Campuses and Classrooms

Assignment:

• Ben-Porath, Cancel Wars, Chapter 5

• Yascha Mounk, “The Real Chill on Campus”

• Eboo Patel, We Need to Build, Chapter 4

Today’s class asks what campuses and classrooms are for and how universities should respond when commitments to free expression, inclusion, and belonging come into conflict. Colleges and universities are not simply places where people happen to speak. Teaching and learning depend on expression, and educational communities need room for people to test half-formed ideas, make mistakes, challenge authority, and revise their views. At the same time, words can exclude, intimidate, and make some members less able to participate. The difficulty is deciding how institutions can sustain open inquiry without treating either free speech or inclusion as an afterthought. We ask who should set the boundaries of campus speech, when efforts to create safety become forms of silencing, when appeals to free speech ignore unequal conditions of participation, and how classrooms can prepare students to carry principled disagreement into democratic life.

Sigal Ben-Porath argues that campuses can serve as laboratories for democracy. Because universities pursue and disseminate knowledge, they can help rebuild civic trust and a shared basis for public reasoning. Her idea of inclusive freedom asks institutions generally to protect expression while taking responsibility for the conditions under which everyone can participate. The best response to harmful or exclusionary speech will usually not be censorship or punishment, but institutional support for more and better speech, clear rules, principled leadership, and deliberate opportunities for engagement across difference.

Yascha Mounk focuses on the gap between what students say they want and what many feel able to do. Most students value exposure to different viewpoints, but many report self-censoring because they fear social punishment and online shaming.

Eboo Patel illustrates the problem through a protest at Sarah Lawrence College (with a familiar face in it). The students understood themselves as challenging institutional power, while others saw the protesters’ access to an elite college as a form of privilege. Some students privately felt that the protest did not reflect the full complexity of their identities but feared dissenting from the group. Patel’s account asks whether higher education can help students move from critique alone toward the harder work of institution-building.