It’s Time to be Honest About “Free Speech”

GENARO MOLINA, LOS ANGELES TIMES, GETTY IMAGES

Colleges and universities, including Claremont McKenna, tout the virtues of open inquiry and free speech. On CMC’s website, one finds no shortage of language on how debate and discussion are the only way in which “we develop the ability to confront and solve complex problems and exercise forms of collaborative leadership.” Likewise, Pomona College reminds us that it is “deeply committed” to free speech, “including the right to protest.”

But these commitments to free expression are very narrowly construed. Students have the right to free expression and political activism up until the point when said activism makes material demands upon the university. The university doesn’t really see itself as having a commitment to engage meaningfully with the political expression of its students. In fact, the university sees itself as holding the right to repress political activism the moment said activism shows signs of actually acquiring political power. Moreover, the way free speech is construed and enforced by universities actually ends up repressing dissent and activism.

Students may petition and protest all they wish, but nothing actually compels the school to hold themselves accountable to student activists. For example, the wishes of 70% of CMC students for a racial-ethnic studies curriculum requirement, and the demand from over 80% of Pomona students for divestment from Israel and weapons manufacturers have fallen on deaf ears. It is a simple fact that power is held by the institution’s donors, exercised by its administrators, and wielded against its students when they engage in meaningful dissent that is perceived as a threat to the interests of the university.  All of this is totally rational within the logic of the university which views students as simply customers with no authority in the administration of the school.

The relationship between those who exercise power and student activists is key. How “free speech” as defined by the university becomes weaponized to justify action against demonstrators. Activism is only allowed within the bounds of institutional free speech policy. But when students seek to mobilize and gain political power— in this case, to end their universities’ investment in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people — within the bounds of these policies, their concerns are dismissed off-hand. 

But what happens when students feel a moral imperative to build political power? What happens when, for example, students see the investment decisions of the colleges around which their lives revolve as being so morally bankrupt that they are compelled to organize in response?

In that case, it’s no surprise that student activism invariably escalates from rallies and referenda to sit-ins and occupations (all peaceful, but that is beside the point). And when that happens, which it inevitably will when students are forced to operate within an institution that refuses to view them as having political agency, free speech and civil discourse are wielded as a cudgel against students for whom such civility politics do not provide a meaningful avenue of redress. 

What is happening on campuses across the country is a collective realization that students’ moral conscience, and the agency to act on that moral conscience, is not a gift bestowed upon them by university administrators, but rather something that is theirs to seize. But the very institutions against whom that power is exercised are the ones that a) possess a monopoly on violence and b) set the terms for what political expression can look like. Often, these restrictions are so extreme that any protest vaguely defined as “disruptive” can be met with suspensions, expulsions, and arrests according to the whim of an administrator. 

When students act on the assumption of their agency, they necessarily threaten the control of the donors and administrators. That is what “disruption” ultimately is in the context of protest— threatening the autocratic control of donors and administrators and daring to assert that students have a say in the governance of the institutions that define every aspect of their lives. 

It becomes crystal clear here that “free speech” in the context of a university has no substantive meaning. On the one hand, the university sees itself as under no obligation to listen to students who stay within the narrowly defined parameters of protected, powerless speech. And on the other hand, when students exceed those guardrails by demanding that administrators take their concerns seriously, “free speech” protections in demonstration policies are used as justifications for suppression that is increasingly assuming the form of militarized police crackdowns. 

Now the obvious objection to this is that students just need to quit sticking their heads where they don’t belong — you don’t have any say in the operation of the institution, so stop pretending like you do! 

All I have to say in response is that structures of power should never be mistaken as permanent. The modern university did not come into existence out of divine ordinance — it arose out of specific historical circumstances, and so shall it fall. We ought to stop thinking about authority as necessary and just simply because it exists.

And when an authority that supposedly sanctifies the value of higher education sees no issue in doing business with a nation that is engaged in wholesale scholasticide, then maybe we ought not take its authority so seriously. 

The response of administrators to student protests, and the moral depravity of the investment practices of universities more broadly, should point us to a new question. American universities are now closing out a semester stained by the unleashing of ruthless administrative brutality against students upholding the radical idea that higher education ought not be an investment vehicle for genocide. And if administrators and donors are so repulsed by this idea that they deem unceasing escalation and police violence to be an acceptable response to such demands, then perhaps they should give a better reason for why that is so than simply expecting us to play along with their self-serving charade of “free speech.”