Free Speech Is Essential. Universities Must Do Everything They Can To Preserve It.

In February 2020, two professors participated in a debate hosted by Harvard on the subject of hate speech and whether it constitutes “violence.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, argued that, yes, hate speech can be violence based on the stress responses in the brain when confronted with speech one finds offensive. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, called Barrett’s argument a “huge disservice to what we are trying to do at universities” and warned that opening up this concept to a room full of students will lead to them equating speech and ideas they don’t like to violence. And when violence is the perception, the only recourse is more violence.

Little did these professors know that they were sitting on a powder keg with a short fuse. Who can forget the chaos that ensued in 2020 and beyond? And since then, with just a few exceptions, numerous violent outbreaks in the public square have been initiated by those rallying around left-wing causes.

Given that the vast majority of college professors identify as “liberal” or “very liberal,” we now have a sizable petri dish in which young people learn that violence is an available tool at their disposal — a tool used to dispose of speech they want eliminated from the public square.

We saw the culmination of this earlier this month with the cruel assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk. According to text messages sent by the young man in custody for shooting Kirk, he “had enough of his hatred,” saying that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” And what “hate” deserved silencing in this twisted mind of the killer? Allegedly, he was romantically involved with his roommate, a male who identified as a female, and Kirk was an outspoken critic of gender identity ideology, as are many others around the world.

Equating the widely held, scientific truth of biological sex to “hate” is absurd. But, regardless, “hate” speech should never be the subject of violence or censorship — especially not on college campuses. Once the bastion of the marketplace of ideas, universities are quickly becoming breeding grounds for uncritical thinking where uniformity of thought is encouraged and dissenters are silenced. Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Academic Freedom, where I serve as director, has intervened in numerous situations where conservative students and student groups — including TPUSA chapters — have been attacked simply for espousing ideas that go against the grain.

Young people didn’t learn the idea of violence as a solution to discomfort in a vacuum. As previously mentioned, the left-wing bias that permeates academic faculty is eye-opening. Studies show that, in 1989, the liberal-to-conservative faculty ratio was 2:1; by 2017, it was 5:1. A 2022 report from the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement found 69.5% of professors identified as “solidly liberal,” while only 13.2% were “conservative.” A 2023 Harvard study showed that its own faculty displayed a 26:1 liberal-to-conservative ratio. This lack of viewpoint diversity has played a significant role in fostering hostility toward free speech.

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The simple solution is for the adults in the room to acknowledge the consequences of faulty ideas and take steps to foster diversity of thought. This means hiring faculty who share different opinions. This means hosting respectful debates where students can witness civil discourse. This means that, if students disrupt respectful debate, campus leadership will take measures to hold unruly protestors accountable. And this means, most importantly, that we should move past the idea that speech protected by the Constitution is equivalent to “violence.”

There are only two ways to enact change in society: speech or violence. In our current political and cultural environment, we’ve seen where both ends of the spectrum draw their lines. But a democratic society cannot long exist when one party believes that it is acceptable to kill those with whom it disagrees. Virtually every civilization throughout history has chosen violence; our founders, on the other hand, chose a better path.

Now is the time to preserve that path.

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Tyson Langhofer is senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom with Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.