In a classroom, discourse is regulated not to maximize free expression but to ensure that vetted disciplinary knowledge is effectively transmitted to students. (Photo: Getty Images)
Last month, a group calling itself the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance (UNC AFSA) sent a letter to UNC chancellor Lee Roberts urging UNC to adopt a policy requiring all course syllabi to include language assuring students that they have First Amendment rights to free speech in the classroom. The stated rationale for this policy is to foster “an environment where diverse viewpoints can be explored without fear of reprisal.”
On Friday, April 26, to little public notice, President Trump fired every member of the National Science Board, the independent group that oversees the National Science Foundation. At first glance, Trump’s mass firing of the National Science Board and a letter advocating for free speech in the classroom would seem to have little to do with each other. There is, however, a common thread: both are tactics in an ongoing right-wing war to undermine respect for scientific and scholarly expertise.
It is, of course, easy to see this war being fought when the tactics are hamhanded: firing scientific experts, appointing people with no scientific qualifications to head regulatory agencies, or rescinding research funding for blatantly political reasons—all of which we’ve seen in the case of the Trump administration. It’s harder to see when the tactics are shrouded in anodyne rhetoric, crafted to make a partisan policy seem supportive of consensual values.
For instance, in arguing that students should be told their classroom speech enjoys First Amendment protection, the UNC AFSA letter says that doing so would usefully promote “viewpoint diversity” and explicitly reinforce students’ rights to freely engage with the “diverse scholarly ideas” they encounter in the classroom. This sounds reasonable, given that engagement with ideas and information is what most people expect to occur in a college classroom. It is, in fact, what most professors long for and take pains to make happen.
Yet there are two problems here: invoking the First Amendment implies that a classroom is an open public forum, which it is not and cannot be; and, unlike an open public forum, a classroom is not a context in which all ideas or “views” are seen as deserving equal time and consideration. The notion that First Amendment protections apply to student speech in classrooms doesn’t merely brush these problems aside. It politicizes classroom discourse in a way that can have long-term detrimental effects on learning.
The distinction between an open public forum and a classroom is crucial. A street corner or a park is a classic example of an open public forum. In such spaces, you’re welcome to set up a soapbox and preach to your heart’s content. You can argue that climate change is a hoax, that the earth is flat, or that evolution is a myth. You might get heckled, but as long as you aren’t inciting imminent violence and you abide by reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions—which must be neutral with regard to the content of your speech—the government can’t shut you down. That’s the protection granted by the First Amendment.
A classroom is a different kind of space, necessarily subject to a different set of rules. In a classroom, discourse is regulated not to maximize free expression but to ensure that vetted disciplinary knowledge is effectively transmitted to students who, by virtue of being students, do not yet possess that knowledge and are paying for the opportunity to obtain it. If a cacophony of ill-informed voices makes this kind of learning impossible in an open public forum, that’s the price of one kind of freedom. But such freedom, inappropriately extended to a classroom, would make it impossible for classrooms to function as classrooms at all.
What conservatives object to is the idea of vetted scientific or scholarly knowledge being privileged by an instructor who is a subject-matter expert. This is why conservatives tout “viewpoint diversity” as their classroom ideal. In this way of thinking, everything that might be offered to students comes down to a “view.” Professors have their views; students have theirs; and pundits have others—but in the end, they’re all just views, none presumptively deserving more credence than any other. In effect, this neutralizes the claim that scientific or scholarly expertise, hard-earned through years of study and research, deserves any special respect. As in an open public forum, we can all share our views, try to find sense in the noise, and let the chips fall where they may.
This approach to classroom discourse does a disservice to students. Instead of teaching them that there are better and worse ways to create reliable knowledge about the world, it encourages them to embrace whichever views they find most emotionally or politically congenial. Instead of teaching them how to assess the value and limits of scientific and scholarly expertise, it teaches them to dismiss claims to expertise as mere elite pretension, especially when expert knowledge is not comforting. One result is a kind of cynicism toward knowledge that can impede learning over the course of a lifetime.
None of this is to say that students shouldn’t be exposed to diverse viewpoints. Of course they should. Disciplines themselves accomplish this within the university as a whole. This also happens in classrooms when instructors acquaint students with competing theories within their disciplines. But in such cases the views offered to students have already undergone testing and are judged, by at least some qualified experts, as sufficiently plausible to deserve attention. This is a far cry from the “anything goes” situation created when the First Amendment is asserted as the governing framework for classroom speech.
What’s the larger agenda behind the drive to turn classrooms into open public forums and delegitimate scientific and scholarly expertise? Trump’s firing of the National Science Board members points to an answer that’s been clear for a long time: scientific and scholarly expertise in the regulatory realm is seen by the right-wing as an obstacle to the freedom of corporations to do as they please in the pursuit of profit. Undermining respect for expertise, in the classroom and in society as a whole, is thus part of the deregulatory game plan. Right-wing claims that experts in the regulatory realm are busybody elitists or self-interests actors is one of a piece with saying university teachers are mere purveyors of their preferred “views,” perhaps protected by the First Amendment, just like students’ views, but warranting no special respect beyond that.
The real goal of pushing the First Amendment as a guiding principle for classroom discourse is not maximum freedom of expression; it is maximum freedom to pursue profit by diminishing public respect for any independent expertise that might restrict corporate behavior. The giveaway is the fact that the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance is not advocating policies that would help students better assess the strengths and limits of expert knowledge in science, scholarship, or the regulatory realm. Pushing the idea that classrooms are open public forums in which all views are created equal makes it harder to cultivate such understandings. What will truly enable students to practice the “robust intellectual engagement” UNC AFSA claims to want is the ability to distinguish between expert knowledge and lay views that are too often evidence-free, incoherent, or more ideologically expedient than correct. That’s not elitism, it’s education in the common interest.
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
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