Campus Discourse

Keynote Address to the American Bar Association Law Deans

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

As a university president, when I am speaking with people off campus, the question I get asked more than any other is about the state of campus discourse. 

OK, that’s not totally accurate.  

The question I actually get asked more than any other is “Why would anyone want to be a university president?”  

But the second most frequent question is usually about the state of campus discourse.

This past spring, that question became even more urgent as hundreds of campuses experienced encampments, protests, sit-ins, and (in some cases) violent clashes over the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza.  

University presidents have found themselves on the receiving end of harsh criticism both for suppressing these protests AND for allowing them to take place. 

Several presidents lost their jobs, and a number of presidents faced no-confidence votes from faculty unhappy with their responses to campus protests.  

How did we get here? 

That’s what I’d like to talk about this morning.  In doing so, I’d also like to talk about the important role that law schools play in helping their universities to address the challenges around campus discourse. 

The health of campus discourse is a topic we need to engage our communities about, both on campus and off, because it directly implicates our trustworthiness as institutions and our ability to achieve our mission of educating the leaders of tomorrow and fearlessly searching for the truth.  We need to get it right.

But conversations require good faith interlocutors.  And so, at the outset, it is important to acknowledge that a great deal of the concern we hear expressed about campus speech is coming from political actors with substantive agendas.  

For some on the right, discussions about campus discourse seem to serve as a stalking horse for the belief that higher education institutions are just too liberal.

That complaint is nothing new.

William F. Buckley began his career with a book complaining that Yale was too secular and too liberal. That was 1951.

In our own time, some conservatives who – as recently as four years ago – were lamenting the lack of freedom of speech on college campuses are now actively promoting bans on so-called “Critical Race Theory” or “DEI” with the express intent of suppressing broad categories of speech they disagree with.  

It was just in 2019, for example, that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a call to action for higher education institutions to protect robust freedom of speech.  

He said, and I quote, “it is imperative for the future of our society that our state colleges and universities protect a culture of free speech on their campuses,” a statement I think most of us would agree with.  He urged Florida universities to sign a pledge to protect freedom of expression.  And they did.

Just a few short years later, Governor DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act.”  The law purports to prohibit critical race theory in a number of settings, including public institutions of higher learning.

Its provisions cast such a wide net that – as one federal judge observed – they might be read to prevent a law professor from hosting a classroom debate between Justice Sotomayor – who supports affirmative action – and Justice Kavanaugh, who opposes it. But it WOULD allow that professor to simply bring in Justice Kavanaugh to argue AGAINST affirmative action.  

Florida is hardly alone in this pivot towards the suppression of speech.  A study by the pro-free-speech organization, PEN America, found that dozens of states have introduced or enacted legislation aiming to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory, with nearly 40% of those bills targeting higher education along with K-12 schools.  

But inconsistent rhetoric about free speech on campus is not coming solely from the right.  

This past academic year, pro-Palestine protesters and their defenders deployed the language of freedom of speech to chastise university leaders for suppressing student protest.   

Some of these criticisms have been sound.  Some universities HAVE seemed too eager to suppress or punish even nonviolent forms of pro-Palestine protest.  

But some of the criticisms have seemed less cogent.

For example, in April, pro-Palestine students staged a protest at a dinner for graduating students that Erwin Chemerinsky was holding in the backyard of his private home.  When he asked them to leave, the activists insisted that they had a First Amendment right to engage in that speech in his home because the dinner – although occurring on private property and not accompanied by any formal program – was sponsored by Berkeley, a public institution.  

What is interesting about these pro-free speech arguments from the left is that many of these same voices who are now deploying expansive theories of free speech in defense of pro-Palestinian protests have been eager to limit the speech rights of others – whom they have accused of creating unsafe educational environments.   

Last year, for example, leaders of a student organization at Seattle University led a letter-writing campaign to pressure the director of our Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement to withdraw the center’s co-sponsorship of an off-campus speech by Jonathan Greenblatt, President of the Anti-Defamation League, at a nearby synagogue. They accused Greenblatt of engaging in hate speech and asserted that that the center’s co-sponsorship of that off-campus event made them feel unsafe on campus.  

At a meeting I held with leaders of the same group this past spring, the students accused Seattle University of improperly suppressing their freedom of speech by applying viewpoint-neutral time, place and manner restrictions on organized protest.  

In the very same meeting, however, the students chastised the university for allowing a speaker from a local Jewish organization – Stand With Us – to appear on campus.  They accused the speaker of engaging in impermissible hate speech and of making them feel unsafe on campus.

Some faculty agreed with them, arguing that, because (in their view) Stand With Us uses an overly broad definition of antisemitism, it does not sufficiently respect freedom of speech and so should not be permitted to speak on our campus.  In other words, disagreement with a progressive perspective on the proper scope of free speech is disqualifying for the exercise of freedom of speech on campus.  (Wrap your head around that.)

Conservatives have also played this game of free speech whiplash.  In the wake of the October 7 attacks, politicians who had previously decried campus speech codes have deployed expansive definitions of hate and bias speech to attack higher education institutions for allowing too much anti-Israel protest activity on campus.  

Whether we are talking about the left or the right, we see the language of freedom of speech being deployed as a vehicle for advancing substantive political agendas.  Everyone – it seems – is in favor of freedom of speech, as long as it is speech they agree with.  But many people are equally eager to suppress the speech of their political opponents.  

The loudest voices criticizing universities today do not seem very interested in actually promoting robust discourse on campus. 

For some on the right, the goal is not to make higher education better.  It seems instead to be to erode public confidence in higher education in order to gain electoral advantage within a polity that is increasingly polarized along educational lines.

For some on the left, the goal seems to be to carve out universities as places where the only permissible discourse is progressive and where progressive students, faculty and staff are free to promote their own points of view without the discomfort of engaging with those who disagree.  

Neither vision is a recipe for robust campus discourse or – in my opinion – for the effective education of our students who will graduate into a diverse, pluralistic – and increasingly politically polarized – democracy.  

Universities depend on a robust discursive ecosystem in which the boundaries of acceptable speech are necessarily wide – so as to create the space for fearless inquiry – even as we work hard to engender norms of civility and empathy that are essential for maintaining a productive learning environment for everyone.  

This is a complex undertaking.  

To succeed, what we desperately need are good-faith conversations – about the boundaries of acceptable speech in an academic community, about the norms that are necessary to avoid creating hostile or unwelcoming learning environments, and about how to teach our young people the value of free inquiry and civil disagreement.  

These conversations are essential to universities’ mission to search for the truth and to prepare the leaders of tomorrow.  

Achieving these missions requires that we expose our students (and, for that matter, ourselves, as educators and researchers and administrators) to a wide range of people and ideas, including ideas that they (or we) might consider to be wrong or mistaken or even offensive.  Ideas that make us uncomfortable – or that offend us – are not the same thing as ideas that deprive us of a welcoming learning environment.

But the eagerness of some on the campus left to suppress speech with which they disagree – often deploying the language of hate speech and safety – combined with the increasing distrust of higher education institutions among those on the right risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the range of actual campus speech becomes increasingly constrained.  

This self-fulfilling prophecy arises because, in responding to external and internal pressures, university leaders are tempted to limit the academic freedom or freedom of expression of students and faculty who express controversial views.  

But, since most universities are overwhelmingly populated by progressive students and faculty, the ideas that generate controversy on campus tend disproportionately to be conservative. 

An example of this was the decision by MIT to cancel a speech on climate change by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbott because of views he had expressed in other contexts about race-based affirmative action in college admissions.  The decision came in response to demands by MIT graduate students who said Abbott’s talk – again, on climate science – made them feel unsafe.  

Confronted with episodes like this, in which even mainstream conservative views (like opposition to affirmative action) are treated as beyond the bounds of permissible campus discourse, conservatives on campus increasingly engage in self-censorship or come to view universities as places that are just not for them.  These responses further narrow the scope of the speech that actually occurs on campus.  And the cycle continues…

But the narrowing of what counts as non-controversial will not stop with conservative perspectives.  

As Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles argued in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “what begins with the exclusion of conservatives eventually [will] end[] up as a threat to liberals or those with a less politicized notion of their vocation.”  

If he is correct, we should expect to see increasing criticism of liberal and moderate “institutionalists,” as Teles dubs those who believe in maintaining a broad scope for intellectual pluralism and robust disagreement as important aspects of university life.  

One vehicle for undermining the space for pluralism and disagreement is the demand that universities take sides on any number of controversial questions.  

Over my ten years as a university administrator, I have witnessed a steady increase in the demands from campus constituencies for me to issue statements on topics having nothing to do with the university itself:  mass shootings, natural disasters, Supreme Court decisions, or – most recently – the conflict in Israel and Gaza.  

Two winters ago – at a time when not much was happening and no one was clamoring for me to issue any statements, I sent a message to our community that we now refer to as my “Statement on Statements.”  

If you Google that phrase along with my name, you’ll find it.  In that message, I say that I will limit my presidential statements to issues and events that have some direct bearing on Seattle University and our operations.  

My reasoning is that excessive university or presidential statement-making tends to have the impact of crowding out the speech of students and faculty AND tends to silence those on campus who disagree.  

On many campuses across the country this past spring – including at Seattle University – one of the main student demands was for the university to issue a statement calling for a permanent ceasefire and labeling Israeli actions in Gaza a “genocide.”  

Of course, issuing such a statement would insert the university into a political controversy about which we have very little expertise and no ability to impact the course of events.  This is an issue that cuts across our campuses, and so issuing such a statement labels those on campus who agree as “insiders” and those who disagree as “outsiders.” 

Establishing a university orthodoxy on controversial issues is not a recipe for the kind of healthy campus discourse we need to be encouraging. And we should see the frequent demand for university statements as related to the effort to further narrow the range of permissible viewpoints on campus.

That’s not to say we should NEVER weigh in, but we need to do so judiciously, when there are clear institutional reasons.

I was heartened to see that, a few months ago, Harvard adopted an approach that was very similar to the one I advocated for in my “statement on statements.”  (They did not cite me.)

The narrowing of permissible discourse on campus is counterproductive from the standpoint of our educational and research missions.

In a society where robust but civil engagement across disagreement is the rare exception, universities need to be a countercultural oasis where disagreement is embraced and cultivated.  

But learning how to engage in productive disagreement requires the actual experience of disagreement, and this in turn requires the presence of a diversity of viewpoints on campus and the ability to share them. 

The absence of viewpoint diversity shrinks the Overton window on campus and can make us inadvertently tone deaf or to (or dismissive of) those who do not share our views.

We are beginning to see some evidence that the relative lack of viewpoint diversity on most campuses is harming our educational missions, particularly for our progressive students. 

A recent essay in the Atlantic by Princeton political scientist Lauren Wright described her research on the impacts of the declining conservative presence on campus, to be published in a forthcoming book. She found that progressive students on overwhelmingly progressive college campuses rarely encounter people advocating positions with which they deeply disagree.  As a consequence, they struggle even to describe the arguments in favor of opposing points of view, whether that be abortion rights, affirmative action, or the conflict in Israel and Gaza.

In contrast, conservatives on campus are constantly exposed to opposing points of view.  The frequent need to defend their views teaches them to understand and articulate the strengths and weaknesses of their own positions as well as those with whom they disagree.  

Which group of students is leaving college better equipped to advocate for the views they hold?  Who will be better able to persuade their intellectual opponents?  

As Wright puts it in her essay, “[c]onservative students experience what higher education has long claimed to offer: exposure to different perspectives, regular practice building and defending coherent arguments, intellectual challenges that spur creativity and growth. Liberal academia has largely robbed liberal students of these rewards.”

We need to do a better job of offering the experience of thoughtful disagreement to our progressive students.  

Importantly, the role reversal on freedom of speech that we experienced this past spring – with campus progressives insisting on the importance of freedom of speech and conservatives (mostly off campus) pushing universities to suppress speech – may have created an opening for campus leaders to defend the importance of protecting space for the expression of diverse and even controversial viewpoints. 

Can we take advantage of this opportunity?  

I hope so, and I think law schools can be helpful to their universities as key allies in this effort.

The reason I think law schools are so important is that our profession is built on the notion of disputation as a pathway to the truth.  

The case method of teaching – and the Socratic dialogue – are built on the notion that disagreement and argument are intellectually productive activities.  

If we do not have actual disagreement in our classrooms, many law professors will try to manufacture it, having students role-play in favor of positions they disagree with or by themselves taking on the role of the Devil’s advocate.

Fostering an appreciation of the pedagogical value of disagreement is an area where law schools can lead the way for their universities, modeling this behavior for the rest of the campus.  

One way we can help our campuses become friendly to civil disagreement is to become more attentive to viewpoint diversity along with other forms of diversity.  This interest can applied in any number of contexts – in inviting speakers, in constituting panels, in organizing conferences, and (most consequentially) in hiring.

Because of lawyers’ appreciation of the pedagogical importance of disagreement, law school faculties should be sympathetic constituencies for these kinds of efforts. 

As Steven Teles argues in the Chronicle essay I mentioned earlier, a key obstacle to achieving a more robust and stable diversity of viewpoints on campus is the tendency of faculties to reproduce themselves over time.  

This dynamic has been a barrier to making progress on other forms of diversity as well.  But, when it comes to compositional diversity, most of our schools have made the issue an institutional priority.  As a result, we have achieved a measurable degree of success in recent years. The percentage of law school faculty of color, for example, has increased from 12% to 21% over the past decade or so.  The percentage of women faculty has also increased.  

Obviously, more remains to be done, and the shameful recent lawsuit against Northwestern shows that the continued progress will require vigilance and courage.  But the positive movement over the past few decades is undeniable.  

Over the same period, however, the diversity of viewpoints represented among law faculty has decreased at most institutions.  

Our ability to make progress with respect to compositional diversity when we set our minds to it suggests that, if we make viewpoint diversity a genuine priority, we can make headway there as well.  

Importantly, these different kinds of diversity are not at odds with one another. This is not a zero-sum game. Every identity group we are concerned about in when it comes to compositional diversity contains members with different points of view on a great many issues.  

I would argue that both kinds of diversity are vitally important to the educational outcomes we hope to accomplish, as universities and as law schools.  

We need to (and can) work on all of them.

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I know I’ve covered a lot of ground.  So let me briefly recap.

Today, we see criticism of the status of freedom of speech on campus coming from both the right and the left.  

The suppression of opposing points of view is the antithesis of the academic freedom on which healthy campus discourse depends, and yet many of the same people (again, on both the left and the right) criticizing universities for failing to protect the freedom of speech of their political allies also seek to suppress the freedom of speech of their opponents.  

Just because some of the critics of higher education are inconsistent and may not have our best interests at heart does not mean that there is nothing for universities to do to improve.

The increasing narrowness of viewpoint diversity on most university campuses has many causes.  But – whatever the cause – it presents an educational challenge that we need to be intentional about addressing.

To educate effective lawyers and citizens, to prepare the leaders of the future, law schools and universities need to expose our students to the broad range of perspectives they will encounter in their civic life, and to teach them the best and most effective ways to engage with others across their inevitable disagreements.

The future of our democracy depends on our successful development of those skills among our students – skills that involve both speaking with and listening to those with whom they disagree.

I look forward to your questions.