It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth
Johns Hopkins University Press
304 pp., $29.95

I have spent considerable energy recently working to defend the need for expertise. Unfortunately, this is not an easy thing to accomplish. Much that experts have said and done in recent decades militates against giving them any deference at all. That’s impossible to deny. Yet we do need competent experts. So I try, in my cautious way, to defend the category, if not the particular people who tend to occupy it in contemporary America.

Books like this one make me want to throw up my hands and give up altogether.

It’s Not Free Speech is a shameful exercise in the deceptive assertion of the prerogatives of expertise by people who consistently break their own rules regarding how expertise is supposed to work. The authors, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, demonstrate by their every word that their claim to respect expertise as something more than just an exercise of power in the service of an ideology is utterly hollow.

This is evident from the book’s first pages. The authors begin with ignorant vilification of two of the most courageous professors on American college campuses today, Amy Wax and Bruce Gilley. The authors, miming the rhetorical manner of the BLM street activist, casually refer to these fearless critics of anti-intellectual dogma as white supremacists. The evidence? Wax dared to argue that some cultures are more effective than others at preparing people for social success in the modern West, and Gilley argued that colonialism offered some benefits to the colonized. Both defended their claims in a scholarly manner, and they responded articulately to the kind of absurd charges made in this book.

But this book’s authors know that most of their readers—leftist academics—will need no skillful argumentation to agree with their denunciation. Those readers are also unlikely to ask how the book’s authors qualify as experts to evaluate the arguments of Wax and Gilley. For here we have a professor of English (Bérubé) and a professor of film studies (Ruth) asserting their right to adjudicate truth, without discussion of any particulars, regarding matters—the causes of racial inequalities and the consequences of colonialism—on which they have no relevant training or expertise.

Bérubé and Ruth describe the situation regarding speech in the contemporary university thus: “Two moral goods are in conflict: freedom of thought and freedom from discrimination.” But “freedom from discrimination” does not include a promise never to be confronted with academic cases that you find distasteful.

Gilley, a professor of political science, wrote a consummately rigorous article on colonialism and a thorough response to the critics of that article, with nuanced factual points and copious references to the literature. Wax, a professor of law, wrote a book on the question of racial inequities and how best to address them, and she has written many other carefully argued pieces in both scholarly and popular venues addressing these same questions. If anyone at the schools where these two professors work cannot fathom how to go on with life in the face of the existence of such well-argued ideas, perhaps that person ought to reconsider his or her decision to be there in the first place. Such a person has, in fact, misunderstood what those institutions are supposed to do.

Yet Bérubé and Ruth assert that “the impact of statements must be prioritized over the intent of a speaker.” They do not even attempt a defense of this position. They have jettisoned any commitment to abstract liberal values (which they describe as “racial liberalism”) and embraced instead an unapologetic race-centered view of liberal values. The Rawlsian perspective, which presents a left-liberal political standpoint as a priori morally correct, is rejected as insufficiently radical because Rawls failed to account for the woke belief that race confers inevitable victim and victimizer statuses.

A walk-through of the authors’ other examples of contestation over academic speech further illustrates the dogmatic nature of their perspective. They give an account of the widely viewed footage of Yale professor Nicholas Christakis being vilely insulted in 2015 by students in a campus courtyard. It looks bad, they admit. They then “contextualize” by insinuating that Christakis deserved the denunciation and punishment. After all, Christakis’s wife, Erika, had (lightly) pushed back, in an email sent to students, against an administrative warning about Halloween costumes that might be offensive. Several months later, after persistent controversy, the Christakis couple stepped down from their posts as faculty-in-residence at Yale’s Silliman College.

What the authors carefully do not do is quote from the administrative email to which Erika Christakis was responding. They characterize it as “anodyne,” and scoffingly add “[w]e just don’t think there is good reason to be suspicious of a memo advising students not to wear blackface.” A glance at the administration’s email reveals that Bérubé and Ruth are misrepresenting its tone and content grievously. It is not just about blackface. It warns students against a wide range of possible costume choices, ranging from “funny” to “historical” to “cultural,” and concludes with this question: “Could someone take offense with your costume and why?”

“This is not a difficult call,” our authors assure us. And surely it is not, when you are as convinced as they are that psychologically devastating offenses are ubiquitous on campus. Those unconvinced of this extremist position, however, will see more nuance.

Erika Christakis’s concern about administrative overreach is utterly reasonable given the message’s content. It is informing Yale students of a duty to police their behavior to ensure that it cannot possibly offend anyone—this in an era, and in a specific institutional site, wherein young people are carefully coached on how much moral good accrues to them from being offended by as many things as possible.

The authors complain that a “decontextualization apparatus” is at work in setting up Nicholas and Erika Christakis as victims. The evidence indicates, however, just how radically Bérubé and Ruth themselves have decontextualized.

Here is another example of their faux evenhandedness, revealed as far-left partisanship in the last instance. After running through a list of examples of faculty being penalized for saying things that sound like the “n” word (e.g., one said “niggardly”; another gave an example of a Chinese term that sounds somewhat like the epithet), they agree that penalties are sometimes incommensurate with any reasonable claim of offense.

But they do, nevertheless, suggest that the fault lies ultimately with the speakers:

One should probably try to avoid the word “niggardly” … and … it might make more sense to use the Chinese word “this” instead of “that” when demonstrating the ubiquity of filler words … given that “this” … sounds like “zhe ge” rather than “ne ga.”

The onus is always and everywhere on the speaker to achieve the impossible: avoid saying anything that can be perceived as offensive to any audience.

Sometimes Bérubé and Ruth drop the fake objectivity and go right for mendacity in describing speech with which they disagree. They see it as reasonable, for instance, based on unfitness for the job, that James Bennet was fired from his editorial position at The New York Times. Bennet’s crime was to run “an openly fascist op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for military violence against peaceful protestors.”

The authors cite nothing from Cotton’s text to validate their interpretation of its content, and their characterization of it has no relationship to the piece, which explicitly names “rioters,” who are neatly distinguished from peaceful protestors, as those whose actions must be controlled by police and military presence.

The void at the heart of Bérubé’s and Ruth’s claims to respect substantive intellectual authority and vigorous academic debate is evident in their discussion of Damon Sajnani. This professor of African cultural studies offered a course titled “The Problem of Whiteness,” and once word got to the public, there were objections. Of course, objections from the public alone should not determine curricula, but the authors’ claims about the rigorous academic quality of this course and others like it are laughable.

It takes but a few minutes of examining the curriculum in the typical African studies program to realize that it can be adequately summarized as political propaganda, in which the feeblest of far-left claims are presented as dogma and no contestations are tolerated. The authors do note that part of the scandal around Sajnani had to do with his cheering, on his Twitter account, the killing of police officers, which probably tells you something about the direction and quality of his pedagogy. But Bérubé and Ruth are untroubled by this.

They believe that universities need special committees of “trained expert faculty” to decide what other faculty members can and cannot say, teach, and write on matters of leftist political concern, and especially on race. You can surely guess who will control such committees. It will be Sajnani and others in the various politicized “studies” fields populated by woke professors who believe what he believes.

It may well be that the universities are completely lost. Books like this one make clear the profound nature of the ideological disease they suffer.