Should Irish universities introduce mandatory free speech classes?

When this correspondent went to University College Dublin, back in the mists of time, freshers used to get two things arriving on campus: a plastic piggy bank emblazoned with the logo of the local bank, and a pep talk on how to think like a third-level student. The message was communicated in three bullet points, which I wrote down and pinned to my bedroom wall: “Logic, rhetoric, grammer [sic].” It was only months later I noticed my misspelling.

By all accounts, students today entering college enjoy vastly superior freebies. But has their preparation for higher education improved? A concern increasingly raised by academics in Ireland surrounds the role of free speech, and whether pressure on students to conform to certain ideas is contributing to self-censorship.

Last month, Stanford Law School in the United States announced plans for a mandatory half-day of instruction on free speech and legal norms after students shouted down and disrupted a lecture by a federal judge on the campus. The heckling of Green Party leader Eamon Ryan at an event at Trinity College Dublin last month was hardly of the same order but it highlighted a tension between protesting against speakers and silencing them.

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The first thing to say about free speech on campus is that it’s a lot more complicated than people assume. Prof Terence Karran, a UK educationalist who has written extensively on academic freedom across Europe, says part of the problem is the absence of an agreed definition on what exactly we are trying to protect.

[ Is free speech under threat in Irish universities? A UCD audit raises concern ]

“Surprisingly, academics have been unable – or unwilling – to define a concept which is supposedly of singular importance to their teaching and research, but they may have a vested interest in resisting definitional clarity,” he says. Ahead of a public lecture at UCD on Thursday, Karran helps to signpost a few general points on the topic that could be used for a campus-wide crash course on free speech.

1 Academic freedom is not the same as free speech

Karran says the two ideals “are different things, even though they are often assumed to be the same”. Endorsing the view that academic freedom is “a cousin but not a sibling” of free speech, he says the former is “a professional freedom designed to enable the twin processes of teaching and research to flourish”.

By contrast, “freedom of speech is a wide generic freedom granted to all, to express their opinions and beliefs”. There are no moral or legal justifications for giving academics greater freedoms of speech than are enjoyed by other individuals in the public domain, when they are expressing opinions outside of their subject expertise, Karran states.

If the UK government decided to forbid Chinese students coming to the UK some universities would go bankrupt

2 Attacks on free speech in universities are not always visible

When one thinks of controversies surrounding free speech on campus it is generally to do with partisan or provocative visiting speakers. But a more systematic threat to academic freedom comes from commercial forces, particularly universities’ growing dependence on funding from undemocratic states.

“You can see that China is slowly but surely trying to strangle academic freedom in its own country but also in other countries where it has a foothold,” says Karran. Some universities in the UK have become so dependent on fees from international students, he adds, “if the UK government decided to forbid Chinese students coming to the UK, these universities would go bankrupt.”

3 Adopting a ‘student as customer’ model changes the nature of conversations

An EU survey on academic freedom contained in a 2019 report by Karran for the Council of Europe found that one in five academics had practised self-censorship. Lecturers are becoming more wary of attracting complaints over introducing difficult content matter in class or giving frank assessments of coursework.

“Students paying high tuition fees now have an expectation that, because they have ‘bought’ their education, they deserve a ‘good’ degree, irrespective as to the effort they have expended. This trend has been accompanied by a decline in academic freedom and the casualisation of academic labour,” says Karran.

He stresses, however, he sees a role for students in defending academic freedom and making sure it is “retained”. While academic freedom merits protection in its own right, he says there “seems to be causal relationship” between universities that uphold the ideal and those that excel in international rankings. “Universities that protect academic freedom attract good academics because they know they can undertake cutting-edge research.”

[ Is free speech under threat in Irish universities? A UCD audit raises concern ]

4 People have a limited right to heckle

In announcing her plan for mandatory free speech classes, the dean of Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, circulated a 10-page memorandum that explores some of the legal and moral issues surrounding “deplatforming”.

A key argument she makes is that different rules apply to heckling at an organised event, such as an educational meeting, compared with, for example, a public park. The First Amendment of the US constitution “does not treat every setting as a public forum where a speech free-for-all is allowed,” writes Martinez. “To the contrary, First Amendment cases have long recognised that some settings are ‘limited public forums’, where restrictions on speech are constitutional so long as they are viewpoint-neutral and reasonable in light of the forum’s function and all the surrounding circumstances.”

In short, people have a right to heckle but it must be balanced against other rights. The moment when a line is crossed is not always clear-cut.

5 AI threatens to tear up the rule book on free speech

When John Stuart Mill wrote his classic defence of free speech in On Liberty (1859) he couldn’t have envisaged public dialogue coming under the spell of artificial intelligence.

“A huge percentage of the utterances which we are presented with each day are produced by algorithms, which are not human and do not have rights,” American historian Timothy Snyder recently remarked. “I think it’s pretty important that one of the ways we organise our conversations around free speech is to make sure the utterances are connected to a person.”

Snyder here pre-empts a discussion about whether AI “speech” – the output of a chatbot, for example, or a machine-produced research paper – deserves the same sort of protection as human expression. Whether we will be able to distinguish between the human voice and AI as time progresses is another matter.

[ Why free speech is more complicated than Elon Musk makes out ]

Coming back to college campuses, AI is having a more immediate impact on the role of the academic. As well as usurping certain teaching functions, technology can be used for surveillance and performance monitoring.

Karran says one of his PhD students is researching the matter. “When he comes in, in the morning, he uses his swipe card to open the door, that’s recorded on the system somewhere; when he leaves it is again recorded; when he goes to the library that’s recorded ... so that will be an issue in the future. They will be able to monitor us very closely, and I’m not sure that will be necessarily a good thing when it comes to research.”

How we will think about free speech and academic freedom in years hence is an open question. However, Karran believes that a better conceptual understanding of these ideals is a first step towards guaranteeing their future. “Academic freedom was quite difficult to achieve, especially in the United States,” he says. “It would probably be more difficult to re-establish once it has been removed.

Terence Karran, emeritus professor of higher education policy, University of Lincoln, will deliver a public lecture, Academic Freedom in Ireland: De Jure Protection, at 6pm on Thursday, April 27th in Sutherland School of Law, L024. It is supported by the Irish Federation of University Teachers in association with the UCD school of philosophy, and is billed as the inaugural lecture in a planned series of Dublin lectures on academic freedom