The State and Censorship

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's speech at Harvard's Commencement this past May was perplexing. On one hand, his main philosophical point–that academic freedom and resistance to censorship are valuable and just principles–is one which anyone should find convincing. Moreover, his focus on recent controversies over rescinded invitations to would-be commencement speakers highlighted a number of cases where universities have been poor stewards of academic freedom. 

On the other hand, the Mayor's at-times conspiratorial preoccupation with the existence of a growing liberal regime of censorship seemed at odds with the rest of his speech. After noting that "96 percent of all campaign contributions from Ivy League Faculty and employees went to Barack Obama," and arguing that this statistic implied an overly homogenous intellectual environment, Mayor Bloomberg later named three political phenomena that were evidence of closed-mindedness:  the Federal ban on funding gun control research, the prevalence of climate-change denial and creationism, and the Federal government's cuts to the research and development budget. Given which side of the political spectrum sustains much of this anti-intellectualism, perhaps the Mayor should have been more shocked by the four percent of campaign contributions that did not go to the President's reelection campaign, rather than the 96 percent that did. 

More than this incongruity, however, the Mayor's speech suffered from the oversimplified historical analogies which he cited. At one point, Mayor Bloomberg rightly mentioned the cases of Socrates, Galileo, Nelson Mandela, Vaclac Havel, Ai Wei Wei, Pussy Riot,  and "the kids who made the 'Happy' video in Iran" as exemplars of the type of censorship that society should eliminate. And throughout his address, the Mayor referred to liberal censorship at universities as "a modern-day form of McCarthyism." But making such a blanket comparison between his historical examples and the apparent censorship the Mayor observes today ignores what made the former particularly pernicious, and inherently different from modern day graduation-speaker controversies: state sponsorship.

Strikingly, most of the Mayor's evidence for modern-day liberal censorship on college campuses comes from private institutions, like Smith, Swarthmore, and Johns Hopkins; and even when it comes from state institutions like Rutgers, the censoring impulse emanated not from the state-appointed governing board, but from elements of the faculty and student body. His historical examples, however, all have to do with state censorship of political views. Socrates, Galileo, Mandela, Havel -- all were persecuted by state institutions and accused of breaking laws. The Red Scare also relied on the complicity of private institutions such as the entertainment industry, but with its legally-prescribed loyalty oaths and roving Senate subcommittee hearings, the government played a central role. 

Drawing a line between state-sponsored censorship and censorship from other sources may seem like making a distinction without a difference, but consider the intensity of graduation speaker controversies today and the Red Scare, or Galileo's persecution in the 17th century. In the latter two cases, official sanction led to ruined lives and imprisonment. When modern universities cave to protesters and awkwardly rescind commencement invitations, they draw condemnation, risk losing donors, and generally appear spineless. The speakers themselves are hardly silenced in any comprehensive way, and might gain some publicity. In short, the worst censorship has historically come when the state and large segments of civil society combine to eradicate certain viewpoints. When colleges act this way in a country with a well-functioning civil society, they are reneging on their responsibilities as bastions of free inquiry, but they are hardly becoming harbingers of a new McCarthyism.

And before we conclude that graduation speaker controversies are always antithetical to free speech, we should note that commencements are a special case of academic freedom. Another element of the Red Scare that was so pernicious was its use of what professors did and believed out of the classroom as a condition of their employment, thereby infringing on their freedom of speech and association and detracting from their core purpose: teaching. But when colleges award honorary degrees, controversy is inevitable because those degrees confer legitimacy on the actions of public figures. And sometimes protests against degree recipients may turn out to be right.

Harvard's choice of the Shah of Iran as commencement speaker in 1968 is one such instance. Given that the Shah came to power in a U.S.-sponsored coup against an elected government and had a questionable human rights record, Harvard would undoubtedly like a do-over on that choice. But the powers-that-be overruled student protestors, and one of recent history's more infamous figures can claim the honor of an honorary degree from Harvard. 

None of these criticisms should detract from the validity of Mayor Bloomberg's central point: censorship for the sake of silencing opposing views is inherently unjust. But that apparent absolute comes with caveats. Not all censorship is evidence of systematic persecution, and some public addresses carry weightier moral implications than others. Colleges should be firm once they pick commencement speakers, but they should also ensure that their choices do not affirm intolerance and oppression, the very evils which academic freedom exists to combat.

Nelson L. Barrette ’17, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Winthrop House. His column will appear every two weeks this summer.