Free Speech and False Speech ...

by Cliopatria

As I read KC Johnson's post about students' free speech rights, I recalled my own advocacy of it and my own failures to defend it. When I was teaching at Antioch, I failed to defend the free speech rights of a young anti-abortion student from Columbus. His position was so unpopular on campus that he was literally driven out of the college and I had failed to speak up in his defense.

My failure was contextual. I was, myself, under fire at the college on all the politically correctness issues. As I came up for tenure, a few students accused me of racism, sexism, classism, and elitism. Not only that, but I was accused of being both a queer and a heterosexist. That they were students who had failed my class in African American history is beside the point. My recollection of that class is epitomized by the question of a young white female student:"When did you repudiate the movement?" She might as well have asked me"When did you stop beating your wife?" Underlying the question was an abyss of malice and ignorance too dense to unpack. She could not have asked such a question had she known anything about the post-civil rights movement or cared to know what was true.

In the first place, of course, I had no sense of ever having repudiated the movement. I was deeply aware of and pained by its fragmentation. From my point of view, she might better have posed that question to some of its leaders: to my friend, Floyd McKissick, for instance, who endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1968 and lived off of the federal grants for the remainder of his career. From my point of view, she might better have posed the question to Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams who endorsed Ronald Reagan for president in 1980 and reaped the glory of that aberration. Was the movement about their freedom to be bought off? She would not have been presumptuous enough to ask that question of them. I thought myself more loyal to the movement's values than any of them.

The most painful of the accusations was the double whammy: that I was both a queer and a heterosexist. Now, such people do exist. Roy Cohn springs to mind, of course; but I am not nearly so conflicted, nor so interesting, nor so malignant as Roy Cohn. The usual answer that we free speech advocates offer to arguments in favor of speech restrictions is that the answer to false speech is more speech. And, yet, I'm hard put to say that, in the midst of my being considered for tenure, false charges of heterosexism and of being queer were best answered by even and ever more fulsome affirmations of my heterosexuality and tolerance for sexual differences. The fact is that my critics had gone for the jugular and I was dead. I would not put my wife and daughters to the embarrassment of turning my appeal for tenure on louder and louder affirmations of the exclusivity of our relationship. My wife would shudder if she even knew that I had referred to that painful memory here. Fortunately, our marriage has survived the impoverishing results of malignant false speech.

My point is that – Yes, as a devotee of free speech, I am obliged to defend the opportunity for false speech. I am obliged to defend it even when it is directed at me. I am obliged to defend its opportunity, even at Cliopatria. But I am not obliged to respect false speech. I'm a witness to the damage it does. I may defend the opportunity for your false speech, but do not dare ask my respect.

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Robert KC Johnson - 11/27/2004

Point taken; I'll amend the above to "one conservative." :) And I concede that probably Duke's 32 Dems in the History Dept. contain one or two conservative or moderate Dems as well. At Michigan, even their one junior person who teaches 20th century political, Matthew Lassiter (whose work is excellent), goes out of his way on his website to broadcast his affiliation with left-of-center causes. The general point is that in depts. with overwhelming ideological tilts, most of the complaints of political bias are understandably going to be coming from the opposite direction.

The Metropolitan State case is one that, I think, exposes some of the limitations of the students' rights issue. Based on what I've seen of her public comments, Meranto hardly seems like the ideal professor. But the students' allegations also seem to be--at best--overblown. In such circumstances, I suppose that publicity is the best option, with students desiring an open-minded approach to Latin American issues well advised not to take Meranto's courses. The problem, of course, is that in a school like Metropolitan, there might not be another prof. who teaches the subject.

Ralph E. Luker - 11/27/2004

KC, One of these days, I really must introduce you to Mills Thornton. I've mentioned him to you before. Mills is a distinguished political historian in the Michigan department and, to my way of thinking, at least, a conservative. One of our mutual friends only half jokingly refers to Mills as a monarchist. But he's also one of the smartest and best informed people I know.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/27/2004

Defending the "opportunity for false speech" should not mean that there are no penalties for false speech or abusive speech, including loss of respect as well as access to speech in appropriate venues.

Of course, I'm a notorious scold: I'm all for freedom of speech, but that also includes my right to object to incivility and indecorous language in forums where standards are set higher.

Robert KC Johnson - 11/26/2004

Ralph's post brings into relief a terribly important point: that while academic freedom exists for both faculty and students, it is of a different type. Professors receive academic freedom because their expertise and training in their given field should give them authority to speak freely on their subject matter. (Of course, figures like those quoted in my Meranto post below call this theory into question, but that's another matter.) Students, on the other hand, have no right to speak with equal authority to faculty members on academic matters: they are in college to learn, not to teach. Their freedom is thus a more limited one, a freedom to learn without infringements upon their First Amendment rights or being subjected to academic fraud (professors offering political opinions masquerading as academic content in classes).

The issue of students' academic freedom, then, really revolves around professors' conception of their jobs. In this sense, there's nothing inherently ideological about the students' academic freedom movement--a conservative professors is just as likely to abuse his or her academic freedom as is a liberal professor. But in practical terms, the movement has become ideological--which is too bad: in a History Department like Duke's, with 32 registered Dems and no registered Repubs, or Michigan's, top-heavy with the race/class/gender approach, there aren't any conservative (or, so it seems, even any centrist) professors, and so student complaints about infringements upon their academic freedom have to be one-sided. That certainly doesn't mean all (or even most) of these complaints are correct, but administrations should take them seriously.