Why Academic Freedom Is Not The Same As Free Speech: Michael Bérubé (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Professor Michael Bérubé’s talk titled “Why Academic Freedom Is Not The Same As Free Speech” at TEDxPSU 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, and good day. You know, you may have noticed that every time there’s a political controversy of some kind on an American campus, someone will appeal to the principles of free speech and academic freedom, sometimes in the same breath as if they’re the same thing. Well they’re not, and that’s what I’m here to tell you today. Free speech we mostly understand.

It covers pretty much everything except fraud, defamation, child pornography, and threats of imminent violence. Courts have generally decided that the violence has to be really imminent. It’s basically a neo-Nazi running at you with a tiki torch right now.

That matters. But academic freedom is not free speech. And so Jennifer Ruth of Portland State University and I wrote an entire book to say so, because we had noticed over the past ten years or so that people were beginning to confuse and even sometimes conflate these two concepts, free speech and academic freedom, sometimes mistakenly, sometimes deliberately.

Reasons for Confusing Free Speech and Academic Freedom

I think there are two reasons for this. One is that a lot of these controversies involve invited speakers. And while all these invited speakers are really matters of academic freedom, some, like this one, involves alt-right trolls whose only purpose is to weaponize free speech, generate outrage, and own the libs, and make a pile of money doing it.

But there’s nothing academic about an event like that. It serves no legitimate intellectual purpose, right? So there’s another reason as well, though, and it’s a little more complicated.

The Supreme Court decided in 1967 that academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment.

It’s not clear what that means. So I like to draw on a metaphor.

Aha! It’s on the horizon, so appropriate for today. Free speech is an ocean. It’s huge. It’s deep. It’s vast. Academic freedom is a ship on the ocean. It won’t work without the ocean, but it is distinct from it.

Who is Covered by Academic Freedom?

Okay, well, who exactly is on this ship? That’s a crucial question, and the courts are all over the place on answering it. There’s no coherence.

It could be the university itself, like Penn State, which should be autonomous from external political control, right? Or it could be individual professors themselves in their research or teaching their classes. Or it could be a collective right of professors as a whole, which is a more nebulous concept.

So let us go to the American Association of University Professors, an organization that actually defined the concept and continues to defend it and refine it today. Academic freedom has three components.

Components of Academic Freedom

The first is not terribly controversial. We’re entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results. I can only think of a couple of instances in which that causes trouble.

One is when a corporation sponsors research and then doesn’t like the results and tries to suppress it. The other involves, I would say, researchers in climate change. Michael Mann taught here for many years, and he was subject to constant political harassment, and now he’s at UPenn, and he’s been fighting back.

So there, you know, his right to publish his research and do his research has been challenged for quite some time, but usually this is not the case. What usually comes up more often is number two. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.

This sometimes happens, and sometimes people read this as if it’s trying to suppress controversy. So the AAUP, in 1970, interesting time, what had just happened, the 60s, interesting time for campuses. So the AAUP went back and did a gloss on this, and here’s the interpretive comment.

The intent of the statement is not to discourage what is controversial. Controversy is at the heart of the academic inquiry that the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.

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Okay. For me, the key word there is persistently, because if a professor makes a one-off comment about the events of the day or a tsunami or something, no harm, no foul. But persistent intrusion of irrelevant material, not covered by academic freedom. It’s not carte blanche.

Extramural Speech

The third thing involves college and university professors speaking as citizens. I’ll get back to this one. It’s tricky, and this is actually where most of the controversies occur. Thank you, medium formerly known as Twitter. But it happens whenever we speak not as professors but as citizens. That is called extramural speech outside the walls of the academy.

Okay. So let me gloss this by way of Yale law professor Robert Post, who distinguishes between academic freedom and free speech like so. Free speech, he says, is a matter of democratic legitimation, meaning that no democratic government is legitimate if it suppresses public criticism of it by its citizens.

So all citizens must have free speech, even if they’re criticizing the government by claiming that the government is actually controlled by alien lizard people. A distressingly large number of people believe things like this. Again, please, just Google David Icke, will find the author and creator of alien lizard people theory.

Also, lots of people believe the Apollo moon landing did not happen. And now we learn there are millions of people who believe that the Democratic Party is running a child smuggling ring through pizza parlors. Like I said, remember ocean? Yeah, the ocean’s big. And the ocean is big because the earth is flat. I just want to make that clear.

Democratic Legitimation vs. Democratic Competence

Democratic legitimation involves putting up with all this nonsense. Democratic competence, though, is something very different. This is, again, Robert Post’s distinction.

Academic freedom, he says, involves democratic competence. You have to have some degree of scholarly expertise, which is completely irrelevant to the First Amendment. The First Amendment doesn’t say anything about whether you know what you’re talking about. Academic freedom does.

And it’s a degree of scholarly expertise necessary to comment knowledgeably about a subject, hopefully for the common good. Because it’s getting harder, I think, to say, well, scholarly expertise is a thing. Because, first of all, it can only be determined by other scholars, right? It’s inevitably elitist and not democratic at all. And it’s getting harder and harder to defend and explain rigorous intellectual vetting processes that you need for scholarly expertise when millions of people are getting their medical advice from Joe Rogan. Or by doing their own research on the internet. That’s democratic legitimation. It has nothing to do with democratic competence.

Scholarly Expertise and Academic Orthodoxy

Well, let me speak for a moment about that form of expertise. I made a note. Because I’ve gotten some criticism about this. The argument is that if you’re basing academic freedom on scholarly expertise, that’s ultimately a conservative argument because academic orthodoxies get entrenched and people can’t challenge them. Well, that does happen.

But actually, academic orthodoxies change all the time. It’s part of what academic freedom enables. A person who is working at the bleeding edge of their discipline today and considered a fringe figure might, in fact, turn out to be hailed a generation from now as a brilliant innovator. This is basically the history of science.

But it happens in the humanities and arts as well. So disciplinary orthodoxy, disciplinary expertise, is actually a moving target. And then there’s the fact that new disciplines emerge where there were none before.

New Disciplinary Fields

I’ll give you an example. Me. I’m now an expert in something called disability studies in the humanities. I don’t have a degree in disability studies. That’s because when I got my PhD in English in 1989, there was no such thing as disability studies in the humanities.

And over the course of my career, I inadvertently helped to create such a thing. That book, “Life As We Know It,” that was mentioned. I was part of it. It’s about my son, Jamie, who has Down syndrome.

I could say the same thing, though, about fields like queer theory, postcolonial studies, environmental humanities. And I’m picking the arts and humanities here because people don’t always realize, yeah, new knowledge gets generated in the arts and humanities. It’s not just the sciences. This is what’s been going on for the last 30 or 40 years.

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New forms of knowledge, new disciplinary fields. So again, that’s why you need a very broad sense of academic freedom, a very flexible sense of academic freedom. This is how new knowledge is generated in a free and open society. Oh, and by free and open society, I mean a society in which politicians are not trying to criminalize entire bodies of thought, like critical race theory.

Extramural Speech Revisited

All right, now let’s get back to that extramural speech thing. Professors talking as citizens. When they speak and write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censoring or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations.

As scholars in educational offices, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence, they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect to the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they’re not speaking for the institution. Well, that’s a very gentlemanly ideal, right, especially the bit about showing appropriate restraint and respect for the opinions of others. I mean, come on, social media was designed precisely to trash those ideas.

And we don’t really uphold that so much, but we do make it clear. We try to make it clear we are not speaking for the institution. Anybody who works for anybody has to do that. I used to have a Twitter account. It said, “my opinions here are mine, all mine.”

The Paradox of Extramural Speech in the US

Okay, so the interesting thing here is that this is unique to the United States. This idea of academic freedom actually incorporates free speech because the idea is that I didn’t give up my First Amendment rights when I took a good job at Penn State or Illinois or any other place, right? So we still have to be free to speak and write as citizens, and the idea is to have as broad a career of intellectual freedom as possible.

However, this produces a paradox, and stay with me because this is going to get weird. The paradox is, when I do this, and that is me, I was much younger, and showing no restraint, bullhorn and all, here’s the paradox. When a professor speaks with a bullhorn in a public square on social media, they have more latitude, more freedom when they’re speaking about something they know nothing about than when they’re speaking as an expert, and if that sounds weird, but think of it this way.

The idea is that an electrical engineer who’s a Holocaust denier is just a crank, but a historian who’s a Holocaust denier is obviously incompetent to be a historian. That’s a real example. Arthur Butz, now retired, taught for many years at Northwestern, he was an electrical engineer and on his spare time, a Holocaust denier. This was very embarrassing for Northwestern, but they determined that it’s just his weird hobby over there, doesn’t affect his electrical engineering career.

Personal Examples of the Paradox

Well, let me take an example closer to home, again, me, because I’m here. If I spend the next few minutes trying to persuade you that the last five Super Bowls were rigged by the gambling industry, and that tonight’s game will be rigged on behalf of you-know-who, Chiefs 33, 49ers 27, you heard it here first, Taylor’s version, okay, no harm done, right? I’m just a crank with a crackpot conspiracy theory, again, believed by millions, but not really an issue.

If, however, I were to go on a rant over the next few minutes saying that it was right and just for people with intellectual disabilities to be sterilized, institutionalized, and outright killed in the first couple decades of this century, I would be making a very good case that I’m absolutely incompetent as a professor of disability studies and probably incompetent as a professor of anything. Okay, now the question. What happens when professors do do things like that?

What happens when they speak out of their realms of disciplinary expertise and they wind up both, say, espousing things like geocentrism or crackpot conspiracy theories or beliefs in white supremacy? Well, one of the critics of our book wrote a review in which he said, oh, come on, I mean, most professors are pretty liberal. How many white supremacist professors are there, really? How big is this problem?

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Legitimacy of White Supremacy in Academia

And I replied to him in an exchange at the website of the Heterodox Academy and I said, look, it’s not a question of numbers. You’re probably right. There aren’t too many white supremacist professors running around out there. But that’s not the question.

The question is whether beliefs in white supremacy have any legitimate intellectual foundations. Spoiler alert, they don’t. And so defending them as part of academic freedom is kind of like saying, well, my area of disciplinary expertise is phrenology, the racist pseudoscience that flourished at the turn of the 20th century and that purported to be able to tell whether someone had a propensity for criminal violence by measuring their skulls with calipers. That was a thing believed by millions of people.

Yeah, phrenology. Well, you know what? Sometimes professors do get fired for espousing crackpot conspiracy theories. I’ll give you two examples from about 10 years ago.

Examples of Professors Fired for Conspiracy Theories

One was Joy Karega at Oberlin College. She subscribed to any number of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one of which was that the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the satirical magazine, was not that carried out by Islamist terrorists, but by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. She also believes and would say that ISIS is not an Islamist terrorist organization. It is a creation of Mossad and the CIA.

Does this disqualify her as a professor of rhetoric and communication? Her faculty peers at Oberlin said yes, and that’s important. It was her faculty peers, not the administration, not donors and trustees, not passing passersby or politicians. Her faculty peers said this is incompetent.

This is not covered by academic freedom. Another example, James Tracy from Florida Atlantic University, a professor of media and communications. Again, that’s important, too, because he is a professor of media and communications who is telling people that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was in fact a false flag meant to generate support for gun control. He also went so far as actually to harass and torment one of the parents of the murdered children.

There is no sense in which that behavior or those beliefs is covered by academic freedom. On the other hand, as Jennifer and I point out in an article we published two years ago, Mark Crispin Miller, he’s a professor, a very widely published and renowned professor of media and communications at NYU, ordinarily considered a reputable university. Miller actually believes in almost every single conspiracy theory of the last 25 years, starting from 9-11 truth and wisdom right through to Sandy Hook. And he has spent the last few years spreading really bizarre conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines.

The Importance of Distinguishing Academic Freedom and Free Speech

OK, then that is why it is so important to distinguish between academic freedom and freedom of speech, because if you don’t, you wind up with a conception of academic freedom in which anything goes. It’s not academic at all. Now, not everyone considers beliefs in white supremacy to be part of racist pseudoscience that’s now discredited, but that’s exactly what they are. Those beliefs are part of that long history of belief that sort of came to a culmination in the first half of the 20th century and laid the groundwork for eugenics and genocide.

I think such beliefs not only have no intellectual foundation, they’re right up there with, say, beliefs in the gas called phlogiston and the substance known as the alchemist philosopher’s stone, and maybe the efficacy of human sacrifice. None of those beliefs have any intellectual foundation, none of them are covered by academic freedom, nor should they be. Thank you very much.