By Stanley Fish, MARCH 20, 2017

Like everyone else these days, I’ve been reading and thinking about what’s happening on campuses when invited speakers are shouted down by student protesters. And my mind keeps drifting back to a statement of principles issued last March by a faculty committee at the University of Minnesota. Principle No. 1 reads: "A public university must be absolutely committed to protecting free speech, both for constitutional and academic reasons."

This statement is at best insufficiently nuanced and at worst false. The constitutional status of free speech at public universities has been worked out in a series of court decisions. The jurisprudence is a bit complicated, but it boils down to a key distinction between speech on a matter of public concern and speech that is personal or internal to the operations of the unit (i.e. a district attorney’s office or an academic department). If the speech at issue falls under the first category, it is constitutionally protected; if it falls under the second, it can be regulated in the same way any employer can regulate speech that disrupts the core business of the workplace.

Justice Thurgood Marshall described the adjudicative task. We must, he said, "arrive at a balance between the interests of the teacher as a citizen in commenting on matters
of public concern, and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs" (Pickering v. Board of Education, 1968).
So, in what might seem to be a paradox, the public university is "absolutely committed to protecting free speech" only when the speech produced is nonacademic.

When it is academic speech that is being produced the interest of the employer is paramount and speech is permitted only when it serves that interest. But isn’t that interest centered on speech because, as the Minnesota faculty put it in their draft recommendations, the university’s "larger normative commitment [is] to the free exchange of ideas"?

No, it isn’t. The university’s normative commitment is to freedom of inquiry, which is quite a different thing. The phrase "free exchange of ideas" suggests something like a Hyde Park corner or a town-hall meeting where people take turns offering their opinions on pressing social matters. The right to speak is held by all; no requirements (of rank, intelligence, professional standing, etc.) limit the number of those who have access to the microphone. (Limits of course may attach to time, manner, and place.)

The course of free inquiry in universities is not like that at all. Before one can speak, in a classroom or in the research seminar or in a journal publication, one will have
been subjected to any number of vetting procedures — votes, auditions, presentations — designed largely to determine those who will not be allowed to speak. Whether it is
a department, a college, a dean, a provost, a learned-journal editor, it is the business of the university to silence voices, not to license them indifferently.
To put it another way, the free exchange of ideas between persons who want in on the conversation is a democratic ideal; but the university is not a democracy; it is (or is supposed to be) a meritocracy, one in which those who get to put their ideas forward are far outnumbered by those who don’t. The process is more Darwinian than democratic.

This leads me to a conclusion implicit in the previous paragraphs: Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these values is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right. The operative commonplace is "following the evidence wherever it leads."

You can’t do that if your sources are suspect or nonexistent; you can’t do that if you only consider evidence favorable to your biases; you can’t do that if your evidence is far afield and hasn’t been persuasively connected to the instant matter of fact.
Whether it is a department, a college, a dean, a provost, a learned-journal editor, it is the business of the university to silence voices, not to license them indifferently.

snip

Consider an example much in the news these days: Middlebury College. The facts are well known. The controversial sociologist Charles Murray, co-author of The
Bell Curve, was invited by the American Enterprise Institute Club to speak at Middlebury about his 2013 book Coming Apart. The event was co-sponsored by the
political science department and one of its members, Allison Stanger, was scheduled to engage Murray in dialogue after his talk. That never happened, because as soon as
Murray rose to speak student protesters turned their backs on him and began a nonstop serial chant featuring slogans like "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away"
and "Your message is hatred; we will not tolerate it." After 20 minutes a university administrator announced that the event would be moved to another location where
Murray would give his talk, and that he and Professor Stanger would engage in a livestreamed conversation. That did happen, but as Murray and Stanger were exiting the
new venue they were harassed and assaulted; Stanger suffered a neck injury and spent a short time in a hospital.

What happened here? Well, according to many commentators, something disturbing and dangerous happened. That is the suggestion of an article headline in The Atlantic:
"A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury." But whose free speech was attacked? If you’re thinking First Amendment (inapplicable to a private school like
Middlebury anyway), no government or government agency prevented Murray from speaking. If you’re thinking First Amendment values like the value of a free exchange
of ideas, that’s not what the students wanted, and it was their show (after they took it away from the AEI club). And if it is what the Middlebury administration wanted, as
President Laurie L. Patton said it was, then it was up to the administration to take the steps necessary to bring about the outcome it desired.

If you were to ask me, "What would those steps be?" I would reply that I don’t know, but it’s not my job to know; it’s the job of the Middlebury administrators, and they
failed to do it. In its account of the affair, Inside Higher Ed reports that "College officials said the size and intensity of the protest surprised them." Really? What planet
were they living on? Didn’t they read the job description when they signed up?

Some Middlebury faculty and many outside observers blamed the students for the debacle, and there is no doubt that their actions and ideas were unattractive enough to
qualify them for the position of whipping boy. When an earnest representative of the AEI Club told the students that he looked forward to hearing their opinions, one of
them immediately corrected him: "These are truths." In other words, you and Charles Murray have opinions, but we are in possession of the truth, and it is a waste of our
time to listen to views we have already rejected and know to be worthless.

Now that’s a nice brew of arrogance and ignorance, which, in combination with the obstructionism that followed, explains why the students are getting such a bad press.
They are obnoxious, self-righteous, self-preening, shallow, short-sighted, intolerant, and generally impossible, which means that they are students, doing what students do.
What they don’t do is police themselves or respect the institution’s protocols or temper their youthful enthusiasm with a dash of mature wisdom.

That, again, is what administrations are supposed to do and what they are paid to do: Set up procedures for establishing, maintaining, and managing the various enterprises, academic and nonacademic, that fall within their purview. Pillorying the students while muttering something about the decline of civility and truth-seeking in a radical PC culture makes good copy for radio, TV, and newspaper pundits; however, it misses the point, which is not some piously invoked abstraction like free speech or democratic rational debate, but something much smaller and more practically consequential: the obligation of college and university administrators to know what they are supposed to do and then to actually do it. How’s that for a plan?

My advice to administrators: Stop thinking of yourselves as in-house philosophers or free-speech champions or dispensers of moral wisdom, and accept your responsibility
as managers of crowd-control, an art with its own history and analytical tools, and one that you had better learn and learn quickly.

http://futureu.education/wp-content/uplo...Speech-Fish.pdf