The Review: Free Speech and the Censor's Dilemma

On expressive rights and proxy reprisals. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, the constitutional lawyer and anti-death-penalty activist Stephen Rohde has a long [essay]( about censorship, occasioned by Robert Corn-Revere’s book, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder (Oxford University Press, 2021). The book tells the story of expanding American legal protections for expressive rights from the 19th century into the present. Its thesis is simple and optimistic, even Whiggish: In the U.S., whenever would-be censors mount campaigns of prohibition, their initial successes finally fail both in the courts — resulting in a broader and more formalized First Amendment umbrella — and in the court of public opinion. With a cunning irony, the last century of free-speech law has, Corn-Revere writes, rendered would-be censors “the ultimate counterculture warriors” as their desired proscriptions give way to wider freedoms. Despite this general trend — Corn-Revere goes so far as to call it “the arc of history among societies that value freedom” — he does worry about changing attitudes among “progressive academics, whom he sees as part of a new anti-free-speech movement,” Rohde writes. And he cites PEN America survey data that tend to confirm what PEN calls “a looming danger that our bedrock faith in free speech as an enduring foundation of American society could give way to a belief that curtailing harmful expression will enable our diverse population to live together peaceably.” Speaking of PEN, the organization’s leader, Suzanne Nossel, [recently took]( to the pages of The Chronicle Review to discuss what she calls “proxy reprisals,” the pretextual disciplining or firing of faculty members accused of offensive speech on ginned-up non-speech-based charges. “This sleight-of-hand allows colleges to sate demands for comeuppance and to constrain obstreperous faculty members, while technically avoiding speech-based reprisals that run afoul of law and policy, and may generate blowback from free-speech liberals.” My favorite instance, though it’s one that Nossel doesn’t mention: In 2020, the University of Mississippi [fired]( the American-studies scholar Garrett Felber, who had publicly accused the university and its donors of racism, for failing to have a Zoom meeting with his department chair. In red-state public institutions, both proxy reprisals and more direct forms of speech suppression seem more likely to come from the right than the left. Nossel offers an example from the University of North Carolina Press, where a law professor named Eric Muller, a vocal critic of a campus Confederate statue, was [booted]( from the press’s board at the behest of the university’s Board of Governors. Her other examples — [Ilya Shapiro]( at Georgetown and [Joshua Katz]( at Princeton — are consonant with Corn-Revere’s concern with the censorial pressure exerted by progressives. As Rohde writes, “censors come in all shapes and sizes, across the political spectrum.” Read Stephen Rohdes’s “What Makes Censors Tick?” [here]( and Suzanne Nossel’s “Academic Freedom’s Proxy Wars” [here](. ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING EVENT [Join us August 2-19]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot now](. Space is limited. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Academic Freedom’s Proxy Wars]( By Suzanne Nossel [STORY IMAGE]( Professors with unpopular views are being punished for unrelated infractions. That’s terrifying. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Doctoral Training Is Ossified. Can We Reinvent It?]( By Zeb Larson [STORY IMAGE]( Lessons from the short-lived Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. program. Recommended - “In the current cultural polemics surrounding the Child, in which everyone claims to be speaking for nature, Cronenberg keeps a useful silence.” In TNYRB, [Anna Shechtman and D.A. Miller on David Cronenberg’s extraordinary new movie]( Crimes of the Future. - “Yes, her choice of line often seems naïve, her images are sometimes clichéd, but in places something flares, that strangeness I associate with poetry that feels open rather than finished before it begins.” In The Paris Review, Elisa Gonzalez [writes about Marilyn Monroe, the poet](. - “I do have a perhaps juvenile hostility to incorporating anything like autobiography in my criticism. Increased latitude allows me to include fewer and fewer personal bits.” That’s Lauren Michele Jackson in [conversation]( in The Point. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( [What Community Colleges Need to Thrive]( Community colleges and the students they serve were disproportionately hit during the pandemic. 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