Two academic freedom experts made their cases for the role and scope of free speech in higher education during Colgate’s 2024 Constitution Day Debate: “‘Snowflakes,’ Truth, and the Future of Academic Freedom” Sept. 12.
The annual debate celebrating Constitution Day is sponsored by the Forum on Constitutional Government and the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization. Since 2005, Colgate has hosted a Constitution Day debate on campus focused on a variety of constitutional issues, including the constitutionality of the administrative state, abortion, affirmative action in college admissions, NSA surveillance, and free speech vs. hate speech.
Keith Whittington of Yale Law School, author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, believes the central mission of a university should focus on the discovery and dissemination of knowledge by academic scholars. Ulrich Baer of New York University, author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus sees a university’s mission as grounded in not only speech, but also in equality.
“Although there were some sharp differences, this year’s event was more Constitution Day discussion than debate,” debate moderator and Professor of Political Science Stanley Brubaker said after the debate. “With Prof. Whittington, we got the perspective of one at the forefront of protecting academic freedom, mindful that it is a complex, relatively recent, and hard won right, essential to an institution concerned with the pursuit of truth. With Prof. Baer, we got the perspective of a humanist professor, concerned with a foundational principle of equality, and a seasoned administrator, concerned with managing the tensions within a university before they hit the boundaries of law.”
Baer acknowledged academic faculty enjoy an incredible amount of latitude and freedom when it comes to designing their courses and choosing class materials, but said they also have a responsibility to keep up with the changing paradigm of their fields. As a former vice provost at New York University, Baer said it was challenging to adjudicate these cases because as a university you want to avoid getting to a place “where some group feels the only way we feel there is just treatment is if the other people are punished. You want to get to a place where there is still a possibility of saying ‘We can work with this person, and we have to remind them of what our shared objectives are.’”
Baer advocates a shift from looking at academic freedom exclusively from a speech lens, to one that includes and involves equality. Instead of focusing on the feelings of someone who is hurt or offended, he said the university should step in when speech interferes with the ability to be in the classroom and to participate the same way as everyone else.
“That speech actually runs into a problem, because universities, public and private, are federally obligated to ensure equal access to educational opportunities,” Baer said.
Whittington outlined his case that the core function of a university is for scholars to push the “outer boundaries of human knowledge, to ask questions we aren’t confident about what the answers are, to hold conventional wisdom and orthodoxy up for criticism, and potentially advance the range of human knowledge through that process.”
There was a time when a university campus wasn’t considered a place to have intellectual controversies, he said, and faculty at American universities realized they needed greater freedom to explore those ideas without having to worry about being fired due to complaints from upset students, donors, or members of the community.
“Part of what university faculty were arguing for in the early 20th century was that campuses were precisely places to have intellectual controversies and it was the job of the university president to protect faculty in those circumstances, not to punish them,” Whittington said.
Those efforts led to the foundation of the current academic freedoms enjoyed by faculty in universities today, he said, including the freedom to teach controversial concepts and materials in the classroom relevant to their studies, the freedom to engage in research and publish that research without interference from the university, and to express their personal opinions in public without fear of reprisal.
All debate guests were provided with a pocket Constitution and a copy of Colgate’s Student Rights and Responsibilities. Read more about the debate and speakers or view the debate recording.