The American college campus is in crisis—at least, that’s what a coterie of recent essays, books, podcasts, and comments from politicians would have you believe. The claim is that ”political correctness” is stifling fair-minded intellectual debate, particularly from the right, and making universities inhospitable to free thinkers, iconoclasts, and anyone who values freedom of expression and diversity of thought.
The American college campus is in crisis—at least, that’s what a coterie of recent essays, books, podcasts, and comments from politicians would have you believe. The claim is that ”political correctness” is stifling fair-minded intellectual debate, particularly from the right, and making universities inhospitable to free thinkers, iconoclasts, and anyone who values freedom of expression and diversity of thought.
Now a group of international researchers has announced the launch of The Journal of Controversial Ideas in an effort to bring unorthodox ideas into public conversation. The peer-reviewed journal will allow academics to post their work under pseudonyms. And in what is perhaps a fitting twist to this saga, the publication is already proving controversial.
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Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, announced the upcoming creation of The Journal of Controversial Ideas in a BBC radio documentary about diversity of thought in academia. He said the journal will launch next year, and will guarantee anonymity to researchers who want to publish papers on controversial or sensitive topics.
“The need for more open discussion is really very acute,” he told the BBC. “There’s greater inhibition on university campuses about taking certain positions for fear of what will happen.”
Also involved in the launch of the journal are Australian bioethicist Peter Singer and Francesca Minerva, a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. McMahan stressed that the journal will be peer-reviewed by a representative board of qualified academics from across the political, religious, and ideological spectrum, including conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.
McMahan and his colleagues are not the first to tackle what they view as an academic echo chamber. In 2015, Australian writer Claire Lehmann founded Quillette, an online magazine that thinks of itself as a home to non-traditional thinkers, with a roster of supporters that includes controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist and militant atheist Richard Dawkins, and psychology professor and free-speech defender Jonathan Haidt.
Though Quillette is a magazine, rather than a peer-reviewed journal, it may offer useful lessons about the risks of creating heterodox echo chambers in the quest for intellectual freedom. In a Politico magazine profile of Lehmann, a former Quillette contributor, Ben Winegard, explains how the pursuit of controversial ideas has turned the magazine into the very thing it sought to combat: “There’s a risk that it does just become an outlet for a lot of people who feel grievances about identity politics and political correctness,” he told Amelia Lester.
That is just one of the reasons for concern in light of this latest free-speech initiative. While the academics leading The Journal of Controversial Ideas insist that they will follow “normal academic standards” for submissions, it is fair to wonder whether the board of a journal dedicated to free speech might have a bias toward publishing particularly controversial ideas in the interest of freedom of thought. That, combined with the fact that academics will be able to submit their work under a pseudonym, risks creating a free-for-all wherein any idea, no matter how discriminatory, unethical, or repugnant, might be considered worthy of debate—on a platform that grants all ideas equal legitimacy to the untrained eye. Moreover, allowing authors anonymity will reduce their accountability. If a researcher puts forward an idea so controversial they feel it won’t be tolerated in normal academic circles, shouldn’t they at least be willing to defend it to a public greater than a friendly editorial board?
McMahan, however, does not believe this will be a problem.
“The articles should speak for themselves, that is, independently of the identity of the author,” he told Quartz. “It should make no difference who the author is.” He says that anonymity is optional, and reversible, and that it exists only to “enable people to … publish ideas and arguments about issues that matter to them without fear of death threats, threats to their families, to their livelihood, and to their reputation.” That, he explains, is what “accountability” has come to mean today: “accountability may mean suffering endless vilification by people on the Internet, receiving death threats, having one’s job prospects and so on threatened, all because it has now become … permissible to go after persons rather than ideas.”
Of course, one could argue that’s the case for anyone brave enough to express opinions of any kind online today. Freethinking academics are far from the only victims of the wrath of social media trolls; many people from across the political spectrum face vilification, harassment, and threats online, without the benefit of anonymity to protect them.
Maintaining freedom of academic thought is a laudable goal. While experts disagree about the extent of the problem, it has become clear in recent years that professors in the US tend to skew left, and that certain college campuses have limited the free expression of views from faculty when those views have run the risk of offending some students. The phenomenon has been exemplified by the rise of “trigger warnings” and students’ accusations of faculty engaging in “microaggressions.” Scholars like Jonathan Haidt have written entire books about why this form of “coddling” of young college students is ultimately harmful, both to them and to any free society.
Studies also show that unequivocal support for free speech and the First Amendment is, in fact, becoming less prevalent among young Americans: A much-cited 2016 Gallup poll funded by the nonprofit Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute (pdf) showed that, of a random sample of more than 3,000 US college students between the ages of 18 and 24, 27% believe schools should restrict the expression of political views that may upset or offend members of certain groups. That same survey showed that just over half of college students believe some people on their campus are prevented from saying what they believe because others might find it offensive.
But there is also reason to believe that the panic surrounding free speech on campus in recent years has been overblown, and is not as widespread a problem as scholars like McMahan seem to think. A rough data analysis conducted by Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project in March showed that incidents of free speech violations on college campuses are relatively rare. The project director, Sanford J. Ungar, says that, although incidents of students disrupting speeches by conservative speakers are common, they center mostly around the same few controversial figures from the right, like Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Richard Spencer, Ben Shapiro, or Ann Coulter.
As Ungar states, “one among many untested concepts is whether the survey results would be different if conservative student groups, instead of repeatedly inviting campus visitors who have built a brand of disruption, were to sponsor serious intellectual dialogue with thinkers on the right.”
Meanwhile, a review of claims of widespread censorship of conservative thoughts on campus by Inside Higher Ed found that “conservative students and faculty members are not only surviving but thriving in academe—free of indoctrination if not the periodic frustrations.”
So does “periodic frustration” justify the use of anonymity to allow controversial academics to post their ideas in a peer-reviewed journal with no possibility of accountability? McMahan and other academics seem to think so. But on this and other claims that the college campus is no longer a place where academics can think and speak freely, the jury is still out.
