Free Speech Matters. So Does DEI.

Do those with the biggest megaphones value free speech more than the rest of us? Billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg proclaim censorship to be evil, even as the algorithms on the platforms they control filter the voices that we hear. Flooding our consciousness with misinformation is not as bad, they feel, as fact checking that may have biases. Let the people, after the platform has done its filtering, decide what they want to hear! The cure for misinformation will be the wisdom of the crowd correcting falsehoods through the marketplace of ideas. More speech!

The marketplace of ideas, emotions and images controlled by Meta, X and their competitors is not, of course, unfiltered. It’s just that the code doing the filtering remains invisible to the users. My social media feeds, for example, know that I enjoy videos of dogs doing cute things and references to the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. I’m fine with that.

The algorithm also knows that I go to Torah study and that on many Saturdays I like to post a line or two from the week’s reading from the Hebrew Bible. As a result, I am loosely connected to other posts on Jewish topics. I’m fine with that, too. But when the algorithm senses that I write things like “Jew-posts,” it may start sending me vicious antisemitic tweets. And there are so many to choose from. Racist posts are not far behind. My zone can be flooded with muzzle velocity, to use Steve Bannon’s words. I can’t just appeal to my fellow Torah lovers for more speech! Calls for hatred and discrimination will always generate more speech, more engagement, than, say, my biblical post that “there should be one law for you and for the stranger.”

Before social media, other mass forms of communication did the dirty work of generating hatred and violence. In 1994, for example, radio stoked paranoid fears of persecution and then detailed plans for mass killings in Rwanda. Station RTLM was effective in dehumanizing the Tutsi enemy, often the first step in dialing up organized murder. The Hutu audiences heard Tutsis described as insects—cockroaches who had to be eliminated for Hutus to be secure. After stoking fear and hatred, the radio station guided militia groups to villages where they could massacre Tutsis with impunity. If another radio station played Mozart or Brahams to calm folks down, it wouldn’t have mattered. Rwanda didn’t just need more radio stations. Once the media lights a fuse of hatred, it’s very hard to stop the explosion.

That’s why a healthy civil society depends on a marketplace of ideas that isn’t polluted by dehumanization and violence. When things are going well, the guardrails for conversation are implicit, and the market is self-regulating (more or less). However, there are times when someone (or some organization) with authority must stop the poisoning of the environment for speech. That’s why universities have prohibited threats, intimidation and harassment from their campuses.

These prohibitions can at times be controversial—not everyone always will agree on what counts as a threat. We can usually work that out. The educational spaces of a college need to be safe enough, but not too safe. We want to protect students from being hit on by their professors (they can’t say, “I love your hair today!” every time a certain person walks in the classroom), but we don’t want to protect students from being offended by ideas not to their liking.  

Several years ago at my university, many students took offense at an op-ed in the student newspaper critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. There were protests, newspapers were thrown in the trash, and there were calls to defund the paper. I sent a short statement to the campus: “Black Lives Matter and So Does Free Speech.” Not a few progressive students said they were offended by my defense of free speech, and I thought this led to excellent, if heated, discussions of the topic. They disagreed with my assessment, but I was fine with that.

At the time, I invited historian and journalist Jelani Cobb to campus because he had written that defenses of free speech were often a cover for racism. He gave an excellent lecture and thanked me for inviting him. The students were at first confused that I would have invited someone with whom I sharply disagreed. But they could see in our collegial example that we could disagree about some very important things and still try to learn together. Some were still angry with me, but we were talking.

It was the diversity of our views that made speaking freely meaningful. Without a diversity of viewpoints, as the Heterodox Academy has been pointing out for years now, free speech is just an echo chamber. Universities have undermined their own arguments for diversity by not working hard enough to promote intellectual heterogeneity on their campuses. The soft despotism of shared opinion has a countereducational effect. In the humanities and interpretive social sciences, especially, the student doesn’t hear enough dissenting views when departments hire only faculty with whom they are comfortable politically. Teaching suffers when political views pass as dogma in the classroom. Complexity is given short shrift when progressive pieties are presented as conclusions.

Free speech matters when the commitment to diversity creates a safe enough space for people with very different views to explore those differences. That doesn’t mean one needs to allow murderous threats to be broadcast—on radio or social media. It doesn’t mean we should join in the puerile scapegoating of trans people and immigrants by those with fearful power. But it does mean that many views that might disturb us will get a hearing. We might discover we were wrong to dismiss those ideas or learn why those ideas have seemed persuasive to others. We might discover something about ourselves and the community to which we belong.

Belonging is also an important value connected to free speech. In my cultural history class, the students are much more likely to have difficult conversations once we have established a sense of community in the classroom. Once everyone feels included in our shared endeavor, that they belong, they are better able to take a stand in opposition to others, or to explore ideas that they might not have otherwise entertained. When people are strangers to one another, or when they have deep-seated suspicions of one another, the commitment to free speech is not nearly as productive as it is when folks have a common purpose.

Free speech yields a healthy bounty if diversity and belonging are in the soil. It is also vital to ensure that access to speaking and the ability to be heard are open to all. Free speech needs basic fairness to be a meaningful value. If one guy talks over everyone else in my class, that won’t work very well. My job as a teacher is to keep him engaged, but not to let his engagement make it less likely that others will learn. Ideally, he will see the fairness in this, and others will be encouraged to play roles in the conversation. This is what equity looks like in the classroom.

Freedom of expression is vital for educational institutions—as are diversity, inclusion and equity. That’s why the recent Dear Colleague letter attacking DEI is so misguided. Of course, we should practice antidiscrimination, but just being “race neutral” won’t alone create the heterogeneity out of which a robust education grows. We need safe enough spaces for people from diverse backgrounds with a mix of ideas to learn from one another with courage and resilience, and we must ensure that access to those spaces and conduct within them are fair. We know how to do this without demonizing minority groups or minority opinions. We know how to do this without stirring up engagement through rage and hatred. And we can do it, as long as we resist the attempts by politicians and their billionaire allies to drown us out with invective and fear mongering.