#viewpoint diversity

By: Helen Pluckrose and James Lindasy

Published: Apr 7, 2018

There is a troubling misunderstanding of the principle of freedom of speech gaining momentum right now. It fundamentally misunderstands two central concepts of the principle — individual freedom and the “marketplace of ideas.”

Before these can be discussed, it will be necessary to explain what we mean by “freedom of speech” or more precisely, what we do not mean.

We are not talking about the legal aspect of freedom of speech such as specific laws or constitutions of specific countries around the principle of freedom of speech, e.g., the US First Amendment. These legal structures relate to the principle of freedom of speech, but they are not the principle of freedom of speech. That principle is much, much broader and extends much further than how governments may or may not interfere with public speech.

We are also not talking about some non-existent right to make any words at all with one’s mouth or keyboard. The “speech” defended under “freedom of speech” does not refer to literal verbal utterances. Some of these are rightly illegal — commissioning a crime, perjury, fraud, false accusations, breaking confidentiality laws, and espionage, for examples. Defenders of freedom of speech are not attempting to change this.

We are talking about a principled defense of the free exchange of ideas on many levels of society; an acknowledgement that this is a basic human freedom and an understanding that viewpoint diversity and the whole process of arguing, questioning, challenging, doubting, refuting, and revising ideas is essential to the advancement of knowledge, to social progress, and to liberal democracy itself. In short, we are talking about what Jonathan Rauch describes as “liberal science,” the development of which in Western modernity has a long and multi-faceted intellectual history. It includes key liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill but also thinkers and political activists as diverse as Puritans and secularists, Marxists and Libertarians. Though rarely seen this way, it is, in fact, an advanced social technology. Establishing the “marketplace of ideas” as the most positive model for a successful and progressive society took hundreds of years and much hard work.

The principle of freedom of speech is often misunderstood. Lately, seemingly following the democratization of information and communication via the Internet and social media, the misunderstanding of the key tenets of the principle of freedom of speech most often takes the form of an accusation, which we might call the Fallacy of Demanding to Be Heard. These accusations can be broadly paraphrased like this:

“You say you are an advocate of free speech, but then you don’t allow everyone to talk to you. You advocate for the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a way to advance knowledge and say that it must be open to everyone, but you don’t allow everyone to engage with yours. Therefore, on the one hand, you are saying that shutting down speech is wrong but on the other you are shutting down speech. This is, at best, inconsistent, and at worst, downright hypocritical.”

This is very confused on two central concepts of the principle of freedom of speech and these work on an individual level and on a societal level.

On an individual level, the Fallacy of Demanding to Be Heard misunderstands the concept of freedom.

Within freedom of speech, there are four essential freedoms:

The freedom to speak — Individuals may express all ideas without hindrance or punishment.

The freedom to listen  — Individuals may listen to all ideas without hindrance or punishment.

The freedom not to speak — Individuals must not to be required to express any ideas or speak to any person.

The freedom not to listen — Individuals must not to be forced to listen to any ideas or any person.

Given that, alarmingly, so many of the people who seem confused about freedom of speech in this way describe themselves as secularists and skeptics and have long fully understood and argued that freedom of religion includes freedom from religion, perhaps a direct comparison with the freedom of religion will be helpful here.

Under freedom of religion, people are free to believe any creed they want to, and they are also free not to believe that creed or any creed at all. People are free to practice their religion but not to compel others to practice it, observe its obligations, participate in its rituals and customs, or accept its dogmas, doctrines, or premises. Freedom of religion entails the freedom to worship and to believe in accordance with one’s community or conscience, and it also contains freedom from being compelled to worship or believe any particular thing at all. A secularist mentality understands this, and only those who reject liberal secular values — that is, fundamentalists — feel others should be compelled to believe or worship in any particular way.

In the same way that it is clear that a defense of freedom of religion does not equate to a commitment to allow everyone else to impose their religion on you, it should be clear that a defense of freedom of speech does not equate to a commitment to allow everybody else impose their speech on you. Nowhere within freedom lies the right to be heard. You have the freedom to speak, yet every other individual has the freedom to ignore your speech by whatever means are necessary, including by removing themselves from the vicinity of it. Being ignored does nothing to infringe upon your right to speak, to hear, not to speak, or not to hear. Your freedom of speech remains fully intact because nowhere in that is the freedom to impose your speech upon others. The right to decide what one listens to remains as inviolable as the right to decide what one believes.

This is the “freedom” bit of freedom of speech.

On a societal level, the Fallacy of Demanding to Be Heard misunderstands the marketplace of ideas

Some people concede that freedom from speech should be a right even for people who defend freedom of speech but add that they think it is clear that those who argue for the importance of viewpoint diversity to advance knowledge and then refuse to listen to (certain) other views are not putting their money where their mouth is. That is, they are behaving hypocritically because they fail to consistently hold a principled line on viewpoint diversity.

This would certainly be a just accusation of hypocrisy if an individual who argues for this then refuses ever to engage with any different ideas. This is not a just accusation, however, if they merely refuse to engage with every idea and every proponent of every idea. Far too often, the criticism “You refuse to listen to other ideas (or your critics)!” means “You refuse to listen to me.” That may be, and there could be a number of reasons someone who is committed to freedom of speech might not be listening to you.

First, your ideas could simply not be within their area of interest or knowledge. We all have to be selective in what we discuss. People have approached me (Helen) recently to discuss economics, drug laws, and adoption policies. I am not well-informed on any of these things, neither do they interest me to the extent that ideology and psychology do. I declined to discuss because my opinion would not be worth much.

Second, they could find your ideas foolish, tedious, or unsupported by evidence. We have recently declined to discuss whether women should be able to vote, metamodernism, metaethics, certain framings of the issues with firearms, and the claim that God exists. We have discussed all these in the past and find such discussions fruitless. You might think we are wrong to think so but again, we all have to be selective, and we retain the right to decide what is worthwhile to give attention to.

Third, you could be personally rude or dishonest in your style of conversation. We are simply not going to enter a conversation with someone who is gratuitously abusive, snarky, insincere, misrepresents our position, or deliberately misses our point. You could be giving off every signal of discussing in bad faith, particularly in wishing to prove yourself right more than to discuss the issue with someone you know disagrees with you. There is no point in pretending that what follows from such a situation is going to be a conversation. At best it is a winding debate, and at worst it’s just a frustrating monologue from the effective equivalent of a street preacher. Conversation requires give and take, and ideally, when there is disagreement, it requires both participants to be willing to change their minds about some or all of the issues. When this condition is not met, there is no onus placed upon us to participate or to listen because, again, we all retain the right to decide what is worthwhile to give our attention to,

Fourth, your ideas could be being presented much better by someone else. We have often been accused of refusing to engage with disagreement when, in fact, the person disagreeing with us is just doing so badly whilst other people are doing it well and presenting us with a much more challenging and therefore interesting and potentially productive conversation. It is quite possible to have highly intellectually & ideologically diverse discussions by choosing to talk to and listen to the most thoughtful, reasonable, knowledgeable and honest proponents of a variety of ideas and not to engage with the abusive, the incoherent, the ignorant and the dishonest.

This last point is particularly important to note. There is a terrible sense of entitlement to insisting that someone must listen, not only to counterviews but your counterviews. We are small social and political commentators and writers, and we already have to be selective with the views we engage. If the person you seek to disagree with is a prominent public intellectual, realize that they will be receiving vast amounts of critical feedback, some of it of a very high quality and much of it off-point and downright rude. If you want yours to be one of the ones they engage with, you’ll have to earn that. It’s nothing personal; everyone faces this same difficulty in being heard by busy and prominent figures.

This is the crucial element of the metaphor called “the marketplace of ideas,” which is being so badly misunderstood. The metaphor appeals to a marketplace. If you were to show up at a farmer’s market with your tomatoes, it doesn’t matter if they are the best tomatoes in the world; it is still your job to attract interest in purchasing them. You cannot force people to buy them. You cannot force prominent individuals to try your tomatoes and then promote them.If someone is allergic to tomatoes, doesn’t like them, or isn’t in the mood for them — or yours, or you — at the time, they have every right to pass your tomatoes by, and you have no standing upon which to demand that they change their mind.

Within the marketplace of ideas, the responsibility is on each vendor to present his ideas to the public by showing them as best they can and hoping people will want to “buy” them, that is, take them seriously and engage with them. No one is obligated to buy any product they believe is inferior or, in fact, any product they are not interested in — for any reason — in a real marketplace in a free society, and it is a blatant infringement of their rights to attempt to force them to buy something they do not want. Likewise, no one is obligated to listen to, engage, promote, or be interested in any ideas within the marketplace of ideas, and it is a blatant infringement of their rights to attempt to force them to do otherwise. Furthermore, people can refuse interest for any reason, which includes any bad behavior on the part of the vendor, regardless of the quality of the product.

This is how the marketplace of ideas works, and it works well. There is no point complaining that your stall has been shut down if people decline to buy from it. It remains open, but it is your responsibility to improve your product by making your argument strong, your evidence substantial, your point clear, your ideas engaging, and your sales pitch courteous. In this way, even if any individual is genuinely badly motivated to avoid your justifiable and insightful criticism, other people will still hear it and your ideas will ultimately win out over theirs in the marketplace.

Conclusion

The Fallacy of Demanding to Be Heard is often leveled in terms of freedom of speech accompanied by gleeful (and reckless) accusations of hypocrisy. Not only is this a misunderstanding of the freedom part of freedom of speech and the marketplace part of the marketplace of ideas, it is a form of entitlement which can even lead to harassment and bullying. It is an attempt to insist that someone who isn’t interested in you or your ideas is somehow failing to uphold critical liberal, intellectual, or academic virtues and then, often, using that against them. This can create a vicious spiral in which the entitled and insulting behavior of someone demanding to be heard will encourage the other person to ignore them even more leading to the former becoming yet more intrusive and defamatory. A better approach for advocates of freedom of speech is to speak when you have something to say, listen when there’s something you want to hear, stay silent when it’s better you don’t speak, and be selective about what ideas and individuals you listen to in a way that upholds your belief in the productivity of viewpoint diversity.  Allow people who want to talk and listen to each other do so and you will uphold the principle of freedom of speech. Don’t think you can force anyone to talk or listen to you.

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I’m incredibly drawn to dark academia’s glorification of intelligence and passion for knowledge, along with the centering of fine arts (which I’ve found lacking in so many spaces) , but I’m also consistently repelled by its homogeneity. This pervasion of whiteness, maleness, and wealth is deeply entrenched in a history of academic gatekeeping, and I’m always disappointed that it has found new ways to persist in the minds of young academics—the people who should be pioneering the expansion of academia to historically excluded communities. I admire dark academia in that it has cultivated an environment for young adults where higher education and the humanities are encouraged, but I find it devestatingly lacking in the richness that comes out of a diverse community.

The Cost of ‘Free Black Thought’

By: Randy Souther

Published: May 24, 2024

In December of 2022, I published on our university library website a research guide consisting of a bibliography of black writers with heterodox views on a wide variety of topics. By May of 2023, five months later, I had been labeled a racist, placed on administrative leave, and targeted for firing.

The bibliography was created and compiled by folks at an organization called Free Black Thought[1] whose mission is, in their own words, to represent the rich diversity of black thought beyond the relatively narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets. Although their website contains a variety of resources, my librarian’s eye was immediately drawn to their bibliography, which they named the Compendium of Free Black Thought.[2] They presented it as an open access work and encouraged folks to use it as they see fit.

What I saw was a fascinating compendium of writers, some of whom I recognized, but most of whom I was not familiar with, that I thought would be a useful resource at my library. We try to promote marginalized voices, particularly black voices, but this seemed to be a subset of those voices that we don’t often promote.

In the fall semester of 2022 I worked on converting a portion of this bibliography into a LibGuide, and by December, my work on the bibliography was mostly complete. I announced the bibliography to my library via Slack, a business communication and social media app that we use extensively. The first commenter on Slack set the tone indicating numerous concerns, including that some of the bibliography entries seem to them anti-black and some seemed outright racist. There were concerns that the bibliography did not represent our values and that it sought to undermine black activism. There were concerns that I had not consulted with anyone inside or outside of the library with expertise in Black studies. I was asked, “does the devil need more advocates?”

Over the holiday break, I received an email from a university vice provost indicating that they had received complaints about the bibliography and that they would set up a meeting with me to discuss the situation. That this had jumped from the library to the upper levels of the university administration was alarming. I felt at this point that my job was in jeopardy, so I turned my focus from my library colleagues to the administration and asked for union representation at the forthcoming meeting. At the meeting, the vice provost suggested that they were neutral in this dispute and were simply relaying the concerns of the librarians who had made the complaints. The concerns now were that the bibliography was not rigorous or academic, that I had not consulted with subject experts, that I hadn’t critically evaluated the bibliography, and that the bibliography would cause reputational harm to the library. At the end of the meeting, the vice provost said they would be in touch with next steps.

With this meeting over, I turned my attention back to my library colleagues. After consulting with my union representative, I made the decision to take down the bibliography as it simply was not worth all the trouble that it was causing. I wrote an email to my colleagues stating that I had taken down the bibliography and hoped that gesture would allow us to have a discussion. I explained my reasons for publishing the bibliography, using the Heterodox Academy principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement[3] as the context within which I valued the bibliography. I talked about my personal interest in terms of intellectual curiosity and the delight that I found in discovering certain authors. I also talked about my regrets in how all this unfolded, and my wish that I had managed constructive disagreement better.

This was not what my colleagues wanted to hear, and it made them even angrier. I was accused of inappropriately centering myself instead of my colleagues. The next day, with no warning, my colleagues from a department that shares reference desk duties with my department began boycotting their reference desk shifts, later stating that they had done so because I had not acknowledged the harm done to my colleagues, and further stating that they did not feel safe when anti-black and racist ideologies are platformed. I later learned that the library dean was aware of this action beforehand and did nothing to prevent it. Finally, I offered a brief apology to everyone, sincerely stating that I was sorry for the hurt that the bibliography had caused, that the manner that it had been introduced had been poorly managed, and that overall its publication had been a mistake. All of this I felt was true. I did not apologize for the content of the bibliography, however, because there was nothing improper about it. There was no response and the boycott continued.

At the end of January, I met with the library dean and he asked me for an update on the situation. I said I was waiting for the next steps that were promised by the vice provost. He informed me that there would be no further involvement from the administration at any level and that and that it was up to me to resolve things. I then held a meeting to update my department on the news from the dean. I let them know that after taking down the bibliography, explaining my reasoning for publishing it, and offering an apology, I was at a loss as to how to move forward.

Instead of offering help, they informed me that they would be asking the dean to replace me as department head and to disallow me from serving at the reference desk. At that, I adjourned the meeting. It must be said that although this meeting was emotionally intense, it was also calm and respectful on both sides. No voices were raised, and no harsh words were spoken. Nonetheless, a few hours later, I received a text from the union president telling me to expect an email from the library dean placing me on administrative leave. He said a number of librarians had told the dean that they were concerned for their safety. The email followed placing me on leave and banning me from the university, but it did not state for what reason. To this day I have not received a direct answer about this but have discovered that it followed from the department meeting detailed earlier.

With no explanation and no investigation, I was removed from the university for several months for being a threat to my colleagues. During this time, I had almost no contact with anyone in the library, but the attacks from my colleagues continued. They wrote a letter to me and the union leadership demanding that I step down from my position as one of the union representatives for the library. In the letter, they characterized me as, quote, “someone who espouses or condones racist and harmful views.” In short, I was branded a racist. In April, the library dean proposed that I could return to the library stripped of all librarian duties and performing instead duties of vacant staff positions and with an extreme schedule of late nights and weekends. In response, the union filed a grievance on my behalf. The grievance process forced movement from the administration and my eventual return to the library appeared likely.

With my return on the horizon, my colleagues mounted one last attack. A long letter to human resources that reframed their complaints as violations of HR conduct policies, and included a new charge: plagiarism, as well as a request that HR fire me from the university. I wrote a robust rebuttal, and HR ultimately determined that I violated no policy, no rule, no regulation or law. Administratively, I was cleared. In July, I returned to the library as a librarian, but minus my department head roles. My relationships, with a few notable exceptions, were in tatters, and the library environment was cold and unfriendly.

In the aftermath, I’ve asked myself how how this might have happened differently. With so many variables, I find it difficult to answer this question. The library administration could have chosen to mediate this dispute, but instead they fanned the flames and ultimately lost control of the situation. This was the most significant factor that prevented us from finding a way forward. That nearly all communications occurred electronically rather than in person was a significant factor impeding progress also. In particular, Slack, with its social media elements rewarded emotional responses. This isn’t a problem when the emotions are positive as they normally are, but when they’re negative, things spiral downward very quickly. And as I said to my colleagues on multiple occasions, I agree with them that consulting with others before publishing the bibliography might have changed the tenor and direction of this situation.

I have learned that constructive disagreement is hard and clearly requires more practice.

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Watch video:

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"Critically evaluated" is a codeword meaning that it doesn't comply with Critical Theory, which views black disagreement with oppressor-vs-oppressed dynamics as "false consciousness" and "internalized racism."

By: Harry R. Lewis

Published: Jan 8, 2024

Let’s go back to how Harvard’s current crisis began: charges of antisemitism.

Why antisemitism seems to be a problem at Harvard and other universities is one of the still-unanswered questions that precipitated the University’s downward spiral.

But, it surely is not Claudine Gay’s fault. It is not because Harvard admits antisemitic students or hires antisemitic faculty. No one is suggesting there are comparable antisemitism problems in other kinds of institutions — such as hospitals or libraries — so there must be something that uniquely happens in universities.

That something must be the source of our woes.

* * *

Unapologetic antisemitism — whether the incidents are few or numerous — is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.

The Harvard online course catalog has a search box. Type in “decolonize.” That word — though surely not the only lens through which to view the current relationship between Europe and the rest of the world — is in the titles of seven courses and the descriptions of 18 more.

Try “oppression” and “liberation.” Each is in the descriptions of more than 80 courses. “Social justice” is in over 100. “White supremacy” and “Enlightenment” are neck and neck, both ahead of “scientific revolution” but behind “intersectionality.”

Though word frequency is an imperfect measure and the precise counts are muddied by duplicate numberings and courses at MIT, this experiment supports the suspicion that the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive left.

For example, “intersectionality” was almost unattested before the year 2000, while published uses of “decolonize” have more than tripled since then.

Merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing.

When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.

While Harvard cannot stop the abuse of our teaching, we, the Harvard faculty, can recognize and work to mitigate these impacts.

The political bias in our faculty is now widely accepted. One solution is to use a kind of affirmative action program for conservative thinkers to change the faculty, but that idea is noxious and misses a crucial point.

Professors should not be carrying their ideologies into the classroom. Our job as teachers of “citizens and citizen-leaders” is not to indoctrinate students, but to prepare them to grapple with all of the ideas they will encounter in the societies they will serve.

Instead, individual faculty might diversify what they teach. Committees and departments could enforce a standard that curricula exhibit intellectual diversity and a variety of agreed-upon topics and techniques.

If done correctly, it would not infringe upon individual academic freedom to allow our faculty colleagues to have a stronger role in shaping each others’ syllabi and curricula. Nor would it be improper for the Board of Overseers — with its elaborate Visiting Committee structure — to weigh in on the evident political biases and ideological vectors in our educational program.

As obvious as this all may sound, it would be a big change from the present.

Over the fifty years I have been on the Harvard faculty, the expectation has evolved that individual Harvard professors are free to teach whatever they wish to whomever they wish. It was once the norm for faculty to rotate through courses of unpredictable size and with stable curricula, but now enrollments are predetermined quite rigorously and even introductory courses may change their reading lists and lecture topics drastically when new professors take charge.

Curricular committees theoretically vet these courses, but not annually, and not for the kinds of political biases that have skewed undergraduate education. The result is to favor the hip, current, and “relevant,” over foundational learning — what instructors personally believe to the exclusion of what students should learn to participate knowledgeably in the world outside our gates.

* * *

The leftward shift of Harvard’s faculty deserves scrutiny. Judicious changes to the hiring and promotion process can thwart intellectual inbreeding — just as the current tenure system, now tired and manipulable, was once an innovative revamp of a system that resulted in ethnic and gender homogeneity. Now is the time to change a system that will take decades to alter the composition of the faculty.

But there is no need to wait for that reform.

The goal is not to give students a choice between courses reflecting different ideologies. Harvard should instead expect instructors to leave their politics at the classroom door and touch both sides of controversial questions, leaving students uncertain where their sympathies lie. Professors should have no more right to exclude from their teaching ideas with which they disagree than students should expect to be shielded from ideas they find disagreeable.

All that is required is for faculty to exhibit some humility about the limits of their own wisdom and embrace the formula for educational improvement voiced by Le Baron R. Briggs, a Harvard dean, more than a century ago: “increased stress on offering what should be taught rather than what the teachers wish to teach.”

By: Rikki Schlott

Published: Sep 6, 2023

Harvard University is officially 2023’s worst school for free speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings on Wednesday, which dubbed the state of free speech at the Ivy League school “abysmal.”

“I’m not totally surprised,” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at FIRE, told The Post. “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”

Despite being the most acclaimed academic institution in the country, Harvard received a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale — a full 11 points behind the next-worst school.

FIRE says the dismal score was “generous,” considering Harvard’s actual score was a -10.69, according to its

Harvard’s score was dragged down by the fact that nine professors and researchers there faced calls to be punished or fired based on what they had said or written — and seven of the nine were actually professionally disciplined.

“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero, but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions,” Stevens said.

The score is calculated based on factors including how strong the school’s policies in favor of free speech are and how many professors, students and campus speakers have been targeted by authorities for their speech.

Bonuses are applied if the school’s administrators stand up for the rights of those whose free speech was threatened.

The rankings also take into account student sentiment about free speech based on polling FIRE conducted in partnership with research firm College Pulse.

Harvard’s lowest rank comes despite the fact that more than 100 of its professors banded together earlier this year to form a Council on Academic Freedom to defend open inquiry on campus.

“We are in a crisis time right now,” Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and member of the council, told The Post in April. “Many, many people are being threatened with — and actually put through — disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom.”

Second-worst on the list was the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, followed by the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Georgetown University in DC, and Fordham University in the Bronx and Manhattan.

Although Columbia University took the prize of worst school for free speech last year, it ranked 214th out of 248 this time around.

The number one school for free speech was Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan. The school earned 78.01 out of 100 possible points. 

“I’m not necessarily surprised that a technological school has a better speech climate, primarily for the reason that they don’t really talk as much about controversial topics,” Stevens said. “They’re there to make things work as engineers.”

Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University and Florida State University rounded out the top five.

FIRE’s survey of 55,000 current students from 254 universities also yielded some staggering results.

Fifty-six percent of students worry about getting canceled for something they said, and 27% said it’s acceptable to use violence to stop campus speech in some circumstances.

As FIRE continues to be inundated with allegations of free speech violations, Stevens says the erosion of campus discourse should concern everyone.

“I’d say the state of free speech on campus is stagnant at best, and possibly a little worse than last year.”

It is so hard! I suspect Rep. Norman believes the notion that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was staged. I don't understand how he does.

Norman is a multimillionaire property developer running for Governor of South Carolina. Looking over some of his campaign materials many of his proposals appear really stupid to me. But I don't think he's a stupid person.

Here is an examination of viewpoint diversity by Lisa Siragainian, Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity: The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism.