‘The fear was so palpable’: How activists smothered debate

Article content

I worried about higher education and what’s happening on campus. Higher ed is where we’re shaping the minds of the future generation of citizens, leaders, doctors, lawyers, policy makers, politicians and teachers. If you can’t engage with ideas that you don’t agree with, or that offend you, what does that mean?

Article content

I ended the film being concerned about democracy itself. A lot of the ideas that were starting on campuses really were bleeding out into society. People are walking on eggshells. I wanted to explore that, and why that happened.

Article content

Who do you believe is driving these speech issues — students, administrators, the cultural milieu…?

Article content

Initially I thought it was the students. I wasn’t a student in the ‘60s, but the birth of the free speech movement in Berkeley, was all about students wanting to be free from the administration telling them what to do.

Article content

They wanted to be able to protest things that were happening off campus, and I thought it was very student-driven. One of the things that I learned was that the administration and professor class was also part of this story.

Article content

Because the fear was so palpable, that’s what shocked me the most – the fear of being cancelled or socially ostracized. People were abandoned by their colleagues, and their friends, for asking questions, or for having certain ideas; it really silences people.

Article content

Article content

My producer and I spoke to hundreds of people who just said, ‘I want to keep my head down. I’m a student. I finally got in. I don’t want to ask a question, because it might piss somebody off. I can’t afford to lose marks or lose friends.’

Article content

Professors without tenure said, ‘I’m worried about offending someone in the class with a reading so I’m just going to change my reading list.’ If they get reported, then the administration will not have their back. We saw this happen again and again.

Article content

Protesters on Evergreen State College campus, in a scene from Speechless. “Somewhere along the way, the climate changed. Students didn’t just disagree with ideas. They felt harmed by them,” director Ric Esther Bienstock says. Photo by Ric Esther Bienstock

Article content

There’s self-censorship; there’s no free speech, rule or law or policy … very insidious. We can’t have dialogue on sensitive issues, like race, gender, October 7. We have the inability to speak across differences.

Article content

In the film’s Stanford example, a student chapter of the Federalist Society – a conservative legal organization with chapters at many elite law schools – invited Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to speak at Stanford Law School. Judge Duncan has taken positions against same-sex marriage.

Article content

Many law students protested his appearance, and tried to prevent the event from going forward, arguing that someone with his views should not be given a platform at the school.

Article content

Article content

What’s especially interesting is that the president of the Federalist Society chapter at Stanford is himself gay, and he doesn’t agree with some of the judge’s views. But he argues that, at a law school, students should be able to hear from a sitting federal judge, especially someone they may have to appear before, if they ever want to argue cases that could end up at the Supreme Court. You need to hear what he says, whether you agree with it or not.

Article content

When I spoke to students from that law school who would not speak to me on the record in the film – which says something also – they said to me, ‘why do I have to listen to someone who denies my existence, whose views I don’t agree with?’

Article content

I wanted to show you, and take you into that world, and then let viewers decide if they think it’s good or not.

Article content

At university, how can open-mindedness be facilitated?

Article content

If you want to live in a pluralistic society, you should expose yourself to different ideas, different views, different cultures. You can’t have institutions that are all monocultures.

Article content

We have to figure it out and change policy. I remember talking to PhD students at Harvard who, when I said this film is about free speech on campus, they recoiled – saying free speech was a right wing thing. When did free speech become a right wing dog whistle? That really surprised me. I kept saying free speech was foundational to democracy, it’s universal.