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• About Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath

Open expression on college campuses has long been a matter of dispute, and we are seeing disagreements about the boundaries of what can permissively be said on campus around matters of race, gender and gender identity, sexuality, pronouns, Israel-Palestine, and matters of abortion and reproductive rights, particularly in medical schools. We are seeing, as a result, that both in the higher education sector and, more depressingly and more broadly, in the K-12 sector, there are increasing restrictions on what books might be available to young people through libraries.

How can we think about speech within public spaces, particularly those that are connected to educational settings? How can we think about them as spaces where dialogue can be sustained?

I like to frame the issue as a matter of setting boundaries for expression. Like any rights and any type of action there are boundaries and restrictions that are set both by laws and by norms as well as by more localized policies. When I think about public spaces that sustain dialogue, I am thinking about the boundaries of what can permissively be said. I’m thinking about dialogue to examine these boundaries so the boundaries are not etched in stone, they are always a matter of continued dialogue and conversation both in legal spaces and other spaces.

Examining these boundaries is also important, and of course working to cultivate dialogue across difference within the boundaries. When we set the boundaries of what can permissively be said on a college campus or in the public debate or on social media or in other settings, we also need to continuously pay attention to what kind of platforms and context we cultivate within the boundaries of permissible expression for dialogue to continue.

What makes it very hard to manage right now is the context of polarization. Polarization, broadly, is a typical phenomenon in the United States and in many democratic countries. Both elected officials and the public are polarizing; there is some disagreement about whether it started among elected officials or among the public, but either way, currently, both are polarizing. There is additionally some debate about whether the left or the right is responsible for the current state of polarization and, even though there is some asymmetry, polarization right now is typical of both the left and the right in the United States as well as in most other democratic countries that are struggling with polarization. We are seeing the public’s positions change increasingly to align with the shifting public views, and that is affecting both views about national matters like immigration or foreign policy but also about local matters, as we are seeing for example in regards to banning books or other aspects of the school board wars in the last couple of years.

Polarization is affecting not only just our policy positions, but also our views about people who are outside our group. Increasingly, both Republicans and Democrats in the United States are seeing members of the other party or people who vote for the other party as dishonest, close-minded, immoral, etc. We have increasingly a negative view about the out party, about people who are different from us ideologically, and therefore we are seeing reduced trust in them. We don’t perceive them as acting in good faith, and we really have no particular reasons to collaborate or compromise with them because we are assuming that they are overall just bad people and not aligned with this growing phenomenon. We are increasingly demanding from people who are members of our ideological group to adhere with all of our policy views and perceptions, and there is less and less tolerance to diversity of opinion within our groups.

This is also really limiting our capacity for dialogue and for exchange across difference. This is really relatively new, and it’s not something that typifies the democracies across time and space. In the United States, it’s really just a matter of the last 6 to 10 years that we are seeing polarization, and affective polarization, increase so significantly. How is this affecting the social foundations of our democracy?

Democracy depends on practices and institutions and structures, but it also depends on a social foundation, meaning a shared understanding of how we think about each other, and in addition to that, a shared epistemic foundation or shared vision of what it is that we all know. We are increasingly informed through different sources of information and we find ourselves in information bubbles both by our own choice and because of the algorithmic structure of many of our sources of information. We are having a bifurcated access to knowledge. We are doing our
own research, so to speak. We are seeing expertise as popular rather than as a matter of learning and a long-term engagement with the topic. We are increasingly disagreeing in regards to what qualifies as evidence about various matters. How can I convince you when we are in disagreement, how can I convince you that maybe I have some information that would be of value for you? We disagree on what evidence might be relevant for that, and we disagree about who can serve as an arbiter for this evidence because we are increasingly distrustful, as a society, of experts, of institutions like the courts, of scientific evidence, etc. As a result, we are seeing that our shared epistemic foundations, to the extent that we had them and to the extent that they were reliable, and I recognize that all of these are a matter of discussion and debate, we don’t really have the capacity to rely on a shared epistemic foundation.

Socially speaking, we are also increasingly seeing the impact of polarization with both some aspects that can be celebrated; for example, our societies are more visibly diverse, our institutions, particularly institutions of higher learning, are more visibly diverse, which I think overall is democratically and socially a blessing. But this change is also generating some pushback from people who have questions or disagreements about whether indeed it is a blessing, and so people are engaged in a process currently of reassessing the meaning of various identities, who qualifies as a member of an identity group, what qualifies as a relevant identity for the purpose of recognition in our social institution, who gets to define it, etc. Within the context of dialogue and debate across difference, we are also in continued disagreement about how our feelings or emotions or our responses to matters that are in disagreement and to voice diverse expression should be taken into account. For example, if you are saying something that hurts my feelings, should that be a reasonable ground for limiting what it is that you might say, or maybe reprimanding you or cancelling you.

The Cancel Wars,^[1] so to speak, the disagreements that we have about the boundaries of expression and about the consequences of somebody who is breaching these boundaries, they result in our shifting policies around school climate, around how to manage universities, K-12 schools, and other public institutions. The dialogue about the boundaries of expression and about the consequences for breaches is an ongoing one and is a very live one. This is not a completely new phenomenon. I just wanted to situate it very briefly in one quick point of history from over 100 years ago with Teddy Roosevelt saying that colleges, who were primarily serving white students primarily at the time, are making their charges “too sensitive to take part in the rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the world” and complained that they were turning out “mollycoddles,” which I think is the early version of snowflakes.

The challenge of polarization is creating a new set of concerns for public institutions and particularly for learning institutions. I want to suggest a few steps that we might take in order to respond to the facts of polarization right now, and especially to the difficulty of sharing sources of information and as well as facts and knowledge, which is a significant challenge to democratic sustainability. The way to address it is not through censoring or limiting speech that is either untrue or is otherwise hurtful or harmful, although both of these types of speech sometimes may need to be curbed in different ways or even in certain cases limited.

The way to cultivate freedom of speech especially in learning institution is through welcoming diverse perspectives. The way to welcome diverse perspectives is through including and assuring an inclusive and open environment that welcomes diverse people with diverse perspectives and diverse experiences. The way to welcome diverse perspectives is through welcoming diverse people. This is what in my earlier work I call inclusive freedom: an approach that gives equal weight to sustaining open expression and inclusion. This is the way in which we can cultivate open inquiry in our public spaces, in our learning institutions, and in our schools and universities: epistemic equity, or the commitment to ensuring that different people know that they can participate effectively in the exchange of opinions. To do that we have to cultivate inclusive domains, to cultivate the sense of belonging among all of our participants. Otherwise we only just don’t censor them officially, but we don’t really cultivate the capacity for them to speak and for others to hear them.

We have to do it across different lines of diversity, different lines of difference. The bridges, and the connections, and the dialogues that we need to build are across different types of difference that exist within our institutions and within our society. We need to support dialogues of this type both within and beyond our classrooms.

The classroom has some unique benefits, particularly because students have to be there, they have to engage, and also because temporarily it’s really making it possible for people to engage across time. It’s making it possible for both the instructor and the students ideally together to develop new knowledge, or new to them knowledge, and to be able to engage with each other in ways that build connections of trust and of understanding. This can really be done only intentionally. If I’m only just standing in front of my huge big auditorium and just speaking, and I’m not listening to different voices, I’m not helping students engage with each other, then I’m really not making it possible for people to connect and to think together. I think for instructors, the continuous nature of the classroom should be seen as an opportunity to cultivate dialogue, and also for an opportunity for themselves to sometimes rethink, reconsider, correct their own mistakes and the like, in order to model productive dialogue and the possibility of both sharing or disclosing and also rethinking your beliefs.

When we are learning together, when we are exchanging views and beliefs and perspectives and knowledge and experiences and building our epistemic foundations, when we do it as a group or as a class, this is really one of the most effective ways to build trust in the knowledge that we develop. It’s not coming from someplace outside of me, just a book or just a person who I can mistrust or ignore. This is something that we are doing, ideally with a text or based on some existing knowledge, together. In this way we learn to think about this knowledge and to own it and to trust it through this process, and we are also learning to trust the institution in which we work on cultivating this knowledge and to trust each other as participants in the building of this knowledge.

When we are learning together, we are overcoming some of the most pernicious effects of polarization, and we are building, or weaving, the kind of social connections that allow us to to overcome a democratic decline that is the result of polarization. In order to build common ground, in order not just to find but also really to construct common ground epistemically and socially that allows for the democratic renewal that is so important right now in American and other democratic society, the place to start is to ask each other:

• What is it that we already share?
• What do we share in terms of our values, our beliefs, our experiences, our goals and the like?
• What is it that we already know?

Because we have to start even minimally with some shared foundation. What is it that we came here to try and find out or investigate or develop together? These questions that are at the source of learning, the reason people go to school or come to the library or attend college, they are the places where we can start developing shared understanding and where we can start renewing democracy in the process as well.

Cancel Wars by Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath

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About Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath

Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath is MRMJJ Presidential Professor in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Faculty Director of the SNF Paideia Program. Dr. Ben-Porath studies schools and colleges as democratic institutions. She received her doctorate in political philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 2000. She was a fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, at Harvard’s Safra Center, and at the Institute for Advanced Studies. She has been with Penn since 2004. She is an associate member of the political science department and the philosophy department at Penn.

Dr. Ben-Porath is interested in democratic theory and practice, and studies the ways institutions like schools and colleges can sustain and advance democracy. She is the author of the symposium common read title, Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy.

Learn more about Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath.