Alt-right battle on free speech is a trap – Chancellor

The ‘alt-right’ is testing United States campuses on free speech as part of a narrative to discredit them, according to Carol Christ, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

“Free speech has been adopted by the ‘alt-right’ as one of its strategies to construct a narrative about universities that is extremely useful for their political goals. Specifically, that universities don’t support free speech and therefore they are really hypocritical,” she said.

She faced an early test of her leadership – having taken up her post in July – when UC Berkeley was at the centre of an outcry after far-right firebrands Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos and Stephen K Bannon were invited to speak at the campus in September by a student group, Berkeley Patriot.

A previous speech by Yiannopoulos had to be cancelled in February after protesters lit fires and threw objects at buildings. This had prompted President Donald Trump to ask in a tweet that if Berkeley “does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view”, should it be denied federal funds?

Speaking at the New Nationalism and Universities international conference to celebrate the 60th anniversary of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education – for which University World News was a media partner – she said free speech is very much associated with Berkeley, but the issue has been used by, and Berkeley has been used by, the alt-right to further a larger political agenda instead of promoting open debate.

“It originated in students’ desire to have freedom of political speech on campus. The most important motivation was from the left, to form the civil rights movement.”

It was initiated by Mario Savio, who had been down organising in the south in the 1960s and wanted to able to recruit in the south and work for civil rights. But he was joined by people from the right. And so the student government committee for the free speech movement was a combination of people from the Republicans and the Democrats, and people on the left, and on the right.

Free speech movement has been ‘reversed’

“Now the free speech movement has become somewhat ironically reversed. In the 1960s students were for free speech and administration was against it. Now administration is for free speech and students are against it.”

The chancellor noted that in this “moment of ambition” for the development of so-called ‘world-class universities’, in many instances that ambition is inseparable from nationalism. Can you have a leading university without a sufficient degree of academic freedom? “I believe that is impossible,” she said. “Freedom of inquiry is absolutely essential to have a comprehensive university at the highest level."

For her the test came this autumn in the form of what she calls the tale of two speeches at Berkeley.

“We first had a speaker, Ben Shapiro, who is very much a serious conservative thinker, someone with whom I profoundly disagree on many, many subjects but someone who should be able to speak on university campuses.

“Then we had a kind of an extravaganza planned by a right-wing provocateur, Free Speech Week – although Free Speech Week was only four days long – and it was an extraordinary array of speakers who were allegedly invited, 25 speakers over four days, really occupying the campus, and this was meant to provoke the university into cancelling it.”

Understanding the narrative

She said it was important to understand that narrative.

“The narrative was not: conservative wants to speak on campus, wants to engage on campus, but rather what can a provocateur do that will motivate the university to take certain actions that will support the narrative he is trying to create.

“Well, we called his bluff and finally the conservative moment – or Milo’s Free Speech Week – collapsed under its own weight,” she said.

At the time, the necessary paperwork for booking the campus venues was not filed and Berkeley Patriot pulled its support for the event entirely, but this did not prevent Milo Yiannopoulos declaring in a press conference that the Berkeley administration had done “everything in its power to crush its students’ aspirations” to host the event.

He nevertheless also showed up for 15 minutes on campus despite the cancellation of the event, signed autographs, sang the national anthem and took selfies with supporters. The university said security precautions for that appearance, which involved officers from eight different law enforcement agencies, cost US$800,000.

At the New Nationalism and Universities Conference, Christ said that the failure of Free Speech Week’s organisers was fortunate for Berkeley, but it is extraordinarily important for universities in the US to support freedom of speech, not only because for public universities it is the law, but because not supporting freedom of speech “plays into a narrative of the far right to discredit universities, so it is just extraordinarily important that we not play that part in that narrative”.

What is the answer?

She said the best answer to hateful speech is more speech.

The chancellor said that the term philosopher John Stuart Mill used in his arguments for freedom of speech, when he referred to the “marketplace of ideas”, is “absolutely foundational to the university”, that all arguments can be put forward and argued with, debated. So there is much to do in the US to recapture that ground both for universities and society at large, to have civil and sharp debate.

A second argument Mill made for freedom of speech was about censorship, she added. Mill said if you hold the belief that freedom of speech should be restricted in some way, then some government authority has to be the censor and what government authority would you trust to do that?

“So I think this is a really fruitful conjunction to reflect upon, to contemplate the relationship between, the new nationalism in universities, their global ambitions, globalism, academic freedom and freedom of speech.”