My ‘Real Time’ with Bill Maher and the ‘new’ campus free speech crisis

Reflecting on last week’s congressional hearings and my appearance on ‘Real Time’

LEFT TO RIGHT: Panelists Jane Ferguson & John Avlon, Bill & me!

I made it onto “Real Time with Bill Maher” this week!

As fans of the show know, Bill is a fan of free speech and a major critic of wokeness/political correctness — or, as I prefer to call it, in Tim Urban’s coinage, social justice fundamentalism. Maher has previously had both my “Coddling of the American Mind” co-author Jon Haidt and my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author Rikki Schlott on the show, as well as FIRE board member Kmele Foster, FIRE advisors Ira Glasser, John McWhorter, and Steven Pinker, and FIRE Fellow Jamie Kirchick — to name a few. 

This appearance had been in the works for months since the release of “Canceling,” but with the writers’ strike and the season ending, I started to fear that it wasn’t going to happen. When the call finally came in, it unfortunately was scheduled for the day after a big book party in New York City, meaning I had to take a cross-country red-eye flight to make it in time for taping. I left at 12:30 a.m. PST for a 4 p.m. interview and took an 11:45 p.m. flight home to make it my sons’ joint birthday party (they turned 6 and 8) — which is why I’m amazed I was still able to walk, let alone talk.

During the interview, Bill and I talked about the various contours of the argument that everyone was asking about that week in the wake of the campus anti-Semitism hearings: “Are calls for genocide protected speech?” I really appreciate that Bill immediately pointed out, just like the presidents had said in their testimonies, that we hadn’t really heard a specific call for genocide on campus. What we had seen were things like the student at Cornell who issued death threats and engaged in other unprotected speech — for which he was rightfully arrested — and videos of students shouting, “Intifada” and the pro-Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The argument, of course, is that both chants imply genocide and aren’t materially different from a death threat. But implying something is very different, in terms of the law and common sense, than actually saying it. Shouting, “I’m going to kill all of you!” in many contexts can constitute a true threat, evidence of a conspiracy toward action, incitement to imminent lawless action, or discriminatory harassment — all narrowly defined and well-established exceptions to First Amendment protections. And as then-President Magill correctly but hamfistedly said during the hearing, determining whether certain speech meets the threshold for those exceptions requires some more context. 

What’s more, it turns out that many students don’t even know what “from the river to the sea” actually means! For the Wall Street Journal, Ron E. Hassner hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. and found that “only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea.” He also learned that of a total of 80 students who were “shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel,” 60 withdrew their support. Hassner concluded:

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography.

Bill did make the argument that as the language gets increasingly extreme, that makes him increasingly nervous — and that's entirely understandable. There's nothing about speech being protected or something you can’t punish that makes that particular speech good. Indeed, the argument I always come back to — as I did in the clip — is that there’s value in knowing what people really think, especially if it's troubling and especially if it warns you of danger on the horizon. Knowing that someone is a type of person who might consider taking violent action is valuable information, particularly in the scariest times. 

My very own dressing room!

Bill and I also discussed my frustration with the idea that people are suddenly noticing that because pro-Palestinian viewpoints are getting people in trouble on campus (they are at a higher rate than previous years, which is understandable given recent events) that somehow there is some kind of “new free speech problem” on campus.

No. As I wrote in The Atlantic, this is not new. In terms of FIRE case submissions, 2020 and 2021 are still by far the worst years for free speech on campus in recent memory. The problem just didn't get the kind of coverage by mainstream media — or really any media — that the current situation is getting. And I do attribute that, in no small part, to the fact that many journalists are much more sympathetic to pro-Palestinian opinions than they are to, say, professors who jokingly refer to Covid as the Wuhan virus — despite the fact that those cases almost never get anywhere near the kind of harassment, incitement, or threats that many cases being given a ton of media coverage have engaged in. This is frustrating, and I still haven't seen enough people in the media and on the left reevaluate the last six years and say to themselves, “Oh wow, maybe we were blind to how bad this has been.” Still, I have hope that this may happen for at least some of them.

What that will take is people finally assessing the actual incidents of censorship that have occurred so they can get over any notion that Cancel Culture is just “accountability culture,” or just people who “had it coming.” As my FIRE colleague Adam Goldstein and I shared in a piece released last week in Fox News, 1 in 10 students say that they've been either threatened with punishment and investigation or actually have been punished or investigated for their speech.

And before you say that 1 in 10 is a small number, keep in mind that when extrapolated out that amounts to roughly 1 million students nationwide. 

Even worse is the state of censorship on campus for professors, 1 in 6 of whom report having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and 1 in 3 of whom report having been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics, and nearly 200 of whom have been fired in the last nine years. These are numbers that have no historical precedent, as I have argued. 

And again, I have to stress that these are only the cases we know about. In fact, it’s amazing they happen at all, given how low viewpoint diversity is and how many mechanisms for silencing dissenting voices on campus already exist — a phenomenon we dub the “conformity gauntlet” in “Canceling.” As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s amazing the cancelers are finding this many heretics to burn.

Me in the dressing room, don’t I look purty?

My only regret about my appearance on “Real Time” is that I flubbed a statistic: When asked to quantify right-wing Cancel Culture versus left-wing Cancel Culture, I flipped the words “right” and “left.” 

The real statistic is that of the more than 1,000 cases of professors being targeted, about one-third of professors are initially targeted from people to the right of them. The firings and punishments, however, are usually carried out by administrators who overwhelmingly lean left.

This is important because it reiterates an argument that I made in my Intelligence Squared (now renamed Open to Debate) debate years ago: Given the left-leaning dominance of both the administration and professoriate on college campuses today, if people on the left were still as good on free speech as I believe they were when I was younger — back when being liberal was synonymous with supporting freedom of speech — almost none of these cases would take place to begin with.

I know that no amount of statistics will convince some critics, which is why I'm constantly trying to remind people of the fact that previous crises in academic freedom — since the laws defending academic freedom were established — sometimes involved no firings for clearly protected speech at all, and only a comparative handful of targetings. At least back then we understood that even one or two professors getting in trouble actually chilled the speech of millions. The numbers, no matter how you look at them, make previous crises pale in comparison to what’s happening today.

I feel a major theme of my talk with Bill, and the major theme of Maher’s work overall, is the idea that old-school liberals like us are diametrically opposed to younger left-leaning folks with respect to free speech. Frankly, we still think our side is right, and the case gets stronger with each passing day.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

This, from the “Overtime” segment on Bill Maher’s show, is probably my simplest explanation so far of why group polarization works and how it relates to free speech. The point being: If you force anti-Semites to only talk to other anti-Semites, you should not be surprised that they become more anti-Semitic.

It seems obvious, but so do a lot of things that I’ve dedicated my life to repeating.