I want to share Bloomberg's article about free speech in the Wall Street Journal.
Republican Censorship Goes for Woke
Ron DeSantis’s efforts
to control educational and corporate speech are no better than the left’s.
By
Republicans often rightly complain that college campuses are hostile to the
free exchange of ideas. Speakers over the past decade have regularly been
disinvited, shouted down and even physically attacked by student activists
unwilling to entertain different ideas and perspectives. This behavior is
anathema to a university’s mission and deeply damaging to our nation.
Unfortunately, instead of taking a
principled stand for free speech, many Republicans are now saying: “If you
can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
Consider Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed a bill that as
of July 1 bars professors from expressing any view in a classroom that
“espouses, promotes, [or] advances” anything that could make students feel
guilty about history, as it relates to race and gender. The bill is known as
the Stop Woke Act, short for Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, and its
principal target is critical race theory, which has become a bugaboo on the
right and is divisive on the left.
Free inquiry and discourse—including professing ideas and beliefs—lie
at the heart of higher education and democratic society. In both the sciences
and humanities, rigorous debates based on facts, data and reason allow ideas
and theories to be evaluated and amended, adopted and discarded, in ways that
promote understanding, advance knowledge and teach responsible citizenship.
Yet Florida’s law abandons this ideal by seeking to proscribe what
professors can say on particular topics. Universities could be held liable, for
example, if a professor expresses support for affirmative action. Remember when
Republicans believed in limiting tort laws, rather than expanding them?
The law also applies to companies, as though government should be
micromanaging the curriculum of diversity-and-inclusion programs. Similar
liability laws have made their way through Republican legislatures in Idaho,
Iowa and North Dakota this year, with more potentially on the way. What
happened to Republican support for free enterprise?
The way to address controversial theories isn’t by banning
professors or business leaders from espousing them to students and workers—after
all, government censorship of ideas often helps them gain popularity. Instead,
it’s to allow citizens to give them a free airing, where they can be openly
debated. That’s the American way, and the future of the country rests in no
small part on the commitment of higher-education leaders to defending it.
I’ve criticized both the left and right for failing to uphold the
principles of free expression over the years. In New York’s City Hall, I
strongly defended a Brooklyn university when it sponsored a speech by an
advocate of the BDS movement, which promotes economic war against the state of
Israel through boycotts, divestment and sanctions. I couldn’t disagree more
strongly with those in the BDS movement—but I also couldn’t believe more
strongly in their right to free speech. I’ve always found that those whose
speech we find most objectionable are those whose rights we’re most responsible
for defending.
Every generation faces its own bouts with censorship. In my youth,
it was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s hunt for communists. I can still vividly
remember his questions (“Are you now or have you ever
been . . .?”). Today, censorship is coming from both sides of
the political aisle, but only one side is writing it into law.
Professors in Florida have sued to block the Stop Woke Act, and
let us hope judges will soon strike it down as an abridgment of the First
Amendment. Some professors, however, have also urged students to boycott a new
state survey meant to gauge whether colleges are hostile to viewpoint diversity.
That’s a mistake. Florida’s censorship law is wrong, but it’s a reaction to the
very real problem of campus intolerance. The more that students speak out about
it—even if anonymously through surveys—the more pressure it puts on
administrators to address it.
Higher education is rooted in intellectual exploration. Colleges
that don’t expose students to challenging and uncomfortable ideas fail their
pupils. The same applies to governments that attempt to block professors from
offering their insights or forcing them to teach material as though all
theories—like evolution and creationism—should be given equal weight.
The sad irony is that many of the same people who have accused
millennial and Gen Z students of being snowflakes—those unable to handle
discomforting ideas—are now acting like the most delicate snowflakes of all.
The solution to political repression isn’t more political
repression. It’s freedom. Truth has nothing to fear from free speech—on college
campuses, or anywhere else.
Mr. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg
Philanthropies, served as mayor of New York, 2002-13.
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