How Activist Speech Threatens Educational Values

Many universities are struggling to reconcile the principles of free expression and campus safety. This is not a new issue, but it has taken on greater salience in the midst of protests over the Middle East. As with every case of conflicting principles, there is no single right solution. We want all members of the campus community to have space to protest, and we want all members to feel safe from harassment, defamation or the threat of violence.

As we think about these tensions, here is a distinction that helps clarify the issues, but also complicates them. It comes from Iris Marion Young’s 2001 essay describing two archetypes of political actors, the “deliberative democrat” versus the “activist”; from her work I derive two distinct types of speech, deliberative speech and activist speech. Deliberative speech is the communicative process of inquiry, of seeking to reach agreement or compromise, of collaborative problem-solving or decision-making—or, failing all of that, at least pursuing an understanding of different positions and the reasons behind them.

Deliberative speech operates by certain rules: taking turns, listening to one another, respecting that there can be different positions on issues, and engaging one another with some degree of civility—even when disagreements might be vigorous and deeply felt. Deliberative speech is the speech of the conference room, the classroom, the laboratory, the university senate. For obvious reasons, it is central to the mission and values of the university.

Activist speech operates by very different rules. It is not speaking with someone else; it is a person or group speaking at them. (Prepositions are revealing here.) Activist speech is a political tool wielded to challenge, to criticize, to accuse, to disrupt. Let me be explicit in saying that activist speech is, generally, protected speech, except for cases of harassment, defamation and threats of violence. It is a legitimate, sometimes necessary, form of political discourse. For some, it may feel like the last resort to be heard when deliberative discourse has broken down, or when people feel excluded from or ignored within the deliberative space.

Activist speech can be a strategy designed to gain a seat at the deliberative table—where the other mode of speech predominates. (Young, in her essay, is especially attuned to the potential limitations of deliberative speech, and the necessity of activist speech as a challenge or corrective to those limitations.) But activist speech itself is at odds with deliberative processes.

What I would like to suggest in this essay is that this kind of activist speech, while undeniably of some value to students and faculty who are learning how to become effective political actors and citizens, poses several challenges for the university context; even where such activist speech is protected by law and university policies, it coexists uncomfortably with the mission and values universities exist primarily to promote. When we tolerate activist speech as a form of free expression —or engage in it ourselves—we must also acknowledge the ways in which such speech can compromise other, more central, university objectives.

Typically, activist speech has certain elements. First, it tends to take the form of slogans or chants that are about creating a sense of solidarity and shared purpose: The very speech act of expressing them, all together, helps to create a sense of unity and power, whether in speech, on T-shirts or placards, or spray-painted on walls. These slogans are pithy, memorable and sometimes clever, but they reduce complex issues into a convenient, oversimplified message. In this, activist speech runs counter to the aim of education—to explore complexity and nuance, to understand that difficult problems rarely have simple solutions and that seemingly desirable courses of action can have damaging long-term consequences.

Second, activist speech often operates through code words—key terms and phrases that don’t say exactly what is intended: For example, supporting “freedom” or “justice” for someone is hard to question, unless you know what specific policies or reforms that entails.

This has two effects. One is shrouding what might actually be controversial views in unobjectionable language. The other is that different people who are invoking these key terms and phrases might have very different meanings in mind about what they are assenting to; there seems to be unanimity at the level of the speech act, but this covers up actual differences and disagreements. The sense of unity fostered by activist speech, which is one of its key effects, is often illusory.

Third, activist speech draws sharp us/them dichotomies: This also helps reinforce the sense of group unity and moral superiority. The downside of this dynamic can be seen in the way activist speech characterizes enemies or targets, those who impede or oppose the righteousness of the path that is so clear to the activist. While expressing concern and empathy for the victims of injustice, the activist often exhibits a lack of civility, respect or concern for the views of others. When you know you are right, everyone else must be wrong. In this, activist speech rejects the value of deliberative engagement with other points of view. We often see this, for example, in the rhetoric of demands—what we are telling them they must do or agree to. This too is an antideliberative stance.

For all these reasons, activist speech, while protected speech, resides uneasily in a context like the university, which is built on deliberative processes. In an educational sense, activist speech works against the aims of acknowledging complexity and moral difficulty, of respecting the facts, of saying what you mean clearly and with full transparency, and of considering respectfully the merits of opposing views. It is certainly true that the deliberative settings of the university achieve these same goals imperfectly, and that specific people and groups sometimes feel left out of those settings or silenced and ignored within them. As I’ve said, the activist stance can be a challenge to those failings and a way of demanding accommodations that allow certain voices and points of view a venue in which to be heard. But this dialectic requires an underlying commitment to the deliberative mode, and that is what is often missing in current campus debates.

More than this, because activist speech draws overly sharp moral distinctions, because it fosters a sense of righteousness, and because it is often targeted against an enemy, it poses an inherent danger of lapsing into harassment, defamation or threats—if not even actually violent and destructive actions. That is corrosive to the maintenance of an open and inclusive teaching and learning environment.

For faculty especially, these tensions pose a deeper challenge. As individuals with political views and commitments, they are just as entitled to engage in activist speech as anyone else. As teachers, as mentors, as role models, however, faculty always need to be asking themselves a separate question, which is the example they are setting for students about how to conduct serious debate about serious issues. Too often the desire to take a stance of support and solidarity with student activists leads faculty to neglect their responsibilities as educators. Some may say, “My activist commitments outweigh my educational responsibilities.” But so much the worse for universities if they do.