BY JOHN K. WILSON
This afternoon (Thurs. April 19 at 1:30pm ET), AAUP political organizer Monica Owens will be holding a Facebook Live event about the threat from legislating free speech.
It’s an important time to address these issues, especially since South Carolina has become the first state to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which imposes a very broad definition of anti-Semitism to be used (exclusively for colleges) in determining whether discrimination has occurred.
But I have a few disagreements with how Owens posed the issue in an email about the event:
“Campus free-speech” legislation, increasingly prevalent in state legislatures, is a solution in search of a problem. Threats to free speech on campus have received outsized media attention in relation to issues with more widespread incidence and deleterious effects, such as diminished public funding of higher education, the adjunctification of the faculty, and a student debt crisis. One thing is clear: bills purporting to protect free speech on campus have become a popular method for legislatures to interfere with and undermine the institutional autonomy of public colleges and universities.
Why do we need to minimize and deny that campus free speech is a problem in order to reject legislation that makes things worse? Why can’t we say this is a bad solution to what is, nevertheless, a real problem? Nor do we need to compare problems: We can and should worry about free speech on campus even if it might be less important than funding cuts (just as the AAUP worries about academic freedom).
However, I think Owens is correct to focus concern on efforts by Republican legislators to impose their narrow and distorted vision of free speech on higher education. Instead, we need to solve the problem of censorship on campus by public criticism of repression, and by developing better campus policies to protect free expression.
I will be speaking about some of these issues on Sat. April 21 at the Illinois AAUP annual meeting in Westmont, Illinois, as part of a great lineup of speakers about campus labor activism, state government issues, shared governance, and political action, and I encourage everyone to attend this free event.
(Owens, by the way, will be speaking at the Missouri AAUP annual meeting in Kansas City on Sat. April 28.)
I will also be part of a panel discussing legislation about campus free speech at the AAUP’s Annual Conference in Arlington VA, June 14-16 (and if you’re going to attend the annual meeting, come early on June 13 for a special event being planned in Washington DC on campus protest and free expression).
Today’s discussion is part of an important conversation about how we need to protect free speech on campus by not allowing it to become a tool of politicians who often have no interest protecting the principle of free expression for everyone.
