15 May 2018 | Academic Freedom, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”100370″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Written by: Che Applewhaite, Samantha Chambers, Claire Kopsky and Sarah Wu
Survivors of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, have been making headlines lately with their calls for more American students to help them change the country’s gun laws. Their right to protest and petition politicians is enshrined in their right to free expression under the First Amendment.
It is clear that the US student body — whether at high school or college — is conflicted over the issue of free expression and what is or isn’t acceptable speech. While some recent surveys and studies show attitudes to be generally supportive of freedom of expression as an important right, in practice this isn’t always the case.
At this vital moment, students around the USA should see why free speech is so vital on their campuses, whether high school or university and what they have to lose if they won’t fight for it.
“Free speech must apply to everyone — even those whose views we find objectionable — or it applies to no one,” says Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship. “Only by being able to express themselves freely and honestly, and also being exposed to as wide a range of viewpoints as possible can these get the most out of their education.”
In the past, the usefulness of free speech as part of such a campaign was much less in dispute. Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches and the student movements of the 1960s, which together changed a generation, relied on this very freedom. A lot of demonstrations today seem more geared towards the suppression of speech, such as those targeting conservative and alt-right voices like Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley and Richard Spencer at Michigan State University.
Students from four US universities weigh in on the issue and tell Index what is fair game on campus and what isn’t.
(Not) talking about race
The University of Missouri, colloquially known as a Mizzou and described as a “liberal student body in a red state”, is no stranger to racial tension. In 2015 the school saw protests by its football team and a graduate student go on hunger strike as part of a campaign to have the school’s president resign after mishandling racial issues on campus. This was followed by a drop in freshman enrollment and funding to the school.
Evan Lachnit, who studies journalism and sports at Mizzou, says that there are certain topics that, in the current political climate, are often too hot to touch. “As it relates to history, if there is one subject everyone appears to walk-on eggshells around, it would be slavery, one of, if not the largest, scars in American history,” he says. “It’s something many will just avoid altogether.”
The issue of “hate speech” — including speech considered to be insulting to a particular race — at Mizzou prompted the University of Missouri Police Department issued a campus-wide email asking “individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech” to call them “immediately”. The police admit that “cases of hateful and hurtful speech are not crimes”, leaving many to wonder why they feel this is an issue the force should be concerned with.
“There is no question that a great deal of ‘hateful and/or hurtful speech’ is protected by the First Amendment, and that punishing students whose speech is determined to meet such a troublingly vague and subjective standard will violate students’ constitutional rights,” Fire, an organisation that campaigns for individual rights in higher education, said in a letter to the school’s chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin. “It is crucial that students be able to carry out such debates without fear that giving offence will result in being reported to the police and referred for discipline by the university.”
Sophie Kissinger, a senior studying history at Harvard University, claims that the ways in which her subject was taught in the past limits knowledge of American slavery today. Recently gifted a 1926 Harvard syllabus that outlines the core requirements for a history student at the time, she notices the document’s “neglect of the oppressed”. “These narratives largely serve to perpetuate a system of erasure, reinforcing colonial ideologies and degrading the lives of oppressed peoples,” she says. “This erasure is all around us today: only 8% of high school senior can identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War and most don’t know an amendment to the US Constitution formally ended slavery”.
Over at Villanova University, Emily Bouley, a junior studying business and psychology, says that privilege can be tricky to discuss because “everyone has different definitions of what privileged means”.
One topic in particular that’s likely to receive backlash, Bouley says, is affirmative action, those measures that are intended to end and correct the effects of a specific form of discrimination. “One time my professor was really passionate about racism against white males in job selection since there are more programs aimed towards diversity now than ever before, which is great, but sometimes candidates will get chosen because they are of a minority,” Bouley says. “Often this isn’t the case, but I felt so uncomfortable sharing my opinion because yes it happens and doesn’t support equality but it’s very hard to argue without sounding racist.”
Thanksgiving rule on campus: no politics
Located in the fifth most liberal city in America as ranked by Forbes, Boston University students are aware of the politically left-leaning environment they live in. But as with the family dinner table at Thanksgiving, heated conversation about politics is discouraged on campus.
According to the school’s policies, students must not “impose” offensive or upsetting views on others. Nicole Hoey, a junior studying journalism and English at the school, says the overwhelming liberal majority, though welcoming of opposing ideas, has a tendency to silence conservative voices through the sheer volume of liberal students. “As a journalist, free speech is so important,” Hoey says. “And for the most part, BU does a good job at promoting free speech on campus.”
“But I think people who voted for Trump would feel more frightened to speak their minds because we’re so liberal,” Hoey adds. “I think the only time they would feel safe is if they’re in College Republicans”.
This is probably why, following the 2016 election and the election of Donald Trump as president, BU College Republicans have seen an increase in attendance.
International studies major at the University of San Francisco Adule Dajani notes that “professors make their political views known pretty discreetly”. As a left-leaning school in a democratic state, Dajani says that USF professors try to remain unbiased by “talking about both the pros and cons of an issue”. However, she finds the conduct of the classroom facilitated by professors to be the main silencer for those in the minority side on any debate. “I can see how someone would feel too uncomfortable to speak up because the students are hotheads,” she says.
Candace Korasick, a professor at the school’s department of sociology at Mizzou, says her classes often tackle difficult issues, but there are some too controversial to discuss. “There are topics that I once would have broached in a class that I, not avoid, but now don’t initiate. And if students initiate them, I feel as if I’m tiptoeing through a minefield,” Korasick explains. “The two topics that I’d rather avoid are abortion and the Confederate flag. It is difficult to have a conversation with more than one or two students at a time on issues like that.”
Journalism and business student Nina Ruhe says topics like race, sexual assault and political beliefs are ones professors handle with “delicacy” on a surface level. For her, that’s a shame because it means she’s not getting any depth of knowledge on these topics as part of her education.
“While doing this allows the educators to say they’ve covered the issues and say that they’ve taken part in these important discussions, they also don’t go deep enough as to letting there be any real form of discussion,” Ruhe says. “Unfortunately, when I have heard of educators that have attempted to go into in-depth conversations about these topics, they are shut down by complaints from parents or superiors and are forced to stop.”
The right to freedom of expression and the right to peaceful protest are crucial in a democracy – and crucial to any success the students of Parkland may have in changing America’s gun laws. They must be in no doubt that it a right that is on their side.
Later this year Index on Censorship will release a report on the freedom of speech on campus[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1526388582695-a56b5824-ce86-7″ taxonomies=”8843″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
5 Feb 2018 | Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Joint Committee on Human Rights has launched an inquiry into Freedom of Speech in Universities. The inquiry is considering a number of issues including: whether free speech is being suppressed in universities, by whom, and the causes. Index on Censorship has provided written evidence to the Committee, which has now been published.
Doughty Street Chambers barristers Caoilfhionn Gallagher QC, Jonathan Price and Keina Yoshida worked with Index on Censorship to prepare their submission. It addresses the question of whether freedom of speech on campus is in jeopardy, and specifically considers and criticises the Prevent strategy. Gallagher, Price and Yoshida’s evidence on behalf on Index on Censorship is available here.
Index is currently undertaking a project looking at the issue of free speech at colleges and universities around the world. You can read more about this work and how to support Index here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Don’t lose your voice. Stay informed.” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”black”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship is a nonprofit that campaigns for and defends free expression worldwide. We publish work by censored writers and artists, promote debate, and monitor threats to free speech. We believe that everyone should be free to express themselves without fear of harm or persecution – no matter what their views.
Join our mailing list (or follow us on Twitter or Facebook) and we’ll send you our weekly newsletter about our activities defending free speech. We won’t share your personal information with anyone outside Index.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][gravityform id=”20″ title=”false” description=”false” ajax=”false”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator color=”black”][/vc_column][/vc_row]
25 Jan 2017 | Magazine, News and features, Volume 45.04 Winter 2016
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Dealing with mutilated bodies, an attempted acid attack and speakers arresting each other. All part of his job organising Hay literature festivals around the world, explains Peter Florence in the winter 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”85033″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]
Running a literature festival in a context where freedom of speech is not a given is like playing chess on a plain grey board. Sometimes you are just not able to imagine where to move, and sometimes you just keep playing on grey. But as US President Barack Obama said so eloquently after November’s election: “You say, OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward?”
Bringing people together around a table or a picnic rug or a campfire is a specific challenge. There is no mediated distance of print or broadcast. The whole point is that you’re face to face, that you’re making it personal. And the offence and the risk are as personal as the joy and the discovery. This makes it a fascinating challenge when the practicalities of running a big public event run into conflict with the authorities who license you to put up your stages.
Sometimes it comes like this: a week after a successful festival, a man you’ve been working with for a couple of years suggests a meeting in a café to review the year’s work. He’s a good man, an enabler; a man who has the careworn look of a bureaucrat who’s survived in an undemocratic regime by knowing which battles to fight.
You like him, because he’s helped navigate the public licences and public funding avenues. He orders cake. He enthuses about the opportunity to meet Hanif Kureishi at the screening of My Beautiful Launderette, and the honour of hearing Carl Bernstein speak about the First Amendment. His funder is thrilled. They love the Hay Festival in the city. We’re in a coffee shop, not his office. They are so thrilled they’d like to double the grant they give us. Alarm bells. Could we help them? Here it comes: could we programme the next festival just the same way, but without the homosexuals or the Jews?
Sometimes it’s harder. Our first festival in volatile, thrilling Mexico comes to a world heritage site in Zacatecas, because the state’s visionary governor has visited our festival in Cartagena, Colombia, and she wants to bring a similar experience to her home. The festival is a huge success. Her term ends and she is succeeded by a new governor who cancels all his predecessor’s funded projects.
But across the country a dynamic new governor in Veracruz, Javier Duarte, picks up the baton and invites us to Xalapa. A fortnight before we start, a drug cartel dumps 35 mutilated bodies onto a busy road nearby. “It’s a gang thing, an inter-narco incident,” we’re told.
We hold the festival. Tens of thousands of students come and listen and talk and wonder.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left” color=”custom” align=”right” custom_color=”#dd3333″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_custom_heading text=”Could we programme the next festival just the same way, but without the homosexuals or the Jews?” google_fonts=”font_family:Libre%20Baskerville%3Aregular%2Citalic%2C700|font_style:400%20italic%3A400%3Aitalic”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
During the third year the talk about the Governor Duarte’s probity starts. Journalists investigating the cartels are disappeared. We bring in Salman Rushdie, Jody Williams and Carl Bernstein again to speak up alongside Mexican writers. The students embrace the festival as a beacon of freedom of speech.
Year four, we receive a petition demanding that we cancel the festival and denounce the governor for failing to stem the constant steam of killings of journalists in Veracruz. The petition is signed by more than 300 journalists and some writers from across Latin America who have attended the festival. We listen. A rival, and much bigger petition is started by the students and teachers in Xalapa begging us not to leave, saying the festival is their bulwark against silence. But we cannot operate against the wishes of writers and journalists. We broadcast the festival digitally on BBC Mundo, and move to Mexico City and then to Querétaro. Many of the students from Xalapa come too. Duarte is currently on the run from the police and the cartels.
Sometimes it’s just farcical. In 2008, at our festival in Wales we invite George W Bush’s confidant and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton to discuss Abu Ghraib and the “war on terror”. Many supporters of Hay are appalled. Our good friend and neighbour George Monbiot, also a speaker, is so appalled he decides that he will attempt a citizen’s arrest at the festival. I assume he’s joking. Monbiot announces this is what he’s going to do in The Guardian. The Dyfed-Powys Police inform me of the legal procedure for citizen’s arrest and step away.
My mother reads me Voltaire. I brief our security team. The day comes. Bolton turns up. His interviewer is called to the BBC at lunchtime, so I have to go onstage with him. I ask him under what circumstances it would be OK for me, if I didn’t believe his answers, to tip him backwards, bag him, and pour water over his face. He doesn’t answer. He cannot say “under no circumstances”, though I’m not sure he understands that’s the issue. It’s on YouTube; it’s compelling.
Bolton knows that Monbiot is going to try to make a citizen’s arrest, and George knows I cannot allow him to do that and still hold Hay as a platform for free speech. So that’s what happens. We restrain a liberal hero from silencing an illiberal neo-con. A guy who throws a bottle of acid hits me, not Bolton. George writes a brilliant and widely shared account of why Bolton should be charged.
Hay Festival is 30 in 2017. We’ll be celebrating by arguing for freedoms of speaking and reading. The festival continues to run around the world in Mexico, Colombia, Ireland and Spain.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Peter Florence is the director and co-founder of the Hay Festival
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”From the Archives”][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”89102″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422012448150″][vc_custom_heading text=”Taking a stand: lit fair challenges” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1177%2F0306422012448150|||”][vc_column_text]June 2012
As literary festivals and fairs become forums of censorship and protest, Salil Tripathi considers the challenges facing writers and their readers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”91337″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229008534852″][vc_custom_heading text=”Soviet lit in Glasgow” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064229008534852|||”][vc_column_text]June 1990
Soviet writers attend literary forum, ‘New Beginnings’ Soviet Arts Festival in Glasgow, where selections from their work were read and discussed.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”94377″ img_size=”213×289″ alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064228008533066″][vc_custom_heading text=”The prisoner: an excerpt” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:http%3A%2F%2Fjournals.sagepub.com%2Fdoi%2Fpdf%2F10.1080%2F03064228008533066|||”][vc_column_text]June 1980
Imprisoned for a paper on education to be delivered at a festival, Yves-Emmanuel Dogbé was imprisoned without trial for five months.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Fashion Rules” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2016%2F12%2Ffashion-rules%2F|||”][vc_column_text]The winter 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at fashion and how people both express freedom through what they wear.
In the issue: interviews with Lily Cole, Paulo Scott and Daphne Selfe, articles by novelists Linda Grant and Maggie Alderson plus Eliza Vitri Handayani on why punks are persecuted in Indonesia.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”82377″ img_size=”medium” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/12/fashion-rules/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_custom_heading text=”Subscribe” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fsubscribe%2F|||”][vc_column_text]In print, online. In your mailbox, on your iPad.
Subscription options from £18 or just £1.49 in the App Store for a digital issue.
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14 Jun 2016 | Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, India, Italy, mobile, News and features, Poland, United Kingdom
Timothy Garton Ash is no stranger to censorship. On the toilet wall of his Oxford home, there is a Polish censor’s verdict from early 1989 which cut a great chunk of text from an article of his on the bankruptcy of Soviet socialism.
Six months later socialism was indeed bankrupt, although the formative experiences of travelling behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s — seeing friends such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn interrogated and locked up for what they published — never left him.
Now, in Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, the professor of European Studies at Oxford University provides an argument for “why we need more and better free speech” and a blueprint for how we should go about it.
“The future of free speech is a decisive question for how we live together in a mixed up world where conventionally — because of mass migration and the internet — we are all becoming neighbours,” Garton Ash explains to Index on Censorship. “The book reflects a lot of the debates we’ve already been having on the Free Speech Debate website [the precursor to the book] as well as physically in places like India China, Egypt, Burma, Thailand, where I’ve personally gone to take forward these debates.”
Garton Ash began writing the book 10 years ago, shortly after the murder of Theo van Gough and the publication of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. In the second of the 10 principles of free speech — ranked in order of importance — he writes: “We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation.” What he calls the “assassin’s veto” — violence or the threat of violence as a response to expression — is, he tells Index, “one of the greatest threats to free speech in our time because it undoubtedly has a very wide chilling effect”.
While the veto may bring to mind the January 2015 killings at Charlie Hebdo, Garton Ash is quick to point out that “while a lot of these threats do come from violent Islamists, they also come from the Italian mafia, Hindu nationalists in India and many other groups”.
Europe, in particular, has “had far too much yielding, or often pre-emptively, to the threat of violence and intimidation”, explains Garton Ash, including the 2014 shutting down of Exhibit B, an art exhibition which featured black performers in chains, after protesters deemed it racist. “My view is that this is extremely worrying and we really have to hold the line,” he adds.
Similarly, in the sixth principle from the book — “one of the most controversial” — Garton Ash states: “We respect the believer but not necessarily the content of the belief.”
This principle makes the same point the philosopher Stephen Darwall made between “recognition respect” and “appraisal respect”. “Recognition respect is ‘I unconditionally respect your full dignity, equal human dignity and rights as an individual, as a believer including your right to hold that belief’,” explains Garton Ash. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to give ‘appraisal respect’ to the content of your belief, which I may find to be, with some reason, incoherent nonsense.”
The best and many times only weapon we have against “incoherent nonsense” is knowledge (principle three: We allow no taboos against and seize every chance for the spread of knowledge). In Garton Ash’s view, there are two worrying developments in the field of knowledge in which taboos result in free speech being edged away.
“On the one hand, the government, with its extremely problematic counter-terror legislation, is trying to impose a prevent duty to disallow even non-violent extremism,” he says. “Non-violent extremists, in my view, include Karl Marx and Jesus Christ; some of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind were non-violent extremists.”
“On the other hand, you have student-led demands of no platforming, safe spaces, trigger warnings and so on,” Garton Ash adds, referring to the rising trend on campuses of shutting down speech deemed offensive. “Universities should be places of maximum free speech because one of the core arguments for free speech is it helps you to seek out the truth.”
The title of the books mentions the “connected world”, or what is also referred to in the text as “cosmopolis”, a global space that is both geographic and virtual. In the ninth principle, “We defend the internet and other systems of communication against illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers”, Garton Ash aims to protect free expression in this online realm.
“We’ve never been in a world like this before, where if something dreadful happens in Iceland it ends up causing harm in Singapore, or vice-versa,” he says. “With regards to the internet, you have to distinguish online governance from regulation and keep the basic architecture of the internet free, and that means — where possible — net neutrality.”
A book authored by a westerner in an “increasingly post-western” world clearly has its work cut out for it to convince people in non-western or partially-western countries, Garton Ash admits. “What we can’t do and shouldn’t do is what the West tended to do in the 1990s, and say ‘hey world, we’ve worked it out — we have all the answers’ and simply get out the kit of liberal democracy and free speech like something from Ikea,” he says. “If you go in there just preaching and lecturing, immediately the barriers go up and out comes postcolonial resistance.”
“But what we can do — and I try to do in the book — is to move forward a conversation about how it should be, and having looked at their own traditions, you will find people are quite keen to have the conversation because they’re trying to work it out themselves.”
