College administrators and faculty are facing a host of student demands: defend undocumented students; challenge campus racism, sexism, and misogyny; and support social movements such as Black Lives Matter. Conversation, debate, and critical engagement have become extremely difficult in the very spaces where they should be celebrated and protected. From its inception, liberal education has involved embracing difficult discussions as opportunities for learning: that is, except when promoting social justice.
We believe campuses should strive to support the practice of what we’re calling democratic speech: conversation and discourse promoting justice. We’ve spent the past year co-chairing a task force aimed at advancing democratic speech on a diverse campus. From observing numerous campus workshops and conversations and building on practices learned throughout our careers in educational, community and organizing experiences, we believe campuses can facilitate speech that promotes social justice without infringing on basic rights to free speech or assembly.
For too long, U.S. higher education has protected a silent power dynamic based on racial, class, and gender privilege and compounded by institutional inertia. Today, more marginalized students than ever are attending college, among them students from some of the country’s and the world’s most economically depressed and racially segregated communities. When they arrive on campus, these students are not empty vessels into which we pour Foucault, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Audre Lorde. They carry with them a range of racial, class, and gender antagonisms drawn from firsthand experiences.
These students expect the campus to serve as a vital place to analyze, test, and wrestle with the history of those experiences, and, they hope, to arrive at a deeper sense of self and purpose. Most liberal arts campuses don’t offer the equitable or neutral space necessary to meet these expectations—space for students to build relationships and community, to acquire skills in communicating and learning from conflict, all with the support of an accountable, healthy, intellectually challenging academic environment.
Indeed, these factors can determine whether the college itself succeeds or fails in its mission to cultivate an informed, engaged citizenry.
In our conception of democratic speech, a vast range of constituents can hotly discuss a range of sociopolitical concerns. But we would argue that campuses need to aspire to free speech while moving beyond an uncritical attachment to it as a salve for an assortment of difficult conversations, and to be especially critical of free-speech claims that promote speech that is willfully uninformed or intentionally harmful and hateful.
College campuses are not immune to racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. But they are also rare sites where these issues are interrogated in classrooms. The challenge is to identify, deconstruct, and uproot these inequities and their intersections. Democratic speech is predicated on the idea that social relationships reflect power dynamics that play out in society; and on a campus shared by many, it is important not only to speak on behalf of oneself, but also to ask ourselves how we relate to and are accountable to others.
