Is Free Speech Under Threat?
During the 2023–24 school year, many of the United States’ most prestigious universities erupted. The protests, chants, encampments and confrontations centred on the war between Israel and Hamas. But they also implicated tensions closer to home. Slogans like ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘intifada revolution’ were heard by some as an empowering rallying cry for Palestinian solidarity, and by others as a call for ethnic elimination of Jews. To some, the encampments were part of a noble tradition of valiant protest harking back to the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement focused on South Africa. To others, they were a menacing manifestation of rising foreign influence, involving offcampus movements paid to radicalise American youth. To some, the protests were an impassioned plea to save innocent lives, foster peace and elevate
the sanctity of humanity. To others, they were an effort to delegitimise and demonise a vulnerable people, paving the way towards their annihilation.
The protests brought into view and deepened a crisis of confidence in the bedrock American precept – enshrined in nearly one hundred years of jurisprudence on the First Amendment to the US Constitution – that even the most controversial and provocative speech merits protection, and that the best answer to noxious speech is refutation through more speech.* Some claimed that efforts to curtail the largely peaceful protests were a betrayal of free speech precepts – a form of viewpoint-based repression aimed to silence dissident perspectives. Others argued that enforcing university restrictions on when, where and how protests could be carried out was simply a way to safeguard the rights of all and prevent disruption to the essential functions of the campus as a place for teaching and learning. Offcampus forces – whether wealthy donors or wellresourced international advocacy campaigns – were blamed for illegitimately skewing the debates.
* While the First Amendment only governs speech at public institutions of higher education, most private universities have voluntarily adopted policies and approaches that aim to offer commensurate protections for expression.
Students and faculty argued that rules governing who could speak and when were being applied unfairly: some said pro-Palestinian speech was being unjustly targeted while others argued that Jewish students were being subjected to hateful speech that would not be tolerated were it directed towards other historically marginalised groups. The disputes were exacerbated by outdated university policies including regulations that were on the books but had long gone unenforced.
Leaders and administrators were fl ummoxed over how to uphold free speech rights without allowing their campuses to become places of menace and intimidation for certain students. Ageold traumas on all sides bred heightened ardour and intensified feelings of vulnerability. Meanwhile, students on many campuses reported that actual debate on the history, consequences or moral weight of the Israel–Hamas conflict was all but impossible. Classmates were afraid to voice their views except in sheltered enclaves of the like-minded. Seminarroom discussions were stilted for fear of offending someone or, worse still, being captured in a viral video that could haunt a future career.
The uproar fuelled the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania,
the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to leading colleges, the initiation of Congressional and state legislative investigations, multiple probes by state and federal civil rights agencies, lawsuits accusing leading universities of turning a blind eye to bigotry and harassment, and complaints to educational accreditation agencies.¹ Meanwhile, similar student movements including solidarity encampments began popping up on campuses around the world: at Trinity College in Dublin, Lausanne University in Switzerland, Sciences Po in Paris, the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and elsewhere. These campus clashes reflect a set of tensions roiling increasingly diverse, social media- soaked societies, as institutions of all kinds navigate between accommodating the needs of a heterogeneous population, and the legal and communal values of free speech and open discourse. In the past decade, media organisations, corporations, technology platforms and civic groups have wrestled with dilemmas over the changing bounds of acceptable speech, and how those limits should be determined and enforced. Among conservatives and some liberals, there are those who believe that topics including immigration, gender identity, gun
control, and the role of race in society have been ring- fenced by left- wing orthodoxies that allow little space for opposing perspectives. Incensed by what they see as ideological rigidities dominating a growing swathe of elite institutions – universities, national news organisations and major consumer brands – some conservatives have fought back with approaches including, in the US, bans on books, and legislated prohibitions on school and higher education curricula. Paradoxically, such measures are not reinforcements of the liberty their proponents maintain is being eroded, but rather governmentbacked constraints that curtail and punish speech.
The fi reworks on US campuses were the culmination of an escalating free speech arms race, with constituencies on the left and the right pressing for disfavoured opinions to be declared out of bounds, socially, morally or legally. The more each side comes to believe that the opposing flank is notching gains in its quest to curtail speech that it abhors, the more determined each becomes to retaliate in kind, declaring new no- go areas and prohibitions. Hypocrisy abounds, with voices on both left and right decrying one another for cancelling disfavoured voices, drowning out dissent, or for wilfully disregarding what they claim are grave
harms and dangers that speech may cause. While the tactics on the right and left differ, and power differentials shape the import of their efforts, both sides have resorted to speech protective tactics in service of their ideological aims.
Given the United States’ historic status as a global free speech standard-bearer, with the First Amendment to the Constitution marking the most protective legal regime for speech anywhere in the world, the deepening divides over what free speech means and how it should be protected in the US reverberate globally. And indeed the ‘cancellation’ of those who voice controversial views, book bans targeting LGBTQ narratives, efforts to discipline professors for errant speech, and the patrolling of speech on the Israel–Hamas conflict are not limited to the United States. In 2023 the United Kingdom’s Conservative government appointed Cambridge philosophy professor Arif Ahmed as the nation’s first ‘free speech tsar’ to focus on defending free speech and academic freedom from mounting threats. ² In early 2024 the French parliament passed a new law that would ‘strengthen the criminal response to racist or antisemitic offences’ and render such speech subject to ‘a guaranteed and systematic criminal penalty’.³ The repression of pro-Palestinian
is free speech under threat?
speech in the art and cultural world in Germany has sparked uproar, raising questions of how to reconcile the country’s history of genocide with its present- day values of liberalism and openness to dissent.⁴ Elsewhere in Europe, conference convenors and academic departments have shunned Israeli scholars and institutions, cutting off dialogue and exchange with independent voices because of anger over actions by the Israeli government.
Compounding doubts, confusion and disputes over free speech on campus and in culture is a widespread sense that, online, expression has run amok. Propelled by algorithmic amplification and jet- fuelled by profi t motives, digital discourse is increasingly recognised as posing a danger to public health, mental wellbeing, social cohesion and democracy itself. The bipartisan April 2024 vote in the United States Congress to force TikTok to sell itself or shut down in the US reflected escalating alarm over how online discourse may threaten national security. The concerns relate to TikTok’s links to the Chinese government and fears that the platform is a uniquely effective and shadowy vehicle for the manipulation of opinion. TikTok, with the support of certain leading free speech groups, is mounting a First Amendment challenge to the law.⁵
With pitfalls and challenges arrayed on all sides, free speech is losing its moorings on both the right and the left. Some argue that the costs of free speech borne by historically marginalised groups are simply too high. Others claim almost the opposite: that free speech rights are being exercised in ways that distort and override majority opinions and mainstream cultural values. Critics of free speech safeguards maintain that such restraints leave society too exposed to those who exploit discourse in the name of money or power. Free speech is dismissed as a plaything for special interests or a principle that is too easily contorted as cover for other less noble goals. The defence of free speech is denigrated as a smokescreen for hatred, a veil for ideological agendas or a legitimiser of violence. These concerns are not idle. Free speech principles can be invoked selectively, distorted or misused. But that is a reason to redouble the defence of a principled approach to free speech, rather than give in to the forces that would pervert it.
Given the United States’ historic role as a citadel for free speech, the challenges on American quadrangles, bookshelves, streets and social media have the potential to reshape the meaning of free expression ideals globally. This perilous situation could prompt liberty-loving citizenries to reckon with new threats
is free speech under threat?
to free speech and renew their vows to uphold it as a sacred value. Or it could hasten resort to suppressive tactics justified in the name of other interests, tilting democratic societies towards authoritarianism. To paraphrase what Winston Churchill once said about democracy, and as dissidents in China, Russia and Iran would roundly confirm – a polity that protects free speech is the worst form of society, except for all those that fail to do so. That is why it is vital to understand not only that free speech is threatened, which it most certainly is, but also the very particular ways that free speech is under attack today, and not to let them go unchecked.
Whose freedom, whose speech
There is no single origin story for today’s free speech controversies. But when it comes to US college campuses, which are crucibles for the wider society, one of the most prominent early altercations happened in 2015 at Yale University when a campus body known as the Intercultural Aff airs Council sent an email to all students warning them against wearing ‘culturally unaware and insensitive’ Halloween costumes – including feathered
headdresses, and turbans – that could cause offence. In response, Erika Christakis, a child development expert and associate master of Yale’s Silliman residential college, sent a message of her own to Silliman students. She argued that the directive infantilised the undergraduates, depriving them of agency to select their own costumes and deal with any fallout that might ensue with their peers. Christakis countered that the answer to potential offence over Halloween costumes was for those who might feel hurt to articulate and explain their feelings and for classmates accused of insensitivity to respond.
Christakis’ email ignited a firestorm online and in the media after more than 740 students signed an open letter accusing her of riding roughshod over the sensitivities of historically underrepresented students, trivialising concerns over denigration, and validating expression that could erode their already precarious sense of belonging on campus. Christakis was prompted to resign.⁶
Days later the storm moved to the University of Missouri, where student protesters targeted campus leaders for failure to adequately address racism, forcing out the school’s president and chancellor.
A student photographer was manhandled while covering the demonstrations, with a media studies
is free speech under threat? professor, Melissa Click, calling for some ‘muscle’ to shove him away. The young journalist’s entreaty, that ‘the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine’, was ignored.
While the events at Yale and Missouri made national headlines, a set of wider trends was quietly taking hold. Pew Research Center reported that among eighteen- to twenty-nine-year- olds social media use had reached almost ninety per cent, reflecting a wholesale transformation in how young people were interacting and gleaning information.⁷
A national poll published in October 2015 by the William F. Buckley Program at Yale reflected rising tensions between free speech and the imperative to avoid conflict and offence.⁸ The survey reported nearly fifty per cent of students saying they sometimes or often felt intimidated and unable to share views that departed from those of classmates or professors. Seventy-two per cent said they thought their universities should be doing more to foster a diversity of opinions in the classroom and on campus. Seventy-two per cent also said they supported disciplining students or faculty who use ‘language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive’. At the same time, campuses reported mounting calls for ‘trigger
warnings’ on syllabi to notify students of potentially upsetting or objectionable material, disinvitations of speakers considered controversial, and calls for colleges to be maintained as psychologically ‘safe spaces’ where students could avoid being confronted by objectionable language or ideas. The battle lines were drawn. On the left, activists had witnessed the power of online outrage and the media spotlight to take down those accused of complicity, indifference or ignorance in the face of racism or bigotry. More conservative constituencies were appalled at what they saw as left-wing intolerance. They labelled students claiming to be harmed by speech as ‘snowflakes’ who lacked resilience and were prone to demanding special treatment. They blamed such misguided sensibilities on a sense of learned frailty that they attributed in part to so-called ‘helicopter parenting’. Erika Christakis’ career-derailing email had cited a newly published article by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff in The Atlantic magazine decrying what they called ‘the coddling of the American mind’, namely a misguided quest to ‘scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense’. The trend, they argued, ‘presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche’.⁹
