The Princeton Faculty’s Anti-Free-Speech Demands: Some of the signers of a controversial open letter don’t stand behind its most alarming demand

By Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic. Excerpt:

"One demand in particular generated a great deal of attention in the media: “Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty.” The letter added that “what counts as racist” should be determined by the yet-to-be-formed faculty committee.

The prospect of a racism tribunal seems, to some outside observers, inherently incompatible with academic freedom. “Academic freedom is the application of free speech principles to the academic context, and academic freedom protects an enormous amount of free speech for faculty,” John K. Wilson wrote at the Academe blog. “If you punish all ‘racist’ or ‘bad’ research, it will inevitably have a chilling effect on professors who want to challenge the status quo. Even if the faculty evaluating these cases are thoughtful and reasonable, how many professors want to be brought up before the ‘racism’ committee and have their thoughts investigated for possible racism?”

Oddly enough, I learned that some signatories share these concerns. In fact, some don’t support the creation of a tribunal at all.

The traditional purpose, end goal, or “telos” of a university is truth, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued in a 2016 lecture. “But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos.” What happens, he asked, if and when truth-seeking and social justice (as members of an academic institution understand it) come into conflict?

Princeton’s faculty seemed to answer that question in favor of truth-seeking when it voted in 2015 to adopt most of the University of Chicago’s statement on freedom of expression, including this passage:

The University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.

That “fundamental commitment” is in direct conflict with the demand signed by hundreds of faculty to define for the university “what counts as racist” and to investigate and discipline racist behavior and scholarship. At a moment when so many are calling for Princeton to fundamentally transform itself, and its president is urging leadership to explore how its resources might be directed to counter racism, was the faculty letter a call for anti-racism to prevail if and when it conflicts with speech or scholarship?

To better understand the intentions of the signatories, I emailed nearly all of them three questions (I couldn’t locate a working address for fewer than 10). Here are condensed versions of the first two questions:

1) If what counts as racism is as yet undefined, pending the work of a faculty committee composed of as-yet-unknown members, how can you be sure that after it is defined, you’ll agree with the definition and that discipline should be meted out in accordance with that definition?

2) Princeton has 950 full-time faculty members. I struggle to understand how any guidelines on what counts as racist “behavior, incidents, research, and publication” would square with all their beliefs. How can an institution simultaneously guarantee academic freedom and mete out discipline to faculty whose scholarship is deemed racist by a definition with which they disagree?

Just 17 signatories replied. Many were only willing to be quoted anonymously, as they feared that commenting publicly would be socially uncomfortable or professionally fraught. One chided me for my questions. “It is disappointing to me that in a fairly detailed and comprehensive letter concerning anti-racism, journalists such as yourself and others have seized on a single detail and created more discourse about it than about 97% of the rest of the letter,” the English professor Zahid Chaudhary emailed. “Unfortunately, unless your piece is prepared to engage the full scope of anti-racist pedagogy and institutional change that the faculty letter details, I am not prepared to assist in distorting or amplifying the most misunderstood part of the letter.” He wasn’t alone in characterizing my focus on that demand as somehow “distorting” its meaning.

That criticism made more sense to me when I learned that some signatories believe the demand has no chance of being met, and treat it as something only bad-faith critics would take seriously. Of course I don’t want that, more than one signatory told me, as if anyone with common sense would already know as much. In fact, multiple signatories are vehemently opposed to the demand beneath which they put their names. “I deeply regret signing that letter,” lamented a faculty member with extreme misgivings. “The reasons were personal and are not intellectually defensible. I regretted signing almost instantly, before the letter drew public attention, specifically because of the sentences you cite.” That faculty member assured me that if the measure came up for a faculty vote, they would oppose it.

More common were faculty members who didn’t regret signing, and favored many of the letter’s provisions, but did worry about or oppose the racism-committee concept. “Your concerns are also my concerns,” the sociology professor Patricia Fernandez-Kelly emailed. “I abhor racism but bristle at the idea of curtailing freedom of exchanges in an academic environment. As we move forward, I believe we will find ways to ensure a balance between open debate and dialogue and a mindful attention to racial discrimination.”

The humanities professor and poet Paul Muldoon believes a great deal more can be done to redress the imbalances in our society but speculated that a racism committee probably wouldn’t fly:

For me, signing such a letter is an indication of my commitment to its broadest thrust while hoping to start a conversation in which the finer points will be debated. One point that will certainly be debated is the idea that a faculty committee might oversee “the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors …”

Such a committee is likely to be seen as smacking too much of a Star Chamber—probably benign and well-intentioned, but a Star Chamber nonetheless … It is likely to be seen as a threat to academic freedom, a concept we should honor while we still can. As you say, the definition of “racist” isn’t always clear-cut, particularly when a character in a play or a poem uses hate speech. I happen to believe that doesn’t necessarily mean the playwright or poet is racist any more than, in writing Macbeth, Shakespeare condones murder.

A professor in the physical sciences said:

Did I really sign to abolish academic freedom of speech? Of course not! I actually had to go look up the paragraph in question to make sure that was really what I signed because the letter had grown so much by the end everything/everyone was moving so quickly. We were told: here are our modifications. It was late, and so I thought, okay, it contains some points I want made and I’m not an identified author anyway. So no, there isn’t ever going to be a censorship committee. There is zero chance that anyone would create such a thing. That is unworkable and against everything we should want.

Now let’s talk about the spirit of what the letter says: it says we should not be racist. And we shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t be sexist. We should have values that embrace diversity, access, and inclusion. We should promote African American faculty. We should look for indigenous colleagues. In the hypothetical scenario where I made the statement “all Jews are bad” I do expect the University president would come knock on my door and say, “Are you out of your mind?” I don’t expect to be fired for that––there is academic freedom. But I would be welcoming it if a president came to my door and said that that is not civil discourse."