“Very Fine People on Both Sides:” Diverse Viewpoints, Truth, and Free Speech on Campus

Abstract

Reflecting a larger context of profound political polarization, controversies and protests around campus speakers have exposed deep social fractures, highlighting an important normative question for campus leaders and educators: how should we make decisions about what views are reasonable and thus merit debate on campus? Although it may be received wisdom that institutions of higher learning in a democratic society are obligated to provide forums for the unfettered, open exchange of ideas, that sense is built on the assumption that the ideas put forward for consideration are reasonable and defensible. Should any and all perspectives always be up for debate? Must campus communities provide forums for viewpoints that democratic societies regard as patently untrue or beyond the pale of what is right and good? In this article, I make the case that, because their missions center discovery and knowledge production, grounded in academic freedom, colleges and universities are far from spaces where anything goes. Valuing free speech does not have to come at the expense of students’ and faculty members’ pursuit of knowledge and truth, a (some might say the) fundamental mission of higher education. Campus speech controversies are not only—or even primarily—about free speech, I argue, but about knowledge and truth.

Notes

1 In this article I use the term “educator” as an umbrella term including faculty members, student affairs staff members, and campus leaders. In my view campus leaders and senior administrators are educators in important ways.

2 For example, as John Dewey (1941) famously put it, true beliefs are those that have “warranted assertibility.” He explained, “my analysis of ‘warranted assertibility’ is offered as a definition of the nature of knowledge in the honorific sense according to which only true beliefs are knowledge” (p. 169). That is, we believe things—they have Deweyan warranted assertibility—based on the best evidence that we have from our community of inquiry.