The Program on Freedom and Free Societies at Cornell hosted an event on free speech this past Monday.
Titled “Uncomfortable Truths: the connection between speech and social progress,” F&FS brought Devon Westhill, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, to speak on free speech. Westhill worked as the top civil rights official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Trump Administration and has worked with the Federalist Society before his current role. The audience included many professors, students, and Provost Kotlikoff.
The talk was organized before the announcement of Cornell’s upcoming year of free expression. Several events on freedom of expression have been hosted at Cornell in recent days, including last week’s visit by Dr. Steven McGuire of ACTA and a lecture in February by Nico Perrino, the Executive Vice President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Westhill began his remarks by stating that Cornell is now “ground zero” for the debates over freedom of expression, referencing the recent trigger warning debacle and cancellation of Ann Coulter ‘84 last November.
Westhill opened his talk with a discussion of the development of civil rights. Why, Westhill asked, did landmark civil rights legislation pass when it did? Audience members provided various explanations. One attendee offered an economic argument– that by the late 20th century, the cost of refusing rights to minority populations was too high. Another spectator offered the geopolitical explanation, that America internalized freedom for all in response to ideological conflict with the Soviet Union. A final commenter offered incremental court decisions.
Westhill responded, “It’s not too much to say that freedom of expression and freedom of speech was critical to the development of the rights we enjoy today.” Westhill contended that protests, pooled collections of free expression, were the most important factor in the development of the civil rights movement. Speech, according to Westhill, was the impetus for social change.
Westhill then asked if, given the tremendous social progress allowed by speech in the 20th century, we have arrived at a place where social progress is no longer needed. Westhill then stated that speech is indeed under threat in the present day. Citing a 2017 poll of more than 30,000 college students, Westhill stated that 66% of college students supported shouting down speakers they disagreed with. More troubling, 23% agreed with using violence against such a speaker.
The veracity of these numbers, Westhill argued, is readily apparent. The speaker went through several recent examples: the shouting-down of pro-life speakers at Yale Law school, the incident at Stanford Law School involving Judge Kyle Duncan, the alleged assault of a speaker on gender issues at San Francisco State University, and Cornell’s own issues, including Ann Coulter and the Student Assembly’s content warning fiasco.
Westhill continued, describing concerns of censoriousness from the political right as well. From the “Stop Woke Act” in Florida to Montana’s recent ban on TikTok use on government devices, Westhill concurs with Cornell President Martha Pollack that there are threats to free expression from both sides of the political aisle.
More concerning to Westhill, though, is the chilling effect these incidents can have. “For every news report,” he began, “there is an untold number of other instances of self-censorship.” It’s bad enough, he argued, that people are being actively censored by others. Worse still is the internalization of these rules such that free discourse cannot occur through self-censorship.
Cornell history professor Barry Strauss then interjected, as the event was—by Westhill’s design—more of a conversation than a lecture. Strauss asked whether a certain amount of self-censorship is desirable. Far from curtailing freedom of speech, self-censorship is simply “being an adult.”
Westhill responded that, while one ought to be careful about how and what things he says, too much self-censorship risks creating an echo chamber. If one represses his views in public, those views will only be expressed to an echo chamber instead, where there is no countervailing voice to act as a check.
Westhill and the audience then discussed echo chambers and their tradeoffs. They compared the benefits of emotional protection and productivity in the absence of conflict with the drawbacks of losing the opportunity to evaluate one’s own positions and biases. Westhill closed the discussion with the insight that one cannot maintain control of societal echo chambers forever, and that dissent will inevitably creep out.
Westhill’s final point was the relevance of the talk “today, here, and now.” Self censorship, he argued, creates friction between students. When some voices are censored, we all lose the opportunity to leave our comfort zones, and one can only learn when taken out of his comfort zone.
Free speech, Westhill explained, builds characteristics that define adults. According to him, these include tolerance, patience, resilience, and self-control. Most importantly, to him, free speech cultivates humility, causing people to acknowledge what they know is not all there is.
Samuel Kim contributed to this report
