Title: Campus Free Speech in the Mirror of Rising Anti-Semitism
Abstract: The Supreme Court has called freedom of expression—verbal and nonverbal behaviors expressing a person or group’s opinion, point of view, or identity— “the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” Channeling liberalism’s ideological ambitions, which specify that the right to liberty manifests itself as freedom of conscience and free speech, freedom of expression is seen by many as a moral and utilitarian right, a constitutional lodestar on which democracy itself is grounded. Despite evidence that liberalism has failed, its foundational goals have become inseparable from the belief that the quest for “freedom” qua “freedom,” when disconnected from the deliberate pursuit of the “good,” advances the engine of human progress. Many commentators, after elevating freedom of expression above other freedoms and goals, see the Enlightenment not simply as a secularist movement but as Epicurean—a modern retrieval of ancient philosophy.
This Epicurean flight from a common constellation of views and interests, is emblematic of modernity’s struggle with memory, or rather its penchant for forgetting. This flight culminates in political, social and cultural amnesia that yields compounding problems. This multiplicity of disturbances is attended by the birth of Marivaudian beings who are pastless, futureless, atomized, and born anew at every instant. A compound of disturbances ,arising from such utopian pursuits, also give rise to a Sisyphean challenge to rationality and reality. Multiplication quickens against a backdrop wherein modern elites insist on the perfectibility of man, nature, and society; this perfectibility is grounded in a trust in human ability and power, as part of a belief in amelioration without limit, of mutability without telos, and of progress without boundary.
The intensifying crusade to embrace unorthodoxy as freedom’s atomistic and highest goal, enables some to see campus speech freedom as “a fundamental American Freedom and a human right, and there’s no place that this right should be more valued and protected than America’s colleges and universities. A university exists to educate students and advance the frontiers of human knowledge and does so by acting as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ where ideas compete.” This competition-based and progress-infused aspiration provides a platform on which to defend maximum freedom of speech against countervailing efforts to fight the marginalization of students in higher education’s domain. Countervailing endeavors include: (A) grappling with anti-Semitism as a form of harm to one’s racial or ethnic identity in a larger fight to preclude bigots from promoting racial, ethnic, and religious hatred, and (B) saving the West from its current crisis of meaning. Other countervailing efforts may be provoked by the suspicion that universities have a mission, which is not fully compatible with the exercise of unconstrained speech. Provoked by such countervailing efforts, this article proposes an approach that will not end disputes but will ensure that disputes are fought out on a terrain that is distanced from appeals to, often illusory, First Amendment norms.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot