Group of 12 academics takes on the controversial issue of freedom of expression on campus

In a poor attempt to grab his students’ attention during a lecture, English professor Bill Dobson portrayed a Nazi salute during the pilot episode of the new Netflix series "The Chair." The act went viral on social media after students captured the moment on video, leading to Dobson’s suspension from the fictional Pembroke University.

While it's purely entertainment, the episode underscores a phenomenon that has become a thorn in the side of campus cultures across the country. Students and professors increasingly report feeling that they have to self-censor what they say and how they act out of fear of being ostracized, or “canceled,” as many have put it.

In addition to being fodder for the Netflix series, the breakdown of freedom of expression and academic freedom on college campuses across the country has prompted a group of academics to launch the University of Austin, which says on its website that its founders are “alarmed by the illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America's most prestigious universities.”

At this point, it’s widely acknowledged that the country’s political polarization has made its way into the ivory towers, resulting in speakers being canceled, professors and students self-censoring and certain viewpoints being demonized before they are debated. In a recent interview with The Business Journals, Colgate University President Brian Casey said that the question he receives more often than any other is “Are our students allowed to speak their minds on a campus? Can you have free debate?”

“It is an issue of great concern,” Casey said.

These concerns prompted a dozen higher-education leaders to work with the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, to create a guide for campuses to combat threats to free expression and help improve confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities. The 12 higher-ed leaders met every few weeks for a year to deliberate and discuss research on free expression issues and to hear from a panel of students before coming up with guidelines that campuses can use to once again become beacons of civil discourse.

The report, titled “Campus Free Expression: A New Roadmap,” identifies perhaps the largest risk to free expression on campuses: perceived tension between diversity, equity, inclusion efforts and goals of free expression. Social media also contributes to the polarization, with most students discussing political and social ideas online rather than in person, the report said, and “nuanced academic reasoning” isn’t typically happening on Instagram.

Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans and one of the report’s authors, said in an interview with The Business Journals that he hopes campuses use the report to start and strengthen discussions among community members about free expression. He added that examples and case studies in the report can be good “tabletop exercises,” to self-reflect about how individual campuses handle these issues.

Kimbrough said he thinks the crumbling of free expression on campuses started in 2015 when former President Donald Trump was campaigning for office. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Dillard, a historically Black university, hosted a Senate debate on its campus that included former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, which prompted protests and outrage from students. Nonetheless, Kimbrough stood behind his decision to host the debate.

“All hell broke loose,” Kimbrough said. “People just lost their minds and they wanted us to cancel. And I was like, ‘No, we rented out the space. We don't have anything in our contract to cancel this event because we don't like somebody who qualified for the debate.’ Going into 2016 is when we started to see more and more of that. So, I think this is more of a relatively new phenomenon in terms of the level of vitriol in how people are fighting back against speakers.”

The task force plans to visit campuses to help foster discussions about free expression in the coming months, Kimbrough added.

“Going into the midterm elections and just some of the stuff that is happening now, people need to prepare for this and I think (this report is) a fantastic resource,” Kimbrough said.

To foster free expression, the report’s authors outline the different roles campus constituents can play. There’s no one-size-fits-all, the report said, instead each “college’s approach to fostering a free-expression culture should be tailored to its unique history, mission, and community.”

Campus leadership, for starters, must show that free expression actually helps the “cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion by building student resiliency and understanding of the range of perspectives, opinions and experiences of others.”

Daniel Cullen, a philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and one of the report's authors said that restoring a campus culture of free expression will require the same intensity of commitment as diversity and inclusion initiatives. He added the task force recommends incorporating programs into student and faculty orientations that discuss "how a culture of free expression and open inquiry is central to a college or university’s day to day activity."

"That means the active engagement of university presidents and their senior leadership teams because when university presidents talk, the campus listens," Cullen said.

One approach that has helped some campuses, including Colgate, University of Maryland and University of Richmond, maintain productive and respectful discourse is engaging the community to create a free-expression statement. The task force recommended that the principle of “disagree with the argument, not the person” could be helpful in such statements.

For its part, Colgate put together a group of faculty, students, trustees and alumni in 2017 to create a statement about academic freedom. The group worked for 18 months to come up with a statement that then went before faculty and the university’s board of trustees, alumni council and the student body. The university endorsed the statement in 2018, Casey said. (Casey was not on the task force responsible for the academic-freedom report.)

“It has a statement that says we have to abide by rules of civility,” Casey said. “It's a hard thing to do but I will say we've had two very provocative speakers on the left since that statement came out and two very provocative speakers on the right. We said, we have this set of principles, so we will have these speakers here. It’s proved to be helpful.”

Likewise, Davidson College in North Carolina this month penned a statement affirming the private college's commitment to free speech and inquiry. Students, staff, faculty and other campus community members will have the opportunity to react to the statement, which was drafted by a group of students, faculty and alumni, and participate in conversations during the spring semester to discuss efforts around freedom of expression on campus.

The task force also recommends that leadership teams talk openly and often about free expression and convene campus groups representing divergent viewpoints. Boosting diversity of faculty and staff will also help to bring different perspective and viewpoints in front of students. The authors recommend that faculty should build free expression and viewpoint diversity into classroom curriculum.

When controversy does occur on campus, the authors said that campus leaders must avoid hasty responses and instead be prepared to respond with messages supporting the institution’s commitment to free speech.

For example, the report outlined an incident of a University of Maryland student sending a private racist and sexist email that became public. University President Wallace Loh held a live Twitter chat “in which he discussed the requirement to protect expression while acknowledging and addressing the consequences of hateful speech.”

Here is a list of the report's authors: