Who Decides What Is Acceptable Speech on Campus? Why Restricting Free Speech Is Not the Answer

Middlebury Protests and Cancellation

Within days of the disturbance by a group of students and some faculty members that led to the cancellation of Murray’s talk, more than 100 Middlebury faculty signed a statement critical of the protestors:

No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain. No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion. The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices. (Parini et al., 2017, paras. 11–13)

Elsewhere, roughly 4,500 people (mostly faculty) signed an online statement drafted by Robert George and Cornel West—two scholars with opposing political views—who put aside their differences to jointly criticize the Middlebury protestors (we are among the signatories to this letter):

We should oppose efforts to silence those with whom we disagree—especially on college and university campuses. . . . All of us should be willing—even eager—to engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments. The more important the subject under discussion, the more willing we should be to listen and engage—especially if the person with whom we are in conversation will challenge our deeply held—even our most cherished and identity-forming—beliefs. (George & West, 2017, paras. 2 and 4)

Dozens of other speakers—for example, Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Heather MacDonald, James Watson, Charles Murray, Tommy Robinson, Christina Hoff Sommers, Brett Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and many others—were cancelled at colleges such as the University of California (UC)-Berkeley (Senju, 2017), University of Toronto (Genuinewitty, 2016), McMaster University (Beatty, 2017), Yale University (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2015b), Evergreen College (Richardson, 2017), Amherst College (Chasmar, 2015), University of Michigan, (Slagter, 2017), Columbia University (Ruptly, 2017), University of Massachusetts (Bettis, 2016), University of Illinois (“U. of I. Cancels Talk,” 2017), Claremont McKenna College (Blume, 2017), University of Oregon (“Students Disrupt Speech,” 2017), Virginia Tech University (Roll, 2017), College of William and Mary (Bauer-Wolf, 2017a), Texas Southern University (Jaschik, 2017a), and University of Connecticut (Barbash, 2017). These cancellations, as well as the Middlebury cancellation, illustrate concepts that lie at the heart of psychology, which we invoke later. Although these speakers differ in their comportment, political leanings, and degree of extremism, the psychological concepts are relevant to them all.

Was Murray’s Planned Talk Hate Speech? A Modest Experiment

As noted, the U.S. Supreme Court considers hate speech insufficient to allow government actors, which includes most colleges, to ban it. Instead, banned speech on state-supported campuses must be not only hateful but also imminently dangerous. It is for this reason that the University of Florida and a number of other institutions have allowed Richard Spencer, the White-nationalist organizer, to speak on campus, despite the high cost for security. However, as noted, we do not believe that Murray’s planned talk was hateful or dangerous; it seemed to us that it was centrist social science. But we can do better than rely on impressions. After Murray was shouted down at his public talk, he was escorted to a studio in the basement of the same building where he and political scientist Allison Stanger attempted to conduct a live stream in which he presented the talk he was unable to give publicly. It was a summary of his book, Coming Apart, describing the increasing alienation from what Murray calls “the founding virtues” of civic life that took place among the White, non-Latino working class in America between 1960 and 2010: declining labor force participation, decreased religiosity and marriage rate, and increased opiate use and crime rate. Although some may disagree with Murray’s analysis of trends among working-class Whites, a transcript of his planned remarks sounded to us like centrist commentary. (Moreover, even if his talk had been strongly conservative, that would not justify silencing him.) To test our impression that Murray’s talk was centrist social science, we created a verbatim transcript of the first 14 min of the live-stream talk he gave after being prevented from speaking to the audience. It hewed closely to his book and bore no relation to his controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve. In this live stream, Murray attempted to summarize the talk he was prevented from giving, but he never managed to finish. Around the 13 min and 30 s mark, he became distracted by protestors’ shouts and wall banging and the fire alarms that were set off. He can be heard asking the sound technician if listeners can hear what he was saying or if his comments were obscured by the noise outside the studio. Thus, our transcription stopped at this point.

We sent this transcript to 68 faculty members in the United States and Canada. This was not a scientific sample but a selection of faculty members who had participated in a national randomized cross-disciplinary email survey of faculty we had conducted earlier on an unrelated issue (Williams & Ceci, 2015). We did not tell these faculty that the transcription was a talk by Murray nor that it was connected to the disturbance at Middlebury College. We asked them to rate it on a 9-point scale (1 = strongly liberal, 5 = middle-of-the-road, 9 = strongly conservative). Fifty-seven of the 68 faculty members responded (plus two spouses, one of whom we included because she is also a professor). Their median rating of Murray’s talk was 5 (mean = 5.02, SD = 1.34). The most liberal rating was 2.5, and the most conservative rating was 8; of the 58 faculty ratings, 37 were between 4 and 6, or middle of the road. Thus, faculty in this convenience sample did not view Murray’s comments as dangerously conservative, and none of their written comments suggested anything remotely oriented toward hate speech. Many faculty provided comments about why they regarded the talk as liberal; we describe these comments below.

We also asked another group of 68 faculty to do the same rating, with one difference: We told them the text was from a speech by Charles Murray. This information made a statistical difference. The 44 who responded knowing it was written by Murray rated it as more conservative than did their blinded counterparts (M = 5.74, SD = 1.21), two-tailed t(96) = 2.74, p = .007. However, even this group’s mean was close to middle of the road. In sum, neither faculty group saw anything about Murray’s talk that deserved to be banned.

Faculty are far more liberal than the general population, and social psychologists in particular are overwhelmingly liberal (Haidt, 2011; Inbar & Lammers, 2012; Redding, 2001). For example, Von Hippel and Buss (2018) canvassed members of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology about their voting preferences (or whom they would have voted for) in the 2012 U.S. presidential election (37.2% response rate): 305 of the 335 respondents indicated that they had voted for Barack Obama, and only 4 had voted for Mitt Romney. On social issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and gun control, psychologists were overwhelmingly liberal—their mean rating was within 2 points of the extreme liberal end of an 11-point scale, and many chose 11 (fewer than 2% chose any option on the conservative side of the scale). When asked about their political leanings, 89.3% said left of center, 8.3% said centrist, and only 2.5% said right of center. In another survey of social psychologists, Inbar and Lammers (2012) canvassed the Society for Personality and Social Psychology discussion list, from which 292 individuals participated: 85% self-described as liberal, 9% as moderate, and only 6% as conservative (a ratio of 14:1). Furthermore, the trend toward political homogeneity increased across cohorts: Whereas 10% of faculty were conservative, only 2% of graduate students and postdocs were. ³ Academics are influenced by ideology when hiring new faculty as well as when evaluating texts (e.g., Abromowitz, Gomes, & Abromowitz, 1975; Ceci & Williams, 2018; Kohler, 1993). For example, psychologists rate methodology differently depending on whether it is framed as conservative or liberal/progressive (Ceci, Peters, & Plotkin, 1985).

In light of social psychologists’ liberal tendency, it was of interest to determine how a nonacademic sample would view Murray’s talk. Would they share the faculty belief that it was middle-of-the-road? To find out, we paid 200 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (mean age = 32 years) to do the rating. They rated their own political orientation on the 9-point scale, and the mean was 4.22, slightly to the liberal side of the scale. To insure they carefully read the transcript of Murray’s talk, we included two factual questions related to the talk at the end of the MTurk survey that they had to answer correctly. Their mean rating of the Murray text was 5.22 (SD 1.17), which is squarely centrist. Thus, all three groups of adults rated the Murray talk as centrist, ranging from 5.02 to 5.74 on a 9-point scale.

Of the 58 faculty members who were unaware that the talk was by Murray, 26 accompanied their ratings with comments. They frequently viewed the talk as a list of descriptive facts that were neither controversial nor conservative but mainly centrist or liberal:

Many of these 26 “blind” respondents perceived it as centrist or liberal because of the themes addressed—class differences, innate talent, motivation—ones they felt conservatives would not address:

Only 4 of the 26 blind respondents perceived signs of conservativism: “My guess is that most students and professors at top universities would guess conservative because he/she has gone on for a number of paragraphs without even mentioning race or gender or inequality or even poverty.”

In contrast, 18 of the 44 faculty who knew the talk was by Murray submitted comments, and 15 of them perceived conservatism:

Thus, blinded respondents were less likely to see conservatism than were nonblinded respondents (p < .001).

In sum, MTurkers who as a group leaned slightly liberal and faculty who as a group are usually liberal both viewed Murray’s talk as centrist—nothing that would warrant labeling it as hate speech or justify preventing others from hearing it. Even had the majority viewed the talk as extremely conservative, it still would not justify infringing on others’ desire to hear Murray’s analysis. By taking it on themselves to prevent classmates from listening to a talk they had come to hear, protestors fell into the trap that Robert George and Cornell West criticized as the “idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself” (George & West, 2017, para. 3).

This underscores the point made by over a hundred Middlebury faculty in their statement of principles (Parini et al., 2017): No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain. No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion. Before protestors presume it is their prerogative or even their obligation to prevent classmates from hearing someone speak (legal scholars do not consider the use of speech to disrupt a speaker as protected speech; otherwise, all speakers would be susceptible to a “heckler’s veto”), they should imagine how it would feel if classmates exercised the same option and prevented them from hearing a controversial speaker from their side of the political aisle. This is not a hypothetical or rhetorical question. Speakers who have strongly progressive credentials that some on the conservative side find offensive have not been shouted down by protestors when invited to speak on college campuses. For example, Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison has been politely received on campuses despite some being offended by his denial of Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitism, for which Ellison eventually issued an apology.

Legal Considerations: The First Amendment

The cancellation of talks on college campuses raises questions regarding the definition and boundaries of free speech and the complexities involved in reasoning about principles governing free speech. Although appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court over the years have issued rulings that have shaped current views of the First Amendment, they have repeatedly affirmed a core principle: Speech that merely offends or hurts the feelings of others, without eliciting a more dramatic and dangerous response, is protected against governmental suppression. Even hate speech, if it does not incite imminent danger (“real threats,” “fighting words”), is protected for governmental actors (e.g., those at state-supported universities). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even speech that advocates illegal or subversive acts may not be prohibited except when “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” (Brandenberg v. Ohio, 1969, p. 447).

Thus, the standard for legal prohibition of speech is high: it is not enough to be hateful; it must be imminently injurious (a “true threat”) or fall into a small class of exceptions such as child pornography, false or deceptive advertising, defamatory statements, true threats, or the incitement of illegal behavior, which are not protected by the First Amendment. As the noted First Amendment scholar Erwin Chemerinsky (2017) has pointed out, it is important to distinguish between the legal and colloquial use of “incitement.” Legally, speech can be punished as incitement only under conditions in which it creates a substantial and imminent likelihood of illegal activity and only when it is directed at advocating such activity (Brandenberg v. Ohio, 1969). Thus, Chemerinsky (2017) argues that even if a highly provocative speaker said hateful things, it would not constitute a harassment exception unless it created an imminent and dangerous “true threat” to someone, as opposed to sarcasm or hyperbole. (In Watts v. United States, 1969, an 18-year-old’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court because it deemed his utterance at a small public gathering as hyperbole when he stated that, if he was inducted into the Army and made to carry a rifle, “the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.”). Chemerinsky notes: “I heard students say that merely having speakers expressing a hateful message on campus made them feel harassed. No court would ever find that was enough to meet the test for harassing speech unprotected by the First Amendment.” So-called fighting words or true threats by their very nature “inflict injury or tend to incite immediate breach of the peace” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942, p. 572) and “have a direct tendency to cause acts of violence” (p. 573) by the person to whom the remark is directed. Absent provocation of imminent violence, the Court has emphasized the responsibility of the targets of offensive speech to ignore it, move away from it, or divert their eyes from an offensive speaker, program, or message. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a draft resistor had the right to wear a jacket emblazoned with the slogan “Fuck the Draft” because persons offended could avert their eyes (Cohen v. California, 1971). This was the reason the president of the University of Florida allowed Richard Spencer to speak, despite the cost over a half-million dollars for security arrangements (Bauer-Wolf, 2017a).

Hundreds of campus speech codes are more restrictive than the Court’s rulings; roughly one in nine campuses have free-speech zones to limit speech to small areas (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2018), and some campus codes, such as that formerly used at the University of Michigan, prohibited “any behavior . . . that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status” (Welch, 2014, p. 8); others forbid “unwelcome verbal, nonverbal, graphic, physical, electronic or other conduct that subjects an individual to an intimidating, hostile or offensive educational or employment environment.” (Bauer-Wolf, 2017b, para. 19). As Chemerinsky argues, such codes have not fared well in court; the ACLU has generally opposed them on the grounds that they violate well-established protections, and case after case has been overturned (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 2015 a). In an ironic turn at the College of William and Mary, Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter, was prevented from discussing free speech issues. Minutes into her talk, students with signs lined the stage and drowned her out with chants of “ACLU, free speech for who?” “The oppressed are not impressed,” “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too,” “Blood on your hands,” “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “Your free speech hides beneath white sheets.” Gastañaga was unable to continue and unable to talk with a smaller group of students afterward because of the volume of the chants.

Some state legislatures have overridden campus speech codes by reinforcing the need to protect speech regardless of how vile, or by extending First Amendment protections to private, nonpublic campuses. California, for example, passed the Leonard Law:

No private postsecondary educational institution shall make or enforce any rule subjecting any student to disciplinary sanctions solely on the basis of . . . speech . . . that, when engaged in outside the campus of a private postsecondary institution, is protected from governmental restriction by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or Section 2 of Article 1 of the California Constitution. (Leonard Law, 2006)

States without a Leonard Law can pursue speech infringements at private universities in other ways. In New York, Fordham University students petitioned to start a Students for Justice in Palestine club (SJP) on the private religious campus. The student government approved the club unanimously, but the dean of students overruled the approval, saying the group would “stir up controversy,” be “polarizing,” and make students uncomfortable (Awad, et al. v. Fordham University, 2017, p. 6). According to the Anti-Defamation League (2014), SJP has “demonized Israel, describing Israeli policies toward the Palestinians as apartheid-like, and comparing Israelis to Nazis or Israel to the Jim Crow-era U.S.” (p. 1). Attorneys for students who were denied the right to establish the club filed an Article 78 Proceeding (a way of challenging the activities of an administrative agency in court) to determine whether the decision by the Fordham University administration was a violation of lawful procedure, affected by an error of law, was arbitrary and capricious, or was an abuse of discretion. Attorneys for the students are arguing that the denial violates free speech and association principles.

In addition, some states forbid public universities from canceling speakers invited by a student organization (or forbid requiring students to pay a higher ticket price to cover security costs). These state laws specifically forbid disrupting invited speakers whose views many find odious. The most recent states to legislate along these lines were North Carolina (“An Act to Restore and Preserve Free Speech . . .,” 2017) and Tennessee (Campus Free Speech Protection Act, 2017); many other states have enacted less sweeping protection of free speech, such as rejecting free speech zones (University of Cincinnati Chapter of YAL v. Williams, 2012). Recently, the state legislatures in a number of states, including Utah, Colorado, and Tennessee have joined Arizona, Virginia, and Missouri in banning free-speech zones, and Florida is currently considering a related bill.

The text of Tennessee’s law is as follows:

(a) the governing body of every institution shall adopt a policy that affirms the following principles of free speech . . . : (1) Students have a fundamental constitutional right to free speech; (2) An institution shall be committed to giving students the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, learn, and discuss any issue . . . ; (3) An institution shall be committed to maintaining a campus as a marketplace of ideas for all students and all faculty in which the free exchange of ideas is not to be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the institution’s community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed; . . . (5) It is not the proper role of an institution to attempt to shield individuals from free speech, including ideas and opinions they find offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed; (6) . . . concerns about civility and mutual respect shall never be used by an institution as a justification for closing off the discussion of ideas, however offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed those ideas may be to some students or faculty; (7) . . . To this end, an institution has a responsibility to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation and protect that freedom; . . . (c) Nothing in this section shall be construed to grant students the right to disrupt previously scheduled or reserved activities occurring in a traditional public forum. (pp. 3, 4, and 6)

Despite their restrictiveness, campus speech codes—including Middlebury’s—prohibit interference with audience members’ ability to hear speakers. However, protestors have argued that higher moral considerations supersede neoliberal values such as free speech. This view is evident not only in protestors’ arguments but also in a recent Brookings national survey of 1,500 undergraduates. Students were asked three questions:

1. Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”? Across all political parties, fewer than half of students were aware that hate speech by governmental actors (which includes those at state universities) is constitutionally protected—39% of Democrats, 44% of Republicans, and 40% of Independents. Thus, the false assertion by UC-Berkeley protestors that hate speech is not protected is unsurprising (Hardman, 2018).

2. A public university invites a very controversial speaker . . . known for making offensive and hurtful statements. A student group opposed to the speaker disrupts the speech by loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear. Do you agree or disagree the students’ actions are acceptable? Overall, 51% of students agreed it was acceptable to prevent others from hearing the speaker. This view was significantly more common among students who are self-described Democrats (62%) as opposed to Republicans (39%) or Independents (45%).

Finally, students were asked:

3. A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking. Do you agree or disagree that the student group’s actions are acceptable? Overall, 19% of respondents endorsed violence in this situation—20% of Democrats, 22% of Republicans, and 16% of Independents. Villasenor wrote:

While percentages in the high teens and low 20s are “low” relative to what they could be, it is important to remember that this question is asking about the acceptability of committing violence in order to silence speech. Any number significantly above zero is concerning. (Villasenor, 2017, para. 14).

The Philosophy of Free Speech: Rights and Obligations

Students have rights as well as responsibilities, as does the leadership on their campuses. Members of a campus community have the right to invite presentations by proponents of a given view, and others have the right to present counterarguments to it. (Although there is no Constitutional requirement for an opportunity for a counterargument, it makes good sense, both educationally and strategically.) However, the right to a counterargument must not preclude the views of speakers with whom some students disagree. Disdained views will not disappear just because they are banned; they can go underground and fester and even grow in support, as the live stream of Heather MacDonald following the cancelation of her talk demonstrates. The learning process thrives in an atmosphere in which all sides are allowed to present their case. We must beware one-party dogmatism and groupthink in which adherents make faulty decisions because group pressures lead them to ignore alternatives and dehumanize the opponent. A group is especially vulnerable when its members are insulated from alternative opinions (Janis, 1971).

Failure to steadfastly defend the discussion of unpopular views is as toxic to campus intellectual health as it is to the democratic health of nations. We must foster the respectful exchange of ideas, even ones that are shocking and that make us uncomfortable. Each side must learn the evidentiary basis of opponents’ cases; research shows that probing members for their understanding of mechanisms leads to moderation of extreme views (Fernbach et al., 2013). In his treatise On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued,

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.” (Mill, 1859/1869, p. 21)

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin made a similar argument

Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth . . . & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree.” (cited in Hardy, 2001, para. 1)

Yet, some students at Middlebury explicitly reject the rationalist views of Mill, Stanovich, Berlin, West, George, and others. They reject the hegemony of the “rational thought-based perspective” in favor of a “lived experiences” perspective, which they argue has greater validity than rational argument: “We contend that experiences and emotions are valid ways to see the world, and that the hegemony of rational thought-based perspective often found in a university setting limit our collective creativity, health, and potential” (Brockelman et al., 2017, para. 8). The enjoinder to listen to various sides’ arguments is inimical to those whose “real, felt experiences” lead them to dismiss those who showed up at Murray’s lecture hoping to hear his views. Protestors’ invocation of emotions over reasoned argument (“the hegemony of rational thought-based perspective”) is troubling not because emotional arguments are easily refuted but for precisely the opposite reason—no one can refute someone’s feelings. If all agree that emotions should trump reasoned arguments, everyone can invoke their own “felt emotional” experience, leaving a battle between sets of feelings, with each side recruiting arguments that affirm their feelings and minimizing those that run counter. This represents a form of myside bias (Stanovich et al., 2013) criticized by scholars at least since the Enlightenment:

The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects. (Francis Bacon, as cited by Nisbett & Ross, 1980, p. 167)

Great universities have seen themselves as bulwarks against arguments based on confirmatory biases and a retreat to emotions, a point recently made by the University of Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer (2016):

Universities cannot be viewed as a sanctuary for comfort but rather as a crucible for confronting ideas and thereby learning to make informed judgments. . . . Having one’s assumptions challenged and experiencing the discomfort that sometimes accompanies this process are intrinsic parts of an excellent education. Only then will students develop the skills necessary to build their own futures and contribute to society. (para. 10)

Zimmer’s letter followed one by John Ellison (2016), dean of students at the University of Chicago:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not. . . cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. (para. 3)

Recently, Lilienfeld (2017) provided a compelling critique of safe spaces and trigger warnings, noting the lack of scientific support for the concept of microaggressions. He argues that it fails on all five dimensions required (e.g., the dimension in which research does not support the clinical claims made by proponents).

Moving Forward: Two Principles and Several Corollaries

The following principles and corollaries are starting points for campus discussions. Students, faculty, and administrators need to be aware of the complexities involved in inviting and cancelling talks as they work toward a consensual understanding of the rights and obligations of aspiring to an inclusive, welcoming community while simultaneously defending freedom of expression. This will require a consideration not only of these two aims but also of public safety and financial issues that some campus administrators have invoked to prevent White nationalist Richard Spencer and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking. Safety is a legitimate issue, of course. In a statement following the cancellation of a speech by Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops, Claremont McKenna College President Hiram Chodosh (2017) said these words:

Based on the judgment of the Claremont Police Department, we jointly concluded that any forced interventions or arrests would have created unsafe conditions for students, faculty, staff, and guests, I take full responsibility for the decision to err on the side of these overriding safety considerations. (para. 2)

This is a legitimate consideration but it must not be used as a cover for political motivations.

What Can Colleges and Universities Do?

In the Cato Institute survey (Ekins, 2017) of Americans with university experience, 66% reported that colleges are not doing enough to teach students about the value of free speech. This view is shared by 51% of current college and graduate students. Events such as the protests across the United States and Canada suggest that activities might be introduced, either during the orientation period for new students or in seminars. These activities are based on psychological research on avoiding confirmatory bias (Nickerson, 1998), particularly the subclass of myside bias, in which people generate evidence or test hypotheses that favor their own side (Baron, 1995) or engage in closed-minded thinking (Baron, 2008), selective perception (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954), motivated skepticism (Taber & Lodge, 2006), illusion of understanding (Fernbach et al., 2013), blind-spot bias (Ehrlinger et al., 2005), and naive realism, the latter tendency to believe that what we see is an accurate reflection of what is really “out there.” In contrast, this same psychological research shows that we perceive political opponents to be afflicted by their own bias from seeing things the same way (e.g., Gilovich & Ross, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012; Taber & Lodge, 2006; Tavris & Aronson, 2007). This research suggests a number of activities to counter naive realism. Gilovich and Ross (2016) in particular show the net influence of naive realism on perceptions of validity of opposing political views: The greater the disagreement with another’s viewpoint, the greater the likelihood we regard it as biased perception.

Colleges might begin by inculcating a culture on campus in which students are expected to become informed about controversial speakers’ views, either by listening to their arguments or reading their positions. As noted, many of the protestors admitted to not having read any of Murray’s work, relying instead on hearsay and a Wikipedia summary in which it was reported that the SPLC labeled his 1994 book the work of a White nationalist. One exercise could be to examine the quotes used by the SPLC to support its White nationalist judgment and weigh them against Murray’s (2017) response to determine whether they were taken out of context, as some have claimed (Liberty Counsel, 2017). Or whether countervailing statements that exculpate him were ignored versus justifying a judgment that he is a White nationalist. Students could be divided into two groups, one asked to evaluate whether a German-built car with a poor safety record should be banned from U.S. highways and the other asked the identical question about an American-built car. Research on myside bias reveals large differences in favor of the American car (Stanovich et al., 2013), which provides a starting point to discuss partisan reasoning biases. Such exercises are valuable in a variety of classes that call on similar analytic skills. (It also would seem relevant to current concerns related to the uncritical acceptance of fake news.) Likewise, the exercises created to document the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Kruger & Dunning, 1999)—the failure to appreciate one’s own incompetence—could be revelatory. It should underscore the need for students to acquaint themselves with opponents’ evidence and the limits of their own.

Role-playing exercises, in which supporters of each side are asked to switch sides, can also be valuable. Debate team veterans know this because they are given a topic and instructed to prepare both pro and con positions; they are not told which side they will defend until shortly before the start of the debate. Similar role-playing exercises could be woven into controversial seminars in the social sciences and humanities and even in some natural sciences (e.g., the role of humans in climate change, the safety of GMOs, the theory of evolution/origin of the universe, the ethics of fetal stem cell therapies, drilling in the Arctic Refuge, CRISPR gene editing). Researching multiple sides of a contentious argument can help prevent ideological groupthink. It can even engender empathy for others and help routinize attempts to falsify one’s pet theory and supplement it with efforts to disconfirm personal bias. Research on the “illusion of understanding” shows that requiring students to explain their views in detail moderates extremist attitudes and narrows gaps between opposing political groups (see Experiments 1 and 2 in Fernbach et al., 2013). Thus, activity that involves in-depth analysis of each side’s claims can moderate extremist views that are caused by a failure to understand underlying mechanisms. Although it may not always be desirable to moderate one’s views, especially when opposing dangerous positions, the driver in reducing extremism is making people aware of their misunderstanding of underlying mechanisms, which is essential to validate one’s views. Encouraging tolerance of speakers with views that are considered odious by some could serve to dilute the homogeneous clusters of online users that result from their near-exclusive exposure to a limited range of sociopolitical content.

During freshman orientation at our university, students are informed about codes of conduct related to plagiarism, intoxication, sexual harassment, and so forth. They must pass online tests based on curricula (e.g., http://alcohol.ku.edu). These are important issues, and entering students must demonstrate that they have read and understood these codes. However, freshmen are not encouraged to think about issues related to free expression, hate speech, what constitutes “evidence,” or what is and is not protected expression by campus speech codes as well as by the U.S. Constitution. For example, does the online assertion that someone is a White nationalist by a respected organization represent proof? What would constitute compelling evidence? And if such evidence is provided, as in the case of the self-avowed White nationalist Richard Spencer, should it be grounds for preventing the individual from speaking, given that such speech is likely to make members of the campus community uncomfortable and run counter to the goals of inclusiveness and diversity? At what point do public institutions have a responsibility to ensure the safety of such speakers and those who come to hear them, rather than default to banning them on grounds that their talks may result in violence or entail large costs to arrange security? In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the issue of security costs in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement , ruling that controversial speakers cannot be charged unreasonably high security fees because doing so potentially constitutes a way to restrict speech on the basis of its popularity. Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote for the Court: “Speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob” (pp. 134–135). One strategy is for hosts of speaking events to submit their projected safety costs, and administrators could have a lottery to rank-order events, thus not penalizing one viewpoint over another. Universities are not free to limit speech by its cost, because that will lead to viewpoint censorship. A public university should decide in advance how much it will spend, and all talks with nonroutine costs go into a lottery for rank ordering. Then the talks could be approved in that order until the money runs out.

One exercise for such training would be to have students discuss the Cato Institute’s campus survey of topics some regard as hate speech. The data cut across both sides of the political spectrum (see also the “balanced ideological antipathy model,” Crawford, Malinas, & Furman, 2015). For example, 40% of Americans with university experience believe that a speaker who says that, on average, men are better than women at math should not be permitted to speak on campus; 51% would ban a speaker who says all White people are racists; 49% would ban speakers who say Christians are backward and brainwashed; 49% would ban speakers who criticize and disrespect police; 48% would ban a speaker who says the average IQ of Whites and Asians is higher than that of African Americans; 57% would ban anyone who claims the Holocaust never occurred; and 41% would ban speakers who said illegal immigrants should be deported.

If a group’s simple demand for the cancellation of an event is sufficient to ban it, this will be the end of discussion of all controversial topics, even if substantial fractions of scholars endorse them. Although the media watch group FAIR (Naureckas, 1995) summarized the predominantly negative reactions to The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) when it was published 24 years ago, not all were negative (see also Browne, 1994; Haier, 2017; Jacoby & Glauberman, 1995; Winegard & Winegard, 2017). Currently, the dominant position among researchers supports some role for genes in the development of intelligence (e.g., Sniekers et al., 2017), although the majority of scholars appear to reject the role of genes in producing racial differences in intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996). Not every opinion is underpinned by equally rigorous science, but no group should have the audacity to claim that it alone possesses the valid view and that all who disagree with it are wrong.

Thus, campuses might use freshman orientation to introduce discussions about the meaning of “evidence” and how personal biases affect our notion of evidence (Kohler, 1993), especially in the context of free speech. Students could be exposed to readings and discussions of free and hateful speech that are designed specifically to “promote an inclusive learning environment but in a way that also respects the unfettered expression of ideas on campus” (e.g., Chemerinsky & Gillman, 2017, p. xi), and asked to prepare arguments for both sides. Terms such as “free speech” and “hate speech” tend to be abstractions for students and are invoked inappropriately, such as when equating banning Murray’s talk with standing up to Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin. It might be illuminating for students to listen to his live stream and answer the question Murray asked: What is so dangerous that they will not permit their classmates to hear it? As seen from our MTurk survey, they will be hard-pressed to claim his remarks at Middlebury were racist, sexist, or White nationalist, despite such claims about The Bell Curve. And if protestors’ actions are in response to The Bell Curve, they should state this explicitly and address the ramifications of banning speech on the basis of historical writings that are unrelated to the invitation.

Students might be challenged to think of reversals in which they have to defend silencing someone they admire. Gilovich and Ross (2016) describe some thought experiments that involve naive realism in opposing political positions (p. 14). Students could also benefit from reading Stanovich’s (2017) counterargument to those who assume the other side is wrong or racist. A little humility can go a long way. “Judge Learned Hand, quoting Oliver Cromwell, said that every courthouse and public building should have inscribed above its entrance, ‘Consider that ye may be wrong’” (as cited by Kendrick, 2017, para. 8). The contemporary words of George and West (2017) put it this way:

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. . . . [One] will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself. (para. 3)

Finally, students could be assigned essays that take opposite sides in the free speech debate; Intelligence² (Intelligence² USA Debates, 2017) is an excellent example of debating whether free speech is threatened on campuses, with writer/lawyer Wendy Kaminer and Columbia’s John McWhorter on the affirmative versus Penn’s Shaun Harper and Yale’s Jason Stanley on the negative. Pinker’s (2015) op-ed in the Boston Globe is another worthy example. In it, he puts forward three reasons for insisting on free speech, notwithstanding the legal exclusions for defamation, national security, child pornography, and yelling fire in a theater. Two of his reasons are pertinent to protests on campuses:

Everything we know about the world—the age of our civilization, species, planet, and universe; the stuff we’re made of; the laws that govern matter and energy; the workings of the body and brain—came as insults to the sacred dogma of the day. We now know that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today. A third reason that free speech is foundational to human flourishing is that it is essential to democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. How did the monstrous regimes of the 20th century gain and hold power? The answer is that groups of armed fanatics silenced their critics and adversaries. (The 1933 election that gave the Nazis a plurality was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent mayhem.) And once in power, the totalitarians criminalized any criticism of the regime. (paras. 8–9)

In conclusion, psychology has a venerable research tradition that demonstrates the folly of naive realism, confirmatory bias, motivated skepticism, blind-spot biases, illusions of understanding, and selective perception. Potential interventions can be deduced from psychological findings, and legal scholars such as Chemerinsky and Gillman (2017) have supplied a framework within which the campus community can work toward consensual practices, even if this does not mean achieving consensual viewpoints.