It can’t be that hard to manage free expression on campus   

Refereeing the free expression environment on a college campus can be challenging at times. But it shouldn’t be impossible, either. That’s what it looked like, however, when confused presidents of some elite colleges performed ineptly in front of a recent congressional hearing. The dreadful performance by the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn demonstrates just how confused the nation’s bastions of learning are these days, both intellectually and morally.

One would think being able to lead a university intellectually would be the number one requirement for a college president. That three presidents of the nation’s supposed top-tier universities can’t articulate the workings for academic free expression tells the nation a lot about today’s intellectual climate in higher education.

It is sad to think that college presidents are being hired by boards of trustees without apparently ascertaining whether their administrators can speak with clarity about fundamental free expression principles and their implementation.

All universities have flashy policies and administrative statements about free expression. Sadly, it is safe to say that a good many college presidents can’t fully explain or interpret them. That should come as no surprise, however, because those policies weren’t designed to manage free expression anyway.

Instead, they were designed as posturing statements to signal lofty ideals, but without ever having to be operationalized. Further, such statements exist to provide cover for administrators to display while simultaneously creating a campus culture that permits some expressions and curtails others. These flimsy statements are bowls of steam, filled with the rhetoric of bureaucracy. Imagine the panic that went through the minds of the cornered college presidents of MIT, Harvard and Penn when they were challenged to sort out and apply their vacuous free speech policies.

Too many college presidents don’t really intend to support broad based free expression on campus at all, which is why it is handy to parse all decisions based on “context.”  

That “context” is based on who is speaking and which trendy cause-of-the-day is being pushed. Given these moving parts, it is no wonder administrators get confused and can’t articulate a coherent approach to intellectual freedom, let alone distinguish between calls for genocide and using an incorrect pronoun or wearing the wrong Halloween costume.

It does become impossible to referee free expression when the campus policies are awash with and leveraged by activist cultural and political considerations. Employee hiring practices are now based on ideological litmus tests and forced statements about supporting diversity. Student orientation programs chill students with warnings about micro-aggressions and pronoun choices. Bias response teams pick winners and losers in the campus culture. Classrooms and dorms have become ideological gulags where students are increasingly afraid to present their own views.

 The “leaders” in higher education have generally failed to promote and model rational free expression at their institutions. And the campus cultures are suffering for it. Surveys demonstrate that students are afraid to speak on sensitive topics. At the same time, nearly half of college students believe it is okay to shout down speakers or resort to violence to deal with offensive speech. These college students are confused because their leaders are confused. Teams are reflections of their coaches, and these college teams are at the bottom of the standings.

Administrators too seldom model intellectual diversity on their own campuses. Events for invited speakers seldom reflect a wide range of ideas. Check the campus calendar at any university and try to find an invited speaker in the last year who has addressed Second Amendment rights, pro-life values or the development of western culture. That’s because high-paid university executives are afraid of their own faculty and students. They know that a speaker with an “unapproved” topic or view will prompt chaos on campus.

Universities long ago abandoned creating a marketplace of ideas in favor of pushing preferred perspectives. The term for this approach is “indoctrination.” Princeton Professor Keith Whittington wrote in the Fordham Law Review, “Ultimately, realizing free speech principles on college campuses is a matter of culture as much as it is a matter of policy.” It is high time college presidents worked to manage that culture and stop preening about paper policies.

There are consequences for the nation when its higher education establishments can’t articulate and live out a functionally interdependent learning environment for free expression. Rational thinking about matters of substance leaves the building. The cultural observer G.K. Chesterton once warned about this prospect, “Freedom of speech means practically…that we must only talk about unimportant things.” Too many universities are nearing that point right now.

Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant. Follow him on X @Prof_McCall.