The Debate Over “Free Speech”: What Role Do Values Play?

by Danny Mucinskas

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published an online letter titled “A Letter on Open Justice and Debate,” which warned readers of a “censoriousness” and “intolerance of opposing views” that appears to be spreading in the culture of the United States, leading to “public shaming and ostracism” and “calls for swift and severe retribution.” The letter was signed by dozens of prominent academics, writers, and others from across the political spectrum, including Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Greenwood, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie, and Gloria Steinem.

Overall, the signatories expressed concern that free speech is being restricted, warning that lack of open debate “invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.” They cite no specific cases but are ostensibly referring to several incidents that occurred in the wake of racial justice protests around the country, such as the firing of data analyst David Shor for posting research supporting non-violent protests and the resignation of James Bennet of The New York Times following the publication of a controversial op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas calling for military intervention to quell unrest.

The letter immediately sparked controversy and criticism from detractors. Some felt that the letter was an attempt by those in positions of power to simply preserve ability to speak with impunity. Members of the transgender community spoke out, believing the letter to be problematic, especially as it had been endorsed by J.K. Rowling, who has recently come under fire for intolerance towards trans women. Others questioned why the letter was even published, at a time when the world is dealing with a global pandemic and the United States is facing a reckoning over racial violence and inequity. At least one signatory retracted her name, while another apologized for signing.

Others who signed have doubled down, though, saying that free speech and debate is a core tenet of liberalism, and that only by continuing to engage with and argue against opinions that we find uncomfortable will society make progress towards being more just and free.

One of The Good Project’s core principles is that personal views on contentious issues and dilemmas are influenced by the values that each of us believe are important, values such as those contained within our value sort activity. For example, an individual who values honesty above all else may choose not to cheat on a test; someone who values material well-being may choose to take a well-paying job they don’t enjoy simply to get a higher salary.

On a political level, Jonathan Haidt (who also signed the Harper’s letter), a social psychologist at New York University, has proposed moral foundations theory as a way to explain our policy preferences and reactions to social debates. Moral foundations theory proposes six core universal tensions that influence our views of ethical questions:

• Care vs. harm

• Fairness vs. cheating

• Loyalty vs. betrayal

• Authority vs. subversion

• Sanctity vs. degradation

• Liberty vs. oppression

Haidt’s research has shown that political preferences in the United States are tied to these foundations, with liberals prioritizing the care/harm and fairness/cheating dynamics above others and conservatives valuing all six foundations more equally. In the same way that differences in values cause people to make different individual decisions, the prioritization of moral foundations causes people to come to different political conclusions, aligning themselves with certain ideas, parties, or policies. The way that these foundations manifest in people’s opinions can also sometimes be confusing and vary or seem to conflict depending on the issue: someone who values the liberty of free speech may oppose abortion rights, an issue affecting women’s liberty, for reasons of sanctity; someone might support a free childcare policy for reasons of care, but oppose debt forgiveness for educational loans for reasons of fairness.

Perhaps the debate sparked by the Harper’s letter is a conflict between moral foundations of liberty and care playing out on the U.S. national stage. Should the liberty of free speech be valued at all costs, even if it causes harm to particular people or marginalized groups? Or should care be valued at all costs, even if it completely silences people from being able to express alternative viewpoints with liberty? Where is the line between these two extremes?

When I complete the value sort exercise, my most important values include “openness,” or being receptive to new ideas, and “pursuit of common good.” Perhaps this is why my opinions on this debate may feel frustratingly “in the middle” in an era of ever more polarized conversation on social media and a climate in which extreme views get the most attention in our media.

In my view, no person is entitled to have their opinions go unquestioned, and the panic surrounding “cancel culture,” which some of the signatories are likely reacting to, seems unfounded. Individuals with public platforms, including the letter’s endorsers, should always be prepared to defend their stances to others, such as those on social media who may disagree with their stances, sometimes in large numbers in a way that can be overwhelming. This is not “canceling,” but is a form of debate in itself. At the same time, we should not simply silence opinions we disagree with, or dole out extreme punishments for making mistakes. Changing other people’s values often takes engagement and convincing, not berating and silencing. As The Better Arguments Project (with which The Good Project recently collaborated) and their “Five Principles of a Better Argument” illustrate, debates require participants to listen passionately, embrace vulnerability, and make room to transform, even when we absolutely disagree and want to take a stand for our side.

However, I am only a single individual, and the majority view on these issues is likely to decide how care and liberty are to be prioritized and debates over free speech are to be resolved, if at all, since the fault lines represented by the moral foundations have existed in American society for centuries. Additionally, individual sectors, such as journalism, may develop new standards regarding speech that will set the norms for that field and the actors within it. For now, the answers to the questions I pose are difficult to discern, as we seem to be in the middle of a culture shift that will define the bounds of acceptability for years to come.

When does free speech “cross a line”? What consequences should an individual face for crossing that line? At what point could stifling free speech or shaming particular speech become dangerous? What values are most important to you in forming these opinions? If you are outside the United States, are there parallel or similar debates occurring in your country?

Recommended Reading: The “free speech debate” isn’t really about free speech

Sifting Through Your Values

by Amma Marfo

This post, originally published in the blog, “The Dedicated Amateur”, is being reprinted here with permission from the author.

“I don’t just care about making you all good at your jobs, though that is really important. I also want you to be good people. That sounds really cheesy, I’m sure, but it’s important and it’s something I want to help with.”

The statement above is a rough excerpt from my speech at our student organization Fall Planning Day, one of our biggest training opportunities for student organization leaders on campus and a significant platform to get relevant information across to this segment of our student leader population. While we had sessions on procedural items such as reserving space, using our campus events calendar, and financial paperwork, I believe that values education and clarification deserves a place on that stage as well, so I incorporated a values exercise into my section of the day.

The link for the activity and accompanying resources will follow this post, but I do want to explain how we went about this process.

Students were given a packet of slips, thirty slips in all, and told to read through them all and spread them out on their table so all could be seen. Bit by bit, they were told to eliminate some of the values present by flipping them face-down, until five remained. Those five were the most important values to them. This exercise was completed in four rounds: identifying personal values, values as an organization member, values of the organization, and what values they want from OSAMP staff, SGA, and those who work with them.

It was this last part that I want to share here in this blog. We all have values that guide us as professionals, and we like to think those are the ones that students appreciate most. To get an idea of what guides the work of my fellow professionals, I took to Twitter and asked.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

 Amma Marfo @ammamarfo

If you had to distill the values with which you do your work down to three words, which three would you pick? #sachat #sagrad

7:23 AM – 10 Sep 2013

I was really excited to see the responses that I got from everyone, and put them into this Wordle for a more graphical representation of the words selected. Even without a common bank of values to choose from, the larger words will indicate which values rose to the top. Take a look to see which words recurred: “empathy”, “integrity”, “caring”, “service”, and “justice”.

 Now, take note of those words, in comparison to the ones that students deemed essential to good working relationships with student activities staff, organization advisors, and their SGA members who oversee many student organization processes:

Of particular note to me was the recurrence of the values “openness” and “honesty”. While students understand (at least in an academic sense) that we can’t always share all the information we have with them, they are also very aware when they’re being given the run-around, or even flat-out lied out. The degree to which this term came up helped me to remember to continue being straightforward with students- including saying “I don’t know” if I truly don’t know an answer.
Another important observation for me was the number of times that professional conduct and professional demeanor surfaced as a desirable value. We all want to have friendly relationships with students, and the degree to which we successfully create these friendly dynamics varies. But when it came down to it, and we asked close to 200 student leaders what they want from those who they work with, they asked for professionalism. Be it by asking for teaching or mentoring relationships, requesting quality work from us, or stressing their desire for hard work and commitment, they want us to be professional.

To be frank, when I look over this cloud again, I find that the values they appreciate, are ones I would like to see in them. We want our student leaders to approach their work professionally, and with the understanding that some initiatives and projects will take work. We want to learn from them, just as they want to learn from us. We would like them to be respectful. And, most common- we want them to be honest.

Do you see intersections between the two clouds? In my estimation, professionals and students alike value having good working relationships, understanding the feelings and thoughts of the parties involved, and being considerate of the opinions and developmental processes each side is experiencing. In the best case, we are all learning each day, whether we’re professionals or students. Being considerate of those learning moments could be essential to better understanding one another, and being able to work together better as offices, student organizations, agencies, and individuals. As I move forward in the year, I look forward to sharing these results with them, and framing the work we each do through the lens of the values they would like to see in us.

Do you incorporate values education into the work you do with your student leaders? What values do they find important? What values do you want to see in your own student leaders?

For more information on the Value Sort activity, a part of the GoodWork toolkit, click the button below:

Values, Value, and Schools

by Peter Gow

Is that school worth it?” As a career independent school educator, I tend to find this question both annoying and provocative. Often enough the inquirer is looking at astronomically high tuition and wondering about economic factors that I, as a teacher working daily in what William Faulkner called “the agony and sweat of the human spirit,” like to dismiss as superficial and beside the point—mypoint, anyway.

But this is in fact a perfectly legitimate question, extending even to per-pupil expenditures in public schools. Even so, from my peculiar perspective I like to look at the value of a school or an education as an expression of something deeper.

American independent schools have a kind of split personality. On the one hand, they are often (and often correctly) regarded as existing to have fostered and preserved the separate status of socioeconomic elites, while on the other—seemingly antithetically—many of them espouse missions and values that stem from faith-based or socially progressive principles of service and personal responsibility. In the past half century, in fact, the great majority of independent schools and their faculties have worked very hard to break down barriers to attendance and to enact principles of inclusivity as an aspect of leaning into the discomfort of reconciling generous and meritocratic ideals with sometimes exclusive and haughty heritages.

Independent schools are not monolithic. If Chairman Mao had been around to encourage educators in the late nineteenth century to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” he could not have anticipated the philosophic, programmatic, or demographic range of the schools that now comprise the membership of the National Association of Independent Schools (for example), the main membership body of the “industry.” Day and boarding, single-sex and coed, specialized and general, elementary and secondary, independent schools vary one from another in ways that startle outsiders and can even confound industry insiders.

As the economy slows, it is not surprising that independent school leaders have begun to consider their position as a market sector and to think in ways that mirror the anxieties of for-profit businesses about ways to sustain institutional viability, from marketing to classroom practice. The phrase “value proposition” pops up frequently: what it is that makes independent schools, or a particular independent school, worth the price of enrollment.

Much discussion of “value proposition” has focused on real dollar factors and those elements that independent schools have misguidedly allowed to exist as proxy measures of quality for generations: next-school and college admission lists, athletic successes, sheer wealth. As prestige factors, such measures (which in fact frequently reflect selective admissions rather than strong or innovative programs) divert attention from, or offer parallel and sometimes contradictory messages to, the robust and inspiring statements of beliefs, values, aims, and aspirations that schools earnestly offer up and that provide the framework on which faculties and administrations work hard to build their schools as places to live, learn, and work.

Suzy, in other words, may attend Lofty Breezes Academy because her parents see the school as providing a route to a selective college and a successful career, but the staff at the Academy sincerely understand themselves to be engaged in delivering programs and policies that will help Suzy develop as a person in all the ways defined in the school’s lovingly crafted mission statement and the legacy values embedded in the mottoes and exhortations heard regularly in its assemblies, classrooms, and on its playing fields. A student’s career at Lofty Breezes, then, is both an instrumental investment in her material future and a metaphysical (and less easily predicted or assessed) investment in her character and personal development.

Many independent schools struggle to align these aspects of their raison d’etre and to build brands that reassuringly accentuate the instrumental while giving adequate expression to the metaphysical. Nevertheless, from the outside the instrumental side tends to prevail, and schools and their marketers customarily rely on the old assumption that college lists tend to trump stories of personal transformation.

I believe that the real value proposition of an independent school can in fact be formulated, communicated, and even in some ways measured in ways that shift the emphasis from instrumental and superficial prestige factors toward the real work that schools, and those who work in them, aspire to do.

In my somewhat simplistic formulation, I see the aim of any school as first to build up—I like the old-fashioned work “stoke”—students’ capacities in a wide range of undertakings and activities: intellectual, social, spiritual, creative, physical, and above all exploratory. Second, the school must find ways to extract from students engaging and developmentally appropriate expressions of these growing capacities. Third, the school must endeavor to instill in its students habits of mind, heart, and behavior that will make both the “stoking” and expression of capacities permanent, automatic, and independently driven (autonomic, if you will) aspects of students’ characters—in their relationships, careers, and civic and community lives. For independent schools, their multifarious missions, values, and cultures must palpably inform the process by which these aims are achieved; a school’s “value proposition,” in a nutshell, is the degree to which it achieves them.

The success of a school in accomplishing these three aims is going to be measurable in stories—stories of growth, stories of success, stories of challenges and even failure. Truly successful schools will publish college and next-school lists that reflect the wide variety appropriate to institutions dedicated to supporting individuals in becoming the best possible versions of themselves. Parents, graduates, and faculty should be able to tell stories that cohere around the achievement of the overall aims and that are richly flavored by the specific aspirational values of the school.

One thing that this concept of value proposition requires is that schools be clear and explicit in propounding their aspirational values. A school must be able and willing to state boldly what it stands for, and then it must use this statement as a touchstone for developing and implementing all of its programs, policies, and practices. It must then not be shy about asserting the ways in which students grow, and are transformed, around these values—using corroborative evidence in the form of stories, images, and factual information.

A school that is “worth it” will have no trouble producing such evidence and in telling varied and compelling stories that make its value proposition clear and concrete. For many schools, this will require some risk-taking—stepping away from traditional and conventional ways of asserting their value (ways for which it is becoming harder to make the case, anyway, with ever-stiffer competition for everything from selective college admission to guaranteed athletic success to fundraising).

But I’m not here to talk about marketing but rather to remind myself (and of course my readers) that values, when we are engaged in the work of education, have to be the foundation of value.

I would emphasize, incidentally, that independent schools haven’t cornered any market on values or values-based education; I’m simply writing from the world I know best. I’m guessing that here aren’t too many schools out there, in any sector, that this concept of “value proposition” wouldn’t fit just fine.