Among Ourselves: Free speech, line one

by Katrina Gulliver

It feels like early days, but free speech is back—at least if the recent events I attended in Nashville and Chicago are any indication. In Nashville, attendees gathered at the start of October for the Global Free Speech Summit to hear presentations on censorship, freedom, and agency in journalism and academia.

Hosted by Jacob Mchangama of The Future of Free Speech and emceed by Michael Moynihan, speakers included everyone from dissident-in-exile Chemi Lhamo to noted Harper’s Letter signatories Thomas Chatterton Williams and Jonathan Rauch. On the program were reporters who had been imprisoned or threatened by governments, scholars talking about the state of academic freedom, and discussions ranged from censorship of comedy to maintaining human thought in the age of AI. (The fact that the presentations were in a hotel function room, in the round, led to some jokes about an MMA cagematch.)

Addressing the audience at the Marriott Vanderbilt, Daniel Diermeier, who has served as the university’s chancellor since 2020, offered a welcome. He spoke of the ways Vanderbilt leads undergraduates to respect free speech: no heckler’s veto, no deplatforming.

Legal scholars Randall Kennedy and Jonathan Turley debated the state of free speech and cancel culture (and the danger of memory-holing just how much canceling went on in the last decade). Sri Lankan comedienne Nathasha Edirisooriya described how, when she was jailed, it was difficult to explain to fellow inmates that she had been locked up for telling a joke. The final session, helmed by Peter Boghossian, was about argument and epistemology; specifically, why we might be far apart on some issues but close to agreement on others.

Though Vanderbilt’s institutional focus on free discourse is encouraging, it speaks to the effort institutions must now put forth to promote the kind of free discussion that should be part of any university climate.

This was made evident in Chicago, where geophysicist Dorian Abbot convened the Freedom of Intellectual Navigation Conference. An intimate group of academics, grad students, and interested members of the public gathered at an events center on the University of Chicago’s campus to chart a path through hostile waters. As Dorian described it:

The US Navy engages in Freedom of Navigation operations to prove the right to sail through international waters aggressive and hostile countries are trying to claim. This conference is a Freedom of Intellectual Navigation operation against the aggressive and hostile forces trying to limit intellectual exploration on campuses nationwide.

At Chicago, like Vanderbilt, there was tight security. Attendees were registered weeks ahead of time. IDs were scrutinized, bags were searched. The days when luminaries could sit across from campus activists without passing through a gauntlet of safety checks are clearly long-gone. Some of those at the lectern had received years of harassment and threats on social media. Others were present for the chance to engage with contentious ideas.

Bryan Caplan gave the first presentation on whether feminism was necessary. Anna Krylov, a Russian-American professor of Chemistry at USC, spoke of campus protests, and the political formation that leads to them, both under repressive states and in the West. “Canadian refugee” Gad Saad spoke of the histrionic responses he gets online, and people’s inability to detect irony. How much institutions have scholars’ backs (or don’t) when it comes to controversial ideas was a recurring theme.

I didn’t agree with all of their theses, but isn’t that the point? I’ve been to enough academic conferences where the audience is nodding along to papers that fit all their priors. Being able to hear from thinkers in a range of disciplines just sharing their thoughts without fear of protest (in person and online) was refreshing. Though, as evidenced by the event policies (Abbot joked that his event operated by “anti-Hotel California rules… you have to check in at a specific time, but you can leave whenever you want”), the high tide of the Great Awokening hasn’t receded quite to pre-2014 levels.

As one reader noted, The Freeman was founded as an outlet for “liberal thought—in the old and priceless sense of that woefully abused adjective.” Our goal is to honor our founding by continuing to offer a wide-ranging discussion. Knowing that freedom of discussion is a cornerstone of liberty, we’re encouraging our writers and readers to share their thoughts. Our recent article by Brandon Warmke explored the current campus climate, and in the next few weeks you can look forward to more dispatches on the topic of academic freedom, as well as musings on everything from Prince Andrew to the economics of Thanksgiving. I hope you’ll join us.

Katrina Gulliver is Editorial Director at FEE and editor of the Freeman. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University, and has held faculty positions at universities in Germany, Britain and Australia. She has written for the Wall St Journal, Reason, The American Conservative, National Review and the New Criterion, among others.