Sigal Ben-Porath’s Cancel Wars^[1] is the book I wish I’d read before wading into debates about institutional neutrality and freedom of expression. Ben-Porath’s model of “inclusive freedom” (p. 76) gives me a foothold on the side of the debate that claims freedom of expression must be constrained to prevent the harms of misinformation and bigotry. As a free speech maximalist who strives to orient toward truth-seeking, I struggled to reconcile the fundamental necessity of free expression to human flourishing with the reality that the exercise of free expression can be a source of harm. Before considering “inclusive freedom,” I held the uncomfortable position of denying that speech can cause real harm, or minimizing claims of harm as subjective experiences.

Inclusive Freedom

As described by Ben-Porath, “inclusive freedom” characterizes a condition of free expression in which all members of the community (be it a university or a nation) can exercise freedom of speech while also being treated as equal in dignity and worth (p. 53). These conditions of dignitary safety, or psychological safety^[2] (not to be confused with emotional safety or safetyism^[3]), expand the project of free speech by increasing those who feel welcome to participate in it. Dignitary safety is also conducive to intellectual risk-taking, which itself is an exercise of expressive freedom. I’m inclined to positive-sum solutions to wicked problems—I like to have my cake and eat it, too—and inclusive freedom is just that: it commits to robust respect for free expression, while acknowledging and addressing harms that may ensue.

Ben-Porath outlines a number of strategies to sustain inclusive freedom. First, she offers a formula for overcoming polarization: working together to identify shared values, shared interests, and shared resources. Critically for those of us in education and libraries, one of those shared resources is our epistemic foundation or epistemic commons: a consensus grounding for debates about priorities, policy, and practice. Another strategy Ben-Porath puts forward is differentiating speech harms from wrongdoing. To accomplish this, she advises identifying who is speaking, what is their intent, who is the audience, and what is the impact of the expression. Recognizing when speech is harmful without rising to the level of a policy violation makes possible what Ben-Porath describes as “efforts to engage across differences rather than as breaches to be corrected through regulation or punishment” (p. 2). To pull this off demands intellectual charity and open-mindedness, empathetic listening such as that taught by Urban Rural Action’s ABC’s for constructive dialogue,^[4] and the skill of ‘steelmanning’ or acknowledging the strongest case made from an opposing perspective, on all sides of transgressive speech.

Ben-Porath optimistically proposes that we can restore both higher education and democracy by taking on the struggle for free speech. (Is this another case of having our cake and eating it, too?) Her proposal is reminiscent of commentary from leading free speech thinkers like Jonathan Rauch^[5] and Greg Lukianoff^[6] who observe that, from a historical and even evolutionary perspective, free speech is the exception rather than the rule, and that the social innovation of free expression is something that must be explained and taught anew to each generation. Foremost among the dimensions of free expression that must be taught, according to Rauch, is what freedom of speech has to offer members of minoritized communities. Where Ben-Porath asks “Who pays the price for free speech?”, Rauch would ask, “Who pays the price for censorship?” Ben-Porath acknowledges the possibility that censorship intended to protect marginalized groups can instead be directed at them (p. 90); Rauch claims that censorship and other injustice impacts those on the margins first and foremost.^[7]

Like other shared resources vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons, our epistemic commons needs advocates. Free speech is a cultural legacy we must consciously pass on to rising generations.

Quantifying Cancel Culture

If I had one suggestion to strengthen Ben-Porath’s argument, it would be to acknowledge that cancel culture is an empirically real phenomenon,^[8] which makes her project of inclusive freedom all the more imperative. Throughout the book, the phrase cancel culture appears in scare quotes as if to mark it as a phantasm of ‘old white dudes’ hand-wringing over their loss of prestige and power in the face of accountability culture. This is an uncharitable—and inaccurate—representation of a phenomenon that has so far claimed more professorships than the Red Scare of the 1950s and shows no signs of slowing down. According to analysis by Greg Lukianoff and Ricki Schlott for their book, The Canceling of the American Mind, the most liberal estimates are that 150 professors were fired during the Second Red Scare of 1947-1957, while the Cancel Culture period of 2014-2023 saw 200 professors fired.^[9] Also since 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) documents more than a thousand academic cancellation attempts, with two-thirds resulting in some form of sanction,^[10] while the National Association of Scholars tracks nearly 300 academic cancellations since mid-2020.^[11]

The most pernicious dimension of cancel culture might not be the cancellations themselves, but instead the chilling effect that the threat of cancellation has on scholars and students. Lukianoff explains that in the 1950s, 9% of social science faculty indicated they had toned down their scholarship due to concerns about controversy;^[12] in 2022, FIRE surveyed faculty and discovered that 59% are likely to self-censor in academic publications, and 78% are likely to self-censor in writing and speaking engagements for a general audience.^[13] Similarly, a 2021 survey by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that 70% of right-leaning academics in the humanities and social sciences admit to self-censoring.^[14]

When it comes to students, 79% participating in Heterodox Academy’s 2023 Campus Expression Survey reported at least some reluctance to ask questions about or discuss a controversial topic in class, compared to only 15% who expressed reluctance to engage on a typical course topic.^[15] A University of Wisconsin report finds that 58% of students agree that a classmate should be reported to university administrators for saying something in class that others feel causes harm to certain groups of people, while 68% believe an instructor should be reported.^[16]

Left unchecked, this rampant chilling effect will shroud our epistemic commons in a Dark Age of self-censorship. It takes intellectual courage to shine a light in this darkness.

Free Speech Culture Needs Privacy Culture

Lukianoff and others argue that free speech law is not enough to advance expressive freedoms: that, since law is downstream from culture, what we really need is a culture that values free expression.^[17][18] In Cancel Wars, Ben-Porath also discusses free speech and inclusive freedom as comprising a set of norms and normative values. She calls on schools and universities to provide opportunities for students to experience free speech as a lived practice, asserting, “[Students] need to learn to speak up, to speak their minds, to connect across divides, and to be allowed to make their own mistakes” (p. 95).

But in an environment in which every utterance can be livestreamed, screen shot, or recorded and distributed at network scale and at the speed of light, we need to lower the stakes of making mistakes—especially for students. By placing Seana Shiffrin’s “thinker-based free speech theory,”^[19] which Ben-Porath cites, in conversation with Neil Richards’ intellectual privacy theory^[20] and Frederick Schauer’s conceptualization of the chilling effect,^[21] I suggest that respecting a private sphere for personal inquiry, and a confidential sphere for classrooms and other learning and scholarly communities to explore and test ideas together, are necessary conditions for the exercise of free expression. Cancellation itself often relies on techniques, like doxing, online mobbing, and broadcasting speech beyond its original audience and context,^[22][23] that are culturally (if not legally) recognized violations of privacy.

Democracy needs a shared epistemic foundation; our shared epistemic foundation needs free speech culture; and free speech culture needs privacy culture.