Free speech on campus calls for both hard heads and soft hearts

In Australia and New Zealand, university vice-chancellors have recently called on their communities to enlighten up – although not in those words.

As “exemplars” of robust debate, wrote the University of Auckland’s Dawn Freshwater last year, scholars should “speak bravely and freely, but with respect”. And in his annual address this year, the University of Melbourne’s Duncan Maskell said we should model “vigorous, informed debate” by way of “respectful listening as well as robust expression” – but not by “throwing metaphorical bricks at each other”.

These calls to reason echo a long Enlightenment tradition, such as Voltaire’s call for tolerance among warring religions: “If you want your doctrine to be tolerated here, start by being neither intolerant, nor intolerable.” For Immanuel Kant and John Henry Newman, the university offered a safe place for reassessing doctrine – in Newman’s words: “by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge”.

On Australian campuses, things don’t always go this way. As seen in recent months, a panel discussion in Melbourne or a guest speaker event in Sydney may attract attempts to shut down the forum before it has even begun. This despite university policies that say the usual things about the value of free exchange and open debate.

Beyond restating policy commitments, how do universities promote free and open discussion as a campus norm, in ways that examine the relative merits of diverse views – and indirectly, that inform the hard decisions societies must make?

Many leaders promote respect as a shorthand for tolerance, civility and upholding the rights of others. Civility works well as a campus norm. And lawful rights must be protected. But since no one has a right to “respect” as such, it should not be a formal rule.

With such a rule, it is too easy to restrict free exchange where some regard others’ views as offensive – as noted by Australia’s French Review, the 2018 government-sponsored review of free speech in higher education. In its judgment on the case of Peter Ridd, the James Cook University academic sacked in 2018 for criticising his colleagues and employer, Australia’s High Court found that the way his university used its respect rules was inconsistent with its commitment to academic freedom. As law professors Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone assert in their 2021 book Open Minds, scholars should be able to voice “harsh and even disrespectful criticism” of their colleagues or university.

So yes, let’s agree to disagree with care and consideration. But let’s be clear too that if universities present respect as a right, scholars will face demands to self-censor and defer to doctrines they don’t accept and may not respect at all. That’s why, in a recent UK debate, the University of Cambridge adopted a policy of “tolerance” instead.

Many UK scholars will be concerned that, in a recent survey of 1,000 UK undergraduates by the Higher Education Policy Institute, 36 per cent agreed that scholars should be fired if they teach “material that heavily offends some students”. Compared with previous survey responses, the authors interpret this as a sign that UK students have become “less liberal” in ways that are not “in line with traditional academic norms”.

In Australia, many scholars worry that students (and colleagues, too) feel compelled to self-censor on campus owing to fear of social sanctions by peers or future career repercussions. But the extent and effects of this are hard to measure reliably.

Australia’s most recent Student Experience Survey indicated that in 2021, 77 per cent of undergraduates felt “free to express (their) views” and 81 per cent felt “free from discrimination, harm or hatred” at their own institutions. Also, 76 per cent of students agreed that academics were “free to express their views”.

So far, I’ve seen no survey that asks students in Australia if causing offence should be a sackable offence. Meanwhile, the principle of being free to disagree within lawful limits seems clear enough. As does being free from social harms, such as defamation or vilification. Yet the whole question of self-censoring raises questions that warrant further research.

For students, one complicator is that they inhabit many overlapping social contexts on campus and online. They may even reside in another country while studying online in Australia. Other complicators include which topic is under discussion; how often students self-censor for positive reasons, such as empathy for classmates; and whether (as UK survey data from the Policy Institute at King’s College London indicates) on campus they feel more free to speak and more free from harm than elsewhere.

All these factors argue for a lot of two-way tolerance and intellectual charity in teaching and learning contexts if students are to “disagree well” in diverse groups on topics where views diverge.

As part of a viewpoint diversity project in Australia, I’ve developed a “hard heads, soft hearts” framework to promote constructive debate in class settings. The soft hearts side is a set of study group norms. These encourage students to share their thoughts openly, consider classmate concerns with care, and normalise hearing each other out.

The hard heads side calls on students to aim for the scholarly high ground, with claims and counter-arguments based on logic and evidence, rather than adopting tactics of rhetorical avoidance or, at worst, exclusionary allegations – such as calling someone a bigot or a snowflake.

Both frameworks present learning as a never-ending project of enlightening up. They reject the lazy assumption that your minority viewpoint or minority group status just means you’re bad or mad or both. In this, they support the higher learning aims of today’s more visibly inclusive universities.

Geoff Sharrock is honorary senior fellow in the University of Melbourne’s School of Psychological Sciences.