Talk
12 5.8.
The halls of academia may appear to be
overrun by battles over academic free-
dom, free speech, identity politics, can-
cel culture and overreaching wokeness.
But why does it look that way? And what
are the real causes? The infl uential politi-
cal theorist Wendy Brown has spent her
career studying the very ideas — those
of identity, freedom and tolerance —
that are central to current debates about
what’s happening on college campuses
across the country, as well as to the
attacks they’re undergoing from with-
in and without. ‘‘We’re confused today
about what campuses are,’’ says Brown,
who is 66 and is the UPS Foundation
professor in the School of Social Sci-
ence at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, N.J. ‘‘We’ve lost track of
what’s personal and public and what’s
acceptable speech where. That confusion
happens in part because boundaries are
so blurred everywhere.’’
When people talk about free-speech
problems in colleges, it’s often in the
context of woke ideology run amok.
Which to me seems like a simplistic
understanding of what might be caus-
ing changes in discourse on campuses.
What do you see as being responsible?
Campuses are complicated spaces,
because they aren’t just one kind of
space: There’s the classroom, the dorm,
the public space that is the campus. Then
there’s what we could call clubs, support
centers — identity based or based on
social categories or political interests.
It’s a terrible mistake to confuse all of
these and imagine that the classroom or
the public space of the campus is the
same as your home. Some of that con-
fusion, and I don’t think it’s limited to
the left, is responsible for the eff ort to
regulate or denounce what transpires
in public spaces. The other thing is that
we are suff ering from highly politicized
discourse about education — discourse
that often doesn’t care one whit about
actual education. The most recent exam-
ple is Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida math-
book banning^1 for reasons that he can’t
explain and that have some vague con-
nection to something he doesn’t under-
stand called either critical race theory
or social-emotional learning. The politi-
cization of academic environments is
unhelpful in being able to understand
how we teach and orient ourselves to
contesting views. What you need is to
have the classroom as a space where
we’re not talking left wing and right
wing but off ering the learning that stu-
dents need to be able to come to their
own positions and judgments. So there
are two problems. One is the loss of
distinctions among diff erent spaces on
campus. The other is the hyperpoliticiza-
tion of knowledge and education.
Who’s responsible for clarifying those
campus distinctions? I want to suggest
that the biggest onus is on faculty them-
selves to think through this problem and
teach it in their classrooms. Tell students,
‘‘These are the diff erent kinds of spaces on
a campus, and here’s what’s appropriatein each.’’ There’s an important set of issues
to teach and to understand rather than
just being reactive. We need to orient stu-
dents diff erently, not just regulate them.
Orient them how? Or, put another way,
where’s the most common disagreement
between student views on free speech
and those of you and your colleagues?
Certainly we have had for some time a
debate about whether hate speech is free
speech or ought to be covered by free
speech, and if not, what qualifi es as hate
speech. Many students today go quickly
to the position that there is such a thing
as hate speech, that they know it when
they see it that and it ought to be out-
lawed. For me that’s a topic to teach, notWendy Brown
at a rally
at Williams College
in 1985, where
she was an
assistant professor.David Marchese
is the magazine’s Talk
columnist.