Keith Whittington Discusses the Academic Freedom Alliance and Free Speech

Prof. Keith Whittington of Princeton University discusses the launch of the Academic Freedom Alliance and the importance of free speech and freedom of inquiry in higher education and throughout our society with IHS's Bradley Jackson. Whittington explains that we are in a time of unusual amounts of controversy about free speech in American society generally, but these controversies seem particularly pronounced on campus. He says "we might have hoped that university campuses were a place where robust debate was particularly valued and that we wanted to protect that kind of intellectual freedom to explore ideas. But increasingly, there's a lot of threats to that. Both students and faculty find their speech under attack....And so, I think there's a great deal of interest and a great deal of need in universities to try to protect that sphere of intellectual freedom."

Whittington and other faculty recently started an organization called the Academic Freedom Alliance, a faculty-driven effort to try to defend academic freedom within American universities. They aim to come to the assistance of faculty in those situations when their academic freedom is being threatened, lend them support, and in some cases to provide support for legal assistance.

Whittington says they also want to encourage professors and college administrators to be willing to speak up and come to the defense of those that are under attack, since most shy away from talking about these issues, in order to avoid controversy, or because they don't agree with what the person is saying. But Whittington says, "I think it's really essential that even people that you deeply disagree with, even if you think that they have said things that are quite wrong, it's important to come to their defense of their right to say it. Because if we're not willing to defend people who we think are in error, we will soon find our own rights significantly restricted as a consequence."

Whittington also discusses his book, "Speak Freely," the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court and and having independent judiciary to defend the First Amendment of the Constitution, the rise of illiberalism in our society on both the right and left, and why we need classical liberal values like freedom of speech in order to have a peaceful and flourishing democracy. He says: "we need to be able to try to explain to people why all kinds of core liberal values are important, why they help build a better society. They help make society work better. They help allow people to live together peacefully together. Speech is part of that. And so, free speech principles have been the very heart of the liberal tradition since its very origins and remains critically important to liberal values more generally...free speech is critical to things like advancing the truth, and as a consequence scientific progress, which is extraordinarily valuable for us as a society. And we lose something significant if we start restricting our ability to explore ideas and explore new boundaries of knowledge. But likewise, they're central to democracy... you want a society in which we're capable of airing our disagreements and talking them through."