t be posting here. You’d be too busy running back and forth to your refrigerator, opening the door every so often so the little man inside whose job is to turn the light on and off doesn’t suffocate.
(Gen. Levaughn Matsui “Hugo” Xinchub: Somehow, Captain, when you say “with all due respect,” I don’t think you intend any respect at all.
Captain, UNS Dublin: Au contraire, General… I intend every whit of the respect that you are actually due.)
C-S 10.08.25 at 7:15 am
@ anon
As an addendum to my previous comment
Me: I think it not unreasonable for me to ask “where, precisely, did I say that speech should be filtered on the basis of whether or not professors like it?”
Are you seriously trying to argue “academia should not platform ideas which have no sound epistemological foundation as if they do” is exactly the same position as “academia should only platform ideas professors like”? Because that is what you seem to be saying. Do you honestly believe that the only reason that the theories and principles underpinning academic subjects are given prominence is because some Professors just happen to like them? Do you have no concept of how determine plausibility of claims? Knowledge, belief, justified true believe, reasonableness, evidence, etc.? To be clear, I am not criticising you if you don’t – I just think you really should spend some time reading up on it before you start making claims about this.
Setting aside, for one moment, your repeated conflation of very specific cases with more general principles (as I have said, “people who are not speakers are not prevented from presenting their ideas – they could, for example, collate the data, make the arguments, and present them in a written format for assessment”, something you seem to have ignored), I am genuinely fascinated by this comment.
Indeed, I would say this is a good demonstration of why it is better for people engage in the discussion of ideas in a written format rather than merely giving a platform to one person from which they may say anything they wish. Because here anyone can follow the conversation and determine for themselves if they think “academia does not need to treat every potential speaker as if they are making a contribution to knowledge” might be reasonably characterised as “academia shouldn’t platform speech that Professor X happens not to like”. Whereas, had you been given a platform from which to make this argument, an audience would not have that opportunity to make that evaluation. Personally, I think the former is more likely to be informative than the latter, though you appear to be arguing strenuously for the reverse.
(Now, were I to be absurdly generous, and ignore the incredibly loaded way you are asking it, I could perhaps pretend your question is something more like “if you are saying that the degree of confidence in ideas should be attributed proportionate to the evidence, then who evaluates the evidence?”, in which case the answer is: anyone who cares to do so – that’s the beauty of academic freedom).
Tm 10.08.25 at 7:21 am
With respect to somebody, LFC and Matt, why do Muricans always assume that everything is about America, even after it has been pointed out that it might not be? It can get on one’s nerves to be honest.
In the context of the OP, the US is relevant and exemplary mainly in one respect, as a cautionary tale how ridiculously easy it can be for a determined fascist regime to subvert academic freedom, freedom of the press and indeed freedom of speech if the media and academic elites collaborate.
J-D 10.08.25 at 11:24 am
If student groups are deciding who they are going to invite to speak on campus (and therefore, by necessary implication, who they are not inviting), then they are deciding which speakers they think have something reasonable and valuable to say. If professors are deciding who they are going to invite to speak on campus (and therefore, by necessary implication, who they are not inviting), then they are deciding which speakers they think have something reasonable and valuable to say. Whoever invites somebody to speak on campus (or anywhere else, for that matter) is determining that speaker has something reasonable and valuable to say. So who do you think should be able to invite speakers to campus?
LFC 10.08.25 at 12:36 pm
@ Tm
You keep bringing up the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop case, about the bakery in Colorado that didn’t want to bake a cake for a gay couple. A glance at the Wikipedia entry on the case confirms my recollection on this, which is that the majority decision revolved around the free exercise of religion claim. So that case, at least as the Sup Ct decided it, was not a free-speech case, and I’m pretty sure the phrase “political speech” does not even appear in the Sup Ct opinions in the case. So that case does not support your argument that the Sup Ct labels “political speech” anything it wants to. You also don’t seem to get that the First Amendment protects speech in general; it’s not that political speech is the only speech that is protected, rather it’s that the Sup Ct has said political speech is “at the core” of what the First Amendment protects.
Yes, of course, not everything is about the U.S., but you might inform yourself a bit more about U.S. constitutional law before confidently pronouncing on it. There are many subjects about which you know more than I do, and I’ll gladly accept a lecture from you on those subjects. U.S. constitutional law does not happen to fall into that category.
engels 10.08.25 at 1:40 pm
I love the smell the academic freedom in the morning
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/oct/08/uk-universities-offered-to-monitor-student-social-media-for-arms-firms-emails-show
Tm 10.08.25 at 1:58 pm
LFC, it is commendable of you to look this up. I’ll take your word for it that baking a commercial cake is not speech but “exercise of a religion”, which makes the arbitrariness of these “legal interpretations” even more obvious and ridiculous.
A better example just came in handy: the Supreme Court is likely to rule that harmful therapy sessions cannot be regulated by the state because they represent protected “speech”. The petition doesn’t seem to say “political speech”, just “speech”, which imho confirms that the “political speech” distinction is actually quite irrelevant. Ultimately there is no “core” protected speech, there is just protected speech and unprotected speech, and the courts decide which is which (and sometimes political speech is not protected, sometimes nonpolitical speech is protected, so?). Again, while I don’t have a law degree, I am confident that none of my factual claims have been refuted.
https://bsky.app/profile/piglet42.bsky.social/post/3m2orgttkws2i
Anyway this terminology is a side issue and I regret having started this fruitless exchange. I just regret that almost nobody around here wants to actually talk about Academic Freedom, which I thought was the topic and which I happen to think – and maybe I’m not the only one thinking this – is really quite important.
Tm 10.08.25 at 2:00 pm
And LFC: “You also don’t seem to get that the First Amendment protects speech in general” – thanks for explaining to me what I have been saying all along. Come on.
SusanC 10.08.25 at 2:37 pm
@Tm: in British and American Common Law (as opposed to Civil Law countries), considerable significance is attached to precedent as establishing what a particular law means, in addition to what the actual text of the law says.
Posters in this thread are typically assuming (implicitly or explicitly) British/American Common Law, and that’s just how it is in those countries.
(when people say “Free Speech” they’re often also assuming the country is the US, not, e.g., England, and it’s a discussion about the First Amendment)
MisterMr 10.08.25 at 5:37 pm
Apropos of speakers invited to university, I’ll note again that both freedom of speech and academic freedom (that are two different things, though similar) are freedom from the government.
Neither has anything to do with students booking either speakers or teachers.
Austin Loomis 10.08.25 at 8:23 pm
I sit in awe of C-S’s patience and willingness to take the time to read anon’s extruded thought-like product at length and in depth, then saw off anon’s ass, slowly and carefully, and with great attention to the considerable detail involved, and serve it up on a forspecial plate.
anon 10.08.25 at 9:23 pm
“If student groups are deciding who they are going to invite to speak on campus (and therefore, by necessary implication, who they are not inviting), then they are deciding which speakers they think have something reasonable and valuable to say. If professors are deciding who they are going to invite to speak on campus (and therefore, by necessary implication, who they are not inviting), then they are deciding which speakers they think have something reasonable and valuable to say. Whoever invites somebody to speak on campus (or anywhere else, for that matter) is determining that speaker has something reasonable and valuable to say. So who do you think should be able to invite speakers to campus?”
Thank you! You are exactly right! I agree with you! If a member of campus thinks a speaker worthy of a visit (with the aformentioned exceptions of calls to violence, hate speech, etc etc), that speaker should be allowed to visit!
Tell that to the rest of these guys, who seem to think only ”reasonable’ people should be allowed to visit. And if there is disagreement between to campus members as to ‘reasonableness’ (say, between one professor and another, or the sociology department and the young republicans), I still can’t figure out how that is determined, in a way that is consistent with academic freedom.
anon
Austin:
“With all due respect, anon, I’m comfortably certain C-S is not arguing “that speakers on CNN break the principles of freedom of speech by actually speaking”, or indeed that any large platform “break[s] the principles of freedom of speech” by having a larger audience than a smaller platform.”
This is quoted from C-S’s post:
“Secondly, if someone is a speaker on a campus, they have already been granted a bigger platform than someone who isn’t. So, the “marketplace of ideas” no longer exists, because – by having speakers in the first place – you are filtering what ideas have prominence in that marketplace.”
I really don’t know how much clearer it could be.
To all: read the comment by “somebody who knows what actual universities exist”
from Oct 7, at 5:22. He gets it.
somebody who says what theyre talking about 10.09.25 at 12:39 am
To respond to Tm @ 62’s caution, I can only say this: Are universities outside of America not considered public institutions? Public property? The possessions of a great and noble people? Or are they, like Harvard, Yale and Columbia, just fun little toys for bulging-eyed ultra-wealthy eugenicists? If so, the OP is even more irrelevant. Sure, prohibit whatever statements you want on private campuses. Burn down the library if you need to! If you don’t, the next Campus President, Brought To You By A Partnership With T-Mobile will. If you dismiss any continuity between the university and public property – either through law or custom or practice – you are on a very dark road. Down that road lies Stanford and announcing you’ve received $2.3 trillion to establish a new AI Startup Business School/Klavern. Might as well!
Better, in my view, to have a few raucous campus protests when the preacher on the quad goes too far. Teaches the youth how to deal with legislators later in life!
C-S 10.09.25 at 10:24 am
@ anon
I notice you haven’t bothered engaging with either my previous two comments. However, the benefit of written text is that people can review this and come to their own conclusions regarding our relative positions – something I believe is valuable.
I’ve said nothing about reasonable people, only about unreasonable ideas, and then only in the context of those ideas being considered contributing to knowledge. I do wonder why you keep misrepresenting what I’ve written – it really isn’t hard to read my words as they are literally just a little above your comments!
To be honest, I think a lot of your “confusion” could be easily resolved if you troubled yourself to actually try to understand anything about the process of trying to develop knowledge (I mean, I have suggested you do so several times now – yet you seem unable to bring yourself to even start googling this stuff!).
Now, “how do we know things” is an entire field of study in itself (so, for the – what, 3rd? 4th? now – time if you were genuinely interested in having an answer to your question you could literally look this sort of thing up!) and I certainly don’t intend to try to condense a few thousand years of discussion by people with far more time and expertise than I into a comment, but to give an incredibly brief and simple overview:
A reasonable claim is one that meets certain standards of rationality, justification, and evidence, ensuring that the beliefs or conclusions derived from the argument are supported by sound reasoning and adequate evidence, and that confidence is apportioned to the supporting evidence. A reasonable claim is, therefore, one grounded in principles that reflect good epistemic practices – for example, is it valid (conclusion follows logically from the premises), sound (is valid and its premises are true), is it based on justifications which can be independently verified or logically warranted, is the supporting evidence relevant to substantiating the claim, etc.?
So, in your hypothetical, anyone (not just the professor or their colleagues, because this is a wonderfully transparent and egalitarian concept) can examine the claim in question (e.g. is there evidence provided to support it, are the arguments internally consistent, etc.). And if, for example, there is data that has been collected using appropriate tools, the analysis follows logical principles, and the conclusions follow from the arguments, then we can (tentatively, as all things must be open to revision in light of new evidence) accept the claim is reasonable. And if your hypothetical professor says “no it isn’t”, you (or I, or literally anyone interested in doing so!) can then ask (and here we see the beauty of this approach!): “OK Professor, now you are the one making a claim – on what basis do you justify yours?”. And if the Professor cannot substantiate their claim of unreasonableness, then that Professor’s claim is itself unreasonable – and we get to discard their objection! Of course, it might also be that the original claim presented does indeed have flaws (who knows, maybe not every single professor is an evil ideologue wishing only to censor their opponents – maybe, just maybe, there are some who actually care about their fields!); in which case those proposing the flawed claim can seek to correct those issues – making their work even stronger! (or, perhaps they see the flaws are so bad that they need to go back to scratch, or maybe they rethink their position, or open a new line of inquiry, or…well, you hopefully get the point). And the things that I think is truly great about this is that the process never stops – we can continue revising and improving our understanding, improving the quality of our collective knowledge less encumbered by adherence to misinformation (for whatever the flaws of this approach, it is a significant step up from just ignoring the quality of a claim – if, that is, you care about knowledge).
This is not only consistent with academic freedom – it is one of the foundational pillars supporting academia in the first place! If we cannot examine and evaluate claims, and revise or discard those which are found wanting, then whether or not ideas are well founded ceases to matter – and in such circumstances, knowledge (that thing which academia is – at least theoretically – supposedly devoted to) will also functionally cease to exist. The understanding of reality that has been carefully and painstakingly constructed will quickly get washed away in a flood of misinformation because it takes a lot less time to make a claim than it does to determine how well that claim comports with reality – and rather than having knowledge, we will just be left with unverified and unsubstantiated opinions.
The only way this isn’t consistent with academic freedom, is if you believe academic freedom means “presenting flawed ideas that people have no reason to believe with a degree of confidence completely unwarranted, from whatever platform you are sufficiently well connected to command, and forever and irreversibly polluting the pool of knowledge with misinformation that may never be corrected”. Which, again, is an idiosyncratic approach (and one I think most people who do value knowledge – regardless of their ideology – would reject).
You don’t know appear to know very much.
How about this: explain what you mean by “principles of freedom of speech” in this context, then explain what you mean by “speakers on CNN break the principles of freedom of speech by actually speaking” (give a general or specific example or two), then try to relate it to what I’ve actually said (particularly regarding individual free speech, and the contrast I’ve drawn vs. professional standards).
I mean, really, feel free to do this anytime – and then maybe you could start trying to respond to what I’ve written!
Because I’ve still no idea what you mean by this statement, or whether you agree that the context in which someone says something can play a role in the likelihood of it being seen and/or accepted, whether you think “freedom of speech” means “absolute freedom to say anything (regardless of how true it is) in all circumstances” (e.g. do you believe that a medical doctor should be able to lie to their patients free of consequences on the basis that it is “free speech”, should a company rep be free to make up anything about their products because stopping them is “breaking principles of free speech”, is asking to see data somehow violating this freedom you seem to have in your mind but not yet expressed, do you believe the very concepts of libel and slander should be abolished, etc.?).
Final remark:
I’ve now spent quite a lot of my free time going over this stuff – and in return you haven’t really responded to my points or arguments, have repeatedly attributed to me things I haven’t said and positions I haven’t adopted, and frankly speaking seem very resistant to actually looking into even the very basic principles of epistemology despite setting yourself up to make broad sweeping statements about knowledge and the process by which it should be best acquired.
Now, I don’t consider my time wasted (after all, it is beneficial for people to be able to read all this and consider for themselves whether your actions are those of someone genuinely trying to understand the topic and engage with those who disagree) but it is, sadly limited. I’ll be happy to reply, should you ever get around to saying something substantive, making coherent arguments, or, you know, actually bothering to engage with the topic.
I rather suspect that you won’t, because you don’t appear to be actually interested in questions like “how do we best ensure we are advancing our understanding of the world”, or “how do we balance individual freedom with the responsibilities authority should confer”, or “how should the interactions of freedoms in tension be resolved”. Nor do you seem particularly interested in responding to the things I’ve actually written (as opposed to attributing to me things I haven’t said, but which are perhaps more comfortable for you to argue against). You do, however, appear very concerned that people (and young republicans in particular) are not being given an unlimited mandate to say anything they wish – no matter how demonstrably false it may be – free of consequence and have it be considered knowledge (as opposed to opinion), which I can’t help but find somewhat revealing about what you actually value.
This seeming desire to elevate opinions you find agreeable, regardless of whether they are true, is by no means unique – but still disappointing. To whatever that we have advanced as a species, it has been in no small part due to people committed to uncovering evidence and and actually understanding the world around us. To see this so readily discarded, and such a strong commitment to dragging us ever deeper into to a world where fact is irrelevant and what matters is status is…well, I find it both depressing and deeply troubling.
I wonder if you’ll actually respond to these three comments, or ignore them or cherry pick a few sentences with a vague and incoherent appeal to undefined “freedoms”. Either way, I suspect, will be…revealing.
LFC 10.09.25 at 1:09 pm
C-S @73
Haven’t followed all the back-and-forth between you and anon, but my view, expressed here without a lot of nuance admittedly, is roughly this: Professors or other instructors in a classroom should be making, to the extent possible, statements that have adequate epistemological support. Outside the classroom, student groups (Young Dems, Young Repubs, Young Democratic Socialists, Young etc etc) should have wide — though probably not completely unlimited — latitude to invite whomever they want to speak on campus. If one of those speakers makes epistemologically unfounded statements, someone in the audience will almost certainly challenge them, leading to an exchange that, in some circumstances at least, could be educational in itself.
Somebody who…@72
You’re making too sharp a distinction between public and private universities, imo. The latter also play in certain ways a public role, and your schtick of trashing them is getting tiresome. Yes they have flaws and are implicated in the reproduction of inequalities, but they are not the engines of pure evil you depict them as. I wonder if you have ever spent even half a day on the campus or in the classrooms of one of these places that you hate so much and misrepresent as the playthings of “wealthy bulging-eyed eugenicists.”
somebody who has never under any circumstances been hyperbolic 10.09.25 at 5:48 pm
to LFC’s remark at #74, I can only say, if my hyperbole is a bit spicy, I apologize, naturally. But it is the nature of private power versus public right that is at the core of this question. the answer to being annoyed by a campus preacher can’t be “tear the university away from the public and hand it over to a tyrannical administrator hired by a $9.8 billion endowment manager”. top tier, gold standard, A++ public universities operate with annoying people yelling garbage on campus all day every day across the whole nation. this is a critical piece of information to the debate. people making speeches with dumb garbage in them does not, empirically, pose a threat to the mission of UCLA, the University of Minnesota or the University of North Dakota. Not noticing that these institutions have managed to do this may not be snobbery or even just the genteel blinders of academe (never worn by me, surely!), but it is a critical oversight of a very obvious and open piece of information.
anon 10.09.25 at 6:39 pm
C-S:
You are simply not facing the reality of your views: that 1) if the only speech that is acceptable on a campus is that which is epistemologically acceptable, then 2) someone has to determine the epistemological value of given speech, and 3) the speech which doesn’t pass the test, will be banned, by somebody, from campus.
I don’t believe the epistemological value of a given act of speech is adequately defined to give anyone the power to judge it thus, or the power to ban therefore it from a campus. Professors can ban if from their classrooms: departments can ban it from their curricula, and clubs can ban it from their club. But I don’t believe any of those entities should have the power to ban it from an entire campus.
anon
C-S 10.09.25 at 9:20 pm
@ anon
As I said, your response is very revealing
And you have yet to face anything approaching my views – though you do appear very eager to dictate to me what they are regardless of what I’ve written. An odd approach, but you do you.
1) I have never said that the only speech acceptable on campus is that which is epistemologically acceptable. Indeed, I’ve said the exact opposite (“If it is indeed important for academia to platform ideas – no matter how discredited they may be – for some reason, I don’t necessarily object.”). Again, it is not particularly difficult to read the words I’ve written – and the fact that you are not responding to quoted text here is, er, somewhat interesting to say the least.
Now, of course, I could stop at this point – because it is pretty clear you are desperately trying to argue a point I haven’t made (quite why is beyond me, as it certainly isn’t making you look like an honest or thoughtful interlocuter). However, briefly adressing the other two: 2) “someone has to determine the epistemological value of given speech” – as I’ve said twice, someone is anyone who wishes to (did you not read my comments?), and 3) I’ve not proposed banning speech from campus on the basis of it not being epistemologically sound.
I don’t believe the epistemological value of a given act of speech is adequately defined to give anyone the power to judge it thus
So, you are arguing that it is impossible to judge the reasonableness or truth of any speech? That must make your life very difficult, and presumably very confusing. But perhaps this gives some insights into why this discussion has taken the direction it has.
But I don’t believe any of those entities should have the power to ban it from an entire campus.
And this is yet another oddly hysterical position to attribute – again, regarding speech on campus, I’ve only ever really talked about whether or not invited speakers count as contributing to knowledge (like, it is literally the bolded text in the preceeding comment – I’m not sure how much clearer I can make it for you!).
Now, out of interest, do you actually intend to answer any of the questions I’ve asked you or adress any of the positions I actually have adopted, or is it just going to be you continually doing this “well, unlike you I oppose kicking puppies” type of nonsense?
C-S 10.09.25 at 9:34 pm
BTW, anyone else notice how anon keeps trying to escalate my position – in the last few comments their allegations against me have gone from “limiting speech”, to “only allowing ‘reasonable’ people to visit”, to now “banning speech from the whole campus”.
At this point I’m genuinely wondering how long it will take before anon starts telling me I want to install microchips in people so I can control the entire world…
(to be clear, I don’t – but given how little interest they seem to have in relating their comments to me I doubt it would stop them!)
J-D 10.10.25 at 2:05 am
I want to put on record my resentment for the way you have grossly misrepresented what I wrote, although I don’t expect that to stop you.
J, not that one 10.10.25 at 5:58 pm
I don’t see how the view expressed in the OP is compatible with the idea of public discourse as Habermas lays it out. Is the idea that academic speech is not part of public discourse? It seems more plausible that academic and political speech both form important parts of public discourse, and that (if only as a practical matter, though possibly more than that) universities are good places for staging even political speech. Or maybe the categories are simply too broad.
As a practical matter, however, the distinction academic/political feels like it provides weapons for both sides to defend themselves against any criticism at all. Political speech would be always open to the defense that it’s not supposed to be true anyway, so every criticism on the basis of logic or evidence would be off-base, while academic speech might barricade itself behind the idea that it’s guaranteed by the institution’s rules to be true. (I realize the OP doesn’t say “true” but only “non-deceptive” but while a debate is ongoing I’m not confident that distinction could be maintained.)
Austin Loomis 10.10.25 at 10:22 pm
C-S, there exists an explanation for anon’s difficulties responding to your actual arguments that doesn’t require attributing the conditions to either villainy or stupidity on their part. They might just not speak English at the native level.
Admittedly, my evidence for this proposition consists only in the sentence “I don’t believe the epistemological value of a given act of speech is adequately defined to give anyone the power to judge it thus, or the power to ban therefore it from a campus” (emphasis added), but I can only think of one allegedly native speaker of English who habitually (or, at least, with noticeable frequency) puts his adverbs between his verbs and their objects, viz. or to wit, our current Chuwero-in-Chief. Maybe anon has to run everything you write through Google Translate to understand it, and run their responses through in the other direction. (I noticed that, in both attempts at commenting on anon’s verbal output, you cut out that adverb; I reasserted and emphasized it to draw everyone’s attention to it.)
Anon 10.10.25 at 10:48 pm
C-S: well if we both agree that speakers shouldn’t be banned from campus, then we really don’t have an argument. As for how to define valuable knowledge: define it however you want. I’m not worried about it. The point of the original post was to redefine academic freedom, to thereby limit some speech from its protections. If you don’t want to do that, we are in agreement, and you can define the epistemological value of speech however you want.
J-D: if I misunderstood you, and you actually do want to ban certain speech from campus, well, sorry I misunderstood. I disagree with you now, though.
Anon
LFC 10.10.25 at 11:02 pm
J, not that one @82
Political speech would be always open to the defense that it’s not supposed to be true anyway
I think this depends a lot on the type of political speech in question. When the plaintiff in Cohen v. California wore a jacket in the courthouse that said “F**k the draft,” that was political speech but he was expressing his feelings rather an uttering a statement that could be shown to be true or false. By contrast, when a public official answers questions by reporters or Congresspeople, or when a Pres. speaks to the country from the Oval Office — just to take a couple of examples — most if not all of the statements in those contexts are supposed to be accurate or bear some close relation to the truth (if it’s testimony under oath the person has sworn to speak truthfully) and if the statements don’t meet those standards there’s a problem (cf. the Trump admin).
C-S 10.11.25 at 12:03 pm
@ Austin Loomis
Perhaps I am not being charitable enough – I do try to be accepting of people struggling in communication (English isn’t my first language!). On the other hand, I see little evidence of anon making much effort to try to engage in discussion in a way that goes far beyond language – not only are they not engaging with my ideas, they haven’t tried explaining their own (despite me asking several times in an effort to try to improve communication). To me, they seem to be someone who has a very simplistic view which they have spent little time thinking about, and merely want to make sweeping claims about how the world should work while avoiding defending their position and offering little sound criticism of anyone else’s.
Of course, milage may vary on that one – as I said, I’m happy for people to read the comments and come to their own conclusions :-)
C-S 10.11.25 at 12:04 pm
@ anon
Setting aside once again your inability to engage with what has been said (you’ve already agreed that it is fine to limit some speech from campus – if it is, for example, inciting violence – and it is pretty dishonest of you to ignore that), I note once again you haven’t bothered to engage with the topic, respond to anything I’ve asked of you, or even acknowledge your constant misrepresentations – let alone try to correct them.
I strongly suspect we are not, but as you keep avoiding defining your positions – let alone defending them – I see little reason to keep pushing the point. After all, if you don’t care about your claims and ideas, why should I?
Yes, your disinterest in whether things are true or not is readily apparent.
Of course, given that you don’t value reality, there does seem little reason to keep engaging with you. By all means continue as you wish – but the position you argue for is a far greater threat to academic speech than anything anyone else has proposed.
J-D 10.11.25 at 12:06 pm
You continue to misrepresent my words, but at least this time I have the satisfaction of having predicted exactly that.
C-S 10.11.25 at 1:58 pm
In the extremely unlikely event that anon actually develops an interest in the topics being discussed, here are some things they should think about:
• What is freedom of speech, and how would you define it?
• Are there limits to this (and if so, how is the judgement about whether they apply or not to be made)? Is this freedom of speech absolute, or are there moving boundaries depending on context (e.g. does it exempt one from any professional standards)? What are the “principles of free speech”?
• Similarly, what is academic freedom? Are there any limits to this (e.g. does academic freedom include active deception)?
• Does it matter if something is true or not? If so, what is the best process(es) by determining how likely something is to be true?
• How do claims come to be accepted, and does the context in which a claim is made play a role? In a world in which some people have a lot of power and influence, and others have very little, is it plausible that those impact what claims are most likely to achieve wide acceptance? If it is, does that matter?
• Is it easier for people to be able to engage with ideas if they are presented in a written form in a public format which anyone can access and comment on, or if they are presented without context from a platform with a limited audience with no possibility for people to comment or respond? For example, does my ability to comment on this blog but not lecture Eric Schliesser in their living room represent a curtailing of my ability to speak? If so, is this also a violation of my freedom of speech (based on the definition previously given)?
• Is not inviting / disinviting someone from speaking the same as banning their ideas? Is it fair to characterise “ideas undergoing epistemological evaluation” as being same as “ideas being liked”?
And after all that, they could perhaps revise what they’ve said and think a little about what consequences might result.
However, I am skeptical they will do any of this – for someone who has spent so much time arguing about freedom and speech, they seem very only capable of mindless repetition of vague slogans, and rather disinterested in understanding (let alone engaging in debate with) anyone else. And despite my asking many, many times for them to actually explain their positions and ideas, they seem very unwilling (or perhaps unable) to do so.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to draw their own conclusions.
J, not that one 10.11.25 at 4:52 pm
@LFC
I’d agree that there’s a lot of space between “political speech doesn’t have to be true in the platonic sense” (whatever in particular that’s seen to permit) and “everyone agrees that in political speech ‘anything goes’.” The First Amendment doesn’t mandate that everyone has to think lies are always OK.
In the US in 2025 I’d think a more important issue is whether the Supreme Court should overturn the Constitution on grounds something like “the American system is opinion and the Court should shift the law as it stands in the direction of truth” or maybe “Democrats operate on the basis of opinion and conservatives iow Republicans operate on the basis of truth, and the court should make sure truth wins out.”
And another danger would be something like an ethno-nationalist populism that’s defended on the grounds that “their culture’s” beliefs are the opinion of the sovereign people, and therefore political speech should confirm to those beliefs and can’t be criticized. In the context of the Constitution and the actual demographics of the United States, that would be very bad.
These are all misunderstandings of the point made by the OP, but are understandable misunderstandings in certain ways, and they’re troubling.
Tm 10.14.25 at 8:55 am
SusanC 68: “Posters in this thread are typically assuming (implicitly or explicitly) British/American Common Law, and that’s just how it is in those countries.”
No, dear friend, “posters in this thread” do not “commonly” make this assumption! Most do not! Just because you are making this assumption doesn’t mean everybody else does! If you want to make a statement about US law, please make that explicit and refrain from speakign as if US law were somehow the global standard! It is not, it is actually a quite unusual outlier compared to most of the world. Most of us also understand that it is interesting and insightful to know something about other countries. Americans, even very well educated ones, are really frustrating in this regard.
Btw the author of the OP is an American teaching at a Dutch university. I do wonder whether he has any interst in Dutch law and Dutch debates about the topics he writes about. I thought that the reference I mention at 47 might be of interest to this debate.
somebody 72: “Are universities outside of America not considered public institutions? Public property?” In Europe, they are mostly public institutions. Why do you ask?
Tm 10.14.25 at 9:04 am
engels 65: Thanks for the link.
“UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show”
We truly live in Orwellian times. I remain flabbergasted at the fact that in a forum ostensibly about academic freedom, next to nobody seems to have even the slightest interest in talking about the actual state of academic freedom, which in countries like the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and others is under unprecedented threat.
MisterMr 10.14.25 at 12:27 pm
@Tm 90
Student’s private communications (? not sure how private, we are speaking of social media ?) are not protected by academic freedom though.
I would argue that they should be protected by freedom of speech and by the normal tenet of liberalism of non poking the nose too much into private life of citizens, but this is not academic freedom.
I sometimes have the feeling that people exaggerate the level their freedom is actually protected by the law, and also that academic freedom/freedom of speech etc. are laws that protect citizens from the government, not from other citizens.
Perhaps “right to privacy” would be more to the point, but the protections of this right are much lower than freedom of speech or academic freedom.
J, not that one 10.14.25 at 2:14 pm
@TM, @SusanC
I think it’s fairly common to use “US First Amendment” as shorthand for “absolute, unrestricted free speech” and the reverse. Discussions of what the First Amendment should permit are often framed as discussions of how far free speech should go. And discussions of reasons why absolute free speech is bad are often seen as implicitly arguments about why the First Amendment is a mistake and other countries shouldn’t follow the US’s example (or why the US should move towards the example set by other countries).
Tm 10.14.25 at 3:34 pm
MisterMr 91: “Student’s private communications (? not sure how private, we are speaking of social media ?) are not protected by academic freedom though.”
No, but that’s really not the point here (and I’m starting to get annoyed by these games of superficial nitpicking to be honest). These universities have offered to engage in illegal surveillance of their students’ private political communications in order to do a favor to an arms dealer. I don’t need to discuss which exact laws are being broken to know that this behavior is not consistent with the mission of an educational institution!
Maybe it’s just me but I do think that Universities are supposed to have better developed ethical values than arms dealers, which btw is part of the justification why they deserve academic freedom in the first place!
J 92: “I think it’s fairly common to use “US First Amendment” as shorthand for “absolute, unrestricted free speech” and the reverse.”
If some people think that the US First Amendment is equivalent to “absolute, unrestricted free speech”, they are fundamentally mistaken. :rolleyes:
somebody who explained already 10.14.25 at 6:21 pm
Tm @ #90 expresses puzzlement at an answer to his own assertion about whether america is a good example for the question raised by the OP. why does it matter if the university is a public institution? who cares? alas, the crooked timber mind palace has engulfed another victim. at every public university throughout america, dingbats, psychopaths, grifters and weirdos spend hours every day howling lies and hatred across the campus and it doesn’t affect the functioning of the university in the slightest. only actually looking at what’s happening can give you this insight, not reasoning it out from within our skulls. “american public universities, should they exist, probably don’t function at all because they allow people to just come on campus and spew lies and garbage!” but they do function, and they do allow people to just come on campus and spew lies and garbage.
experiencing someone looking you dead in the eye and saying you’re going to be tortured for eternity because you’re a filthy slut is something that women can experience in any public space in the whole country, america has determined, so long as it does not fall within the very narrow confines of criminal harassment in one of the rare jurisdictions where police will believe what a woman tells them if she is well-dressed enough. and so it happens on campus every day. yet somehow the public universities in america survive, because the public university is conceived of as an extension of other public places. there are some restrictions, of course – you can’t jump on stage during a performance of hamlet at a public theater to advertise your favorite cereal, for example – but the restrictions are not connected to whether someone is “lying” or saying something that’s somehow unsound.
so, if america can pull off the logically impossible but trivially observable feat of having a campus where idiots and fanatics can show up to scream their dumb lies, why can’t other nations whose universities are, Tm tells us, public institutions also manage it?
Tm 10.15.25 at 6:47 am
94: “Tm @ #90 expresses puzzlement at an answer to his own assertion about whether america is a good example for the question raised by the OP.”
This is not what I expressed and not what any of my assertions was about. Please refrain from putting words in my mouth will you? Thanks.
“why does it matter if the university is a public institution?” That’s not a question I would ask because the answer is pretty obvious. Again, whatever you are responding to, it’s not my words.
Tm 10.15.25 at 6:51 am
94: “so, if america can pull off the logically impossible but trivially observable feat of having a campus where idiots and fanatics can show up to scream their dumb lies, why can’t other nations whose universities are, Tm tells us, public institutions also manage it?”
I really have no idea what you are getting at. What do you know about how “other nations” manage their universities? How is it related to the discussion at hand? Maybe you have a valid point to make, but you actually need to make it, ideally without distorting what others have said.
MisterMr 10.15.25 at 9:12 am
@TM 93
I don’t think this is just a problem of nitpicking.
Many of the more or less fascist moves by Trump have been made under the excuse of “freedom of speech”, or banning “hate speech”.
Conservatives really believe that their freedom of speech is violated by universities, or that teching creationism should be protected by academic freedom or freedom of religion, or that preventing people to manifest against israeli policies is fighting hate speech/antisemitism.
It is true that there a strong level of motivated reasoning behind these conservative arguments, but often this kind of motivated reasoning exists also in progressive arguments.
It is important to understand what are the actual rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom, privacy rights etc., and also what are the limits of these rights, because they can easily be weaponised, as Trump is in fact doing.
The OP started by making a distinction like this, though in a way that I don’t completely agree with, however most commenters conflate all these rights in a big soup. I cannot read minds, but I suppose that when Anon above speaks of speakers banned from campus, he is conflated speakers booed by students with the government forcing teachers, directly or indirectly, to tech what the government wants, and the two are completely different situations, but it is impossible to disentangle the two if we make the “big soup of rights” argument.
Tm 10.15.25 at 9:33 am
An interesting news item from the Academic Freedom (in German “Wissenschaftsfreiheit”) front. The Nazi party asked for lists of university departments and professors who they consider idelogical enemies. Some universities responded by … compiling the lists.
https://taz.de/AfD-hetzt-gegen-Hochschulen/!6116589/
Tm 10.15.25 at 12:04 pm
Here’s a tough question:
If a university fires a faculty member because he refused to follow an order by the Dean directing him to censor the student newspaper, is that a violation of (1) academic freedom, (2) press freedom, (3) freedom of speech, or all three? Or (4) it doesn’t matter because who cares any more?
It’s not a trick question.
https://www.idsnews.com/article/2025/10/indiana-university-daily-student-print-paper-censorship-fired
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