On October 17, 2024, UVA’s Old Cabell Hall was home to Free Speech @60, a discussion on the present and future of free speech. The event was put on jointly by Think Again, a free speech and viewpoint diversity initiative here at UVA, and UVA’s Heterodox Academy branch, a nationwide organization founded by Johnathan Haidt to promote intellectual diversity and curiosity. It featured a discussion with Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, facilitated by Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor and former president of Purdue University.
Speech Today
Together, Weiss and Daniels diagnosed some of the problems with identity, polarization, and campus speech in today’s society. Weiss says that swaths of society, predominantly on the left, but now also on the right, believe that identity trumps ideas. This viewpoint insists that your identity determines your beliefs and that assumptions about your identity can determine what kind of person you are. When disruptive or destructive conduct goes viral online, oftentimes the internet argues that the identity of the perpetrator can determine whether the conduct was right or wrong. This is unjust, Weiss says. People should not be judged on the sins of their fathers.We should judge people as individuals responsible for their own actions. This rise in identity politics has caused the political center to shrink massively. In response, people run to the political flanks where identity politics is embraced or rejected. Within these competing camps, people can find a like-minded community and moral orientation against the opposing camp. But not everybody embraces this radical polarization of the American political sphere. Weiss argues that this political shift has left her and the majority of Americans politically homeless.
Identity politics has had drastic effects on speech at universities. The campus free speech movement which began at the University of California, Berkeley in the 60s appealed to American values of freedom, speech, and equality. Now, Weiss claims, those who see themselves as the inheritors to this progressive movement are waving the flags of terrorists and shouting down opposition on college campuses.
Why Free Speech?
Why defend the speech of others, especially if you disagree? Because, Weiss says, free speech is a tool for the pursuit of truth. Free speech protects viewpoint diversity, opening the marketplace of ideas to include even unpopular positions. In this way, the dominant and popular ideas can be challenged, which will help either strengthen or replace them. Through this process, free speech ensures the progression and advancement of ideas.
Free speech also is a tool for conflict resolution, Weiss argues. Free access to a platform where thoughts can be shared allows problems to be resolved freely and openly.
How Do We Fix Free Speech in Higher Education?
Near the end of the discussion, Daniels asked Weiss what people should do to reform free speech in higher education. Weiss gives three exhortations.
First, Weiss wants better institutions committed to free speech. She lists the University of Austin and The Free Press as two examples of institutions that she believes live up to educational and journalistic values respectively.
Secondly, people should refuse to accept compelled speech. The dominance of progressive thought in our highest institutions has forced people to go along with things they don’t believe. Stand up to the mobs which seek to destroy and rewrite history. If you wait for other people to take a stand, no one will.
Third, stand up for burned witches. Weiss used J. K. Rowling as an example of a “burned witch.” Rowling spoke up against the presence of men in women’s prisons. She saw how language was being contorted to harm biological women. Weiss wants people to stand up for those who are attacked for having the “wrong” opinions in the mainstream political climate. “Courage is contagious,” Weiss says. Once people start to take a stand for free speech, others will follow.
Free Speech @60
This event was organized as part of a national effort to celebrate the 60 years since the birth of the free speech movement at UC Berkeley. Preceding the event, Think Again and Heterodox Academy hosted a discussion among free speech leaders from organizations such as FIRE, BridgeUSA, the Constructive Dialogue Institute, and many more. In an email, UVA politics professor and the organizer of the event Mary Cate Kary said that these leaders will be part of a prospective national movement dedicated to free speech and viewpoint diversity workshops and programming.
Professor Cary also mentioned that many of the free speech leaders thought it was appropriate for this new movement to be budding here at UVA, Thomas Jefferson’s university. Between the legacy of liberty left to us by Jefferson and UVA’s recent chart-topping free speech ranking, UVA might be the best place for a transformation of the free speech movement.
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