- [Announcer] And now an Arizona PBS original production.

- [Narrator] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project, ideological conformity on campus and in American society, this week: - Some people think, "oh my God, like this is like speaking truth to power.

This is political speech.

It must be protected."

Other people feel like, oh my gosh, right?

This is like hate speech against cops.

Like we need, you know, it's harmful.

It's causing injury.

We have to silence this speech.

- [Narrator] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

And now Franciska Coleman, assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School talks about the anatomy of cancel culture.

- I am so thankful to be here.

I'm always so excited to get to talk about my passion because I can talk about this all day, kinda like Avenger character, I can do this all day, I can do this all day.

So what is the social regulation of speech?

So I don't use the term cancel culture in my writing.

I prefer a more neutral term social regulation of speech.

Some people use cancel culture, the other people on the side use consequence culture.

So I just try to be neutral and use social regulation of speech, which encompasses both of those things.

And it's the process by which ordinary citizens in society use collective pressure on institutions to establish and enforce a set of regional or national speech norms.

One of the things that my research suggests is that this social regulation of speech is not a constitutional anomaly, but it's actually presupposed by our first amendment.

Our first amendment says no legal centralized regulation.

That's actually not the same thing as no regulation, okay?

But it just means no legal centralized regulation.

But this leaves open communities choosing what kind of speech norms will be allowed and practiced in their communities, right?

And so I say this is a choice that the First Amendment made and one of the ways we know that it made that choice is because our first amendment values of self-governance, marketplace of ideas, self-expression actually requires people to be able to set norms around speech.

There are three types of speech that are the target of social regulation.

The first type is very common type, censurable speech.

Sometimes people refer to this as hate speech, but this is speech that is stigmatized and considered harmful across different discourse communities, across different races, genders, political ideologies.

There there is a level of consensus, it's not unanimous, but there is a strong level of consensus that this speech is harmful and injurious.

So that's censurable speech.

Actually very little speech falls into that category.

But you can think of it a little bit as group libel.

This category actually is always in the process of becoming, because different groups sometimes you can say, "oh, that's rude to say," but we don't consider it kind of hate speech.

But as groups kind of engage in activism in society, they can become recognized as a vulnerable group.

And then speech that we thought was kind of rude and insensitive can actually become hate speech.

So this category is not a closed category, it's a category that's constantly in process.

The other is contested speech.

So when groups are in the process of trying to become recognized as a marginalized group, such that marginalizing or disparaging things that are said about them will be classified as hate speech.

We end up a little bit with like contested speech.

Contested speech is very, very interesting because contested speech is speech That there is a sizable discourse community or group in society that believes this speech is high value speech that warrants first amendment protection.

But then there's a competing group in society that believes that this is actually low value speech that should be censored.

And so that's why it is contested.

When you think about this, you can think about Black Lives Matter, like speech around Black Lives Matter and policing.

Some people think, "Oh my God, like this is like speaking truth to power.

This is political speech.

It must be protected."

Other people feel like, "Oh my gosh, right?

This is like hate speech against cops."

Like we need, you know, it's harmful, it's causing injury.

We have to silence this speech.

That's what makes it contested, that some people think it's valuable and other people think it's very, very harmful.

Discreditable speech is tone policing, right?

It's speech that's rude, that's insensitive, that's callous.

We agree many times as society that it's low value.

What we disagree about is whether it should be sanctioned in any particular way.

And so you can think about, I think in Boston at one point there was a person shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing, for Halloween, she dressed up as a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing and she took a picture and like put it on, you know, and people were like, you know, it wasn't that she was marginalizing any particular group, right?

And it wasn't that anyone thought her speech was high value, but it was kind of rude, callous, and insensitive.

And she actually lost her job.

So here's just kind of some examples of these categories, kind of similar to what I already told you.

This was a tweet about the Obama White House and claiming this is moving day.

So this is like censurable 'cause it's like racial, you know, slurs contested, this is Kaepernick kneeling for the flag.

And then you have Discreditable, I think the Rockets were playing the Mavericks.

And so there is this gun pointed to a horse and this person was fired for emoji violence.

So it may seem as if these categories are like, you know, we can look at speech or we can listen to speech and we know what category it belongs in.

But as I said, these categories are contested, they're evolving.

And actually what happens when you have a cancel culture incident is that actually normally the speaker thinks, "oh, this is contested speech."

Or this is, you know, maybe I was rude, this is discreditable speech.

But then many times the other side thinks, "No, this is like injurious speech."

So these categories are not objective categories, they're subjective categories.

And people can disagree about what speech goes into which category, and it depends on who they are, right?

Different people with different affiliations, with different norms of speech are going to evaluate speech differently.

That's social regulation speech.

How do people think social regulation of speech works?

There are two primary narratives about how the social regulation of speech works.

One narrative is the cancel culture narrative.

And the other narrative is the consequence culture narrative.

So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about those two narratives.

The consequence culture narrative assumes that social regulation of speech, most of the time, almost all the time, is directed towards censurable speech, okay?

This is, you know, the Holocaust began with words, right?

This is speech that is marginalizing, demeaning, dehumanizing, and just a couple of steps away from actual physical violence.

For some people this speech itself is actually violence, right?

And so the consequence culture narrative is that most of the speech that people are being fired over is this kind of harmful injurious speech.

Now there is censurable speech, sexual harassment, death threats, right?

These are the examples people use, right?

And the assumption is most of the speech is like this, it's like sexual harassment.

It's like death threats.

And so transgressive speech, by transgressive speech, I just mean speech that someone has claimed as transgressive, not that it's actually transgressive in any particular way.

So in the consequence culture narrative, we are not talking about offensive speech, we're talking about injurious speech.

Then you have the cancel culture narrative.

The speech that is being punished in the cancel culture narrative.

Most of the speech is actually not in any way hate speech.

It's speech that's controversial.

It's speech that's contested, it's speech that's discreditable by which I mean is rude or insensitive or callous, okay?

That's the lay version of cancel culture.

There are some academic critics of cancel culture and they say even if the speech is hate speech, even if it is censurable speech, censoring it actually does more harm right?

To society and speakers than whatever harm is suffered by the listeners, okay?

Most of the time when people are talking in the cancel culture narrative, they kind of put to one side the existence of, you know, harassing speech, death threats.

Like they're clear like yeah, that's not what's happening.

That's not what's on the table.

That's not what we're talking about.

That's rare, okay?

And the cancel culture narrative, instead, the cancel culture narrative says all of the things that are being, you know, sanctioned by universities and employers are just speech that some random subjective group of people found offensive or some speech that is controversial.

And so we have Donald Trump giving us the kind of definition of cancel culture.

"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it", right?

And there's a sense in which cancel culture is like, you know, this is bullying.

You know, there is a Pew research survey where one of the people said, yeah, you know, the idea of holding people accountable for their speech is kind of supposed to be an anti-bullying type of intervention.

But actually the people who engage in sanctioning the speech are themselves the bullies.

And so that's part and parcel of the cancel culture narrative.

So first the speech has to get out into society.

So normally that's a tweet, Facebook posts, if you're talking about a university campus, podcasts, lectures, news, interviews, all these kinds of things.

You know, academics are very fond of speaking in public.

And so normally you get a lot of cancel culture occurrences with academics because they are kind of, we are kind of paid to speak in public.

And so tweets, Facebook posts, cable, online media, podcast, the accusation, someone sees the publication, right?

They see the tweet, they see the Facebook posts, they hear a recording of the video.

Most of the time the academic or the speaker intended for the speech to be public.

And so they intended for it to reach varied audiences.

When you have your Twitter profile, you have your followers, but most of the time it's public.

So people who aren't your followers can see it as well.

So normally the people who bring the accusations, they're actually not the Twitter followers, like who are like the genuine followers and that we agree with you.

It's actually kind of the people who didn't like you in the first place, right?

Who bring the accusation.

So the accusation has this challenge of being you are one type of person with kind of certain speech norms and you have a discourse community that has certain speech norms.

There's a certain way you talk, there's certain things you assume about the world.

Then there's another discourse community, normally a competing discourse community that sees things differently.

When you have accusations, they're normally across discourse communities, right?

So it's almost like people speaking two different languages, right?

And so they are kind of accusing each other.

Who does the accusing?

Normally it's someone who has an affiliation with the institution.

If you see an accusation, they're gonna say, you know, "As a student in this institution, I cannot believe you are allowing this to happen.

That you employ a professor who would say this kind of thing", right?

Or if you are a customer, right?

Oh my gosh, as a customer, right?

I will no longer, you know, give my service to a business that employs this type of person, right?

When you think about what happens after the accusation is made, it's really similar to the kind of old fashioned pillory where they were like, put you up in the marketplace, the market square, and then random people passing by would see you there and then they just throw whatever's in their hand, right?

And this happens like once you have been accused, your tweet, your statement is like put up in the square, right?

The internet markets version of the market square.

And various people come by and they just, you know, add abuse and scorn on you.

Occasionally in the old fashioned pillory there would be people who were like, "What happened?

No, no, they didn't do anything wrong."

And they throw a flower, right?

Instead of, you know, feces.

And occasionally that happens in the internet marketplace where some people try to defend you like, "oh, it wasn't that bad."

If actually the most of the people speaking are defending you, maybe you can successfully escape cancellation.

If not, if most of the people are, you know, piling on with abuse and scorn, then maybe you don't.

It also depends on who these people are.

Sanctions is the last phase.

So if in the pillory, the opinions of the people that the university cares about are against the speaker, it's likely that there will be some form of sanction.

The favorite sanction is forced resignation or being terminated.

That's like occasionally you get a verbal condemnation for universities, right?

If you are tenured, you're likely to get a verbal condemnation if you are untenured, right?

Or you're a lecturer or an adjunct, out the door, okay?

The universities are very responsive.

Now, one of the challenges is that this often happens so quickly that before the people who want to defend your speech can actually ever speak up.

You've already been terminated.

But I think realizing right, that people have the capacity to change, then we'll invest a little bit more in dialogue and reconciliation, I think it's much better, right?

To make an ally of a former enemy than to actually have them become like an even worse enemy.

So I'm out of time, so I'm gonna gonna stop there.

Thank you all for this.

(audience clapping) (light ambient music) - Thank you for those remarks, Franciska that presentation.

So I thought I would pose some questions that start with some follow up about the, the analysis you provide of the dilemma we find ourselves in starting, especially with university communities, that one side of this view about a cancel culture or limiting speech emphasizes the important aim of the university is knowledge production or inquiry or debate or discussion.

And another voice or side in the debate emphasizes the importance of a university community being a community.

And so all students, faculty, staff feel welcome there to participate in the aims of, of seeking knowledge, seeking truth, knowledge, production, et cetera.

So this raises the question of the tensions that I think you are saying can never really go away or not likely to go away soon.

So is that, is that a fair, okay.

So could you talk a little bit more about those tensions and why they're not likely to go away?

- Yeah, so yes.

I think, you know, one of the things that has kind of happened over time as the university is in addition to the university's kind of mission to disseminate knowledge, like we now view the university as also a place of like equality, right?

We're going to kind of, you know, when they talked about affirmative action, they were like, "oh, we need, you know, these type of leaders."

And so we view the mission as not just about knowledge, but as also about important vehicle for making kind of an inclusive society that's more egalitarian across race, gender, ethnicity, that kind of thing.

And so I think those two missions can seem to be intention, but I think there is a way in which we have to have a both and.

Instead of an either or orientation, sometimes we view this group as listeners and this group as speakers.

And that's where the tension comes from, right?

Like we have, oh, you know, the professors are about academic freedom, but then we have to make the students feel included or people with race privilege are saying this, but the people without race privilege are feeling this way.

And so we kind of divide these groups, the fact that we think different people have academic freedom and different people need to be included rather than realizing actually on the campus people need both, right?

Like nowadays they talk about yes, we wanna have inclusion for like conservatives, right?

And actually some speakers are actually minority groups.

And so I think if, if we realize that our community is not divided into two distinct groups, one of which wants diversity and inclusion and one of which wants academic freedom, but helping our communities realize, okay, actually the people who want diversity and inclusion also need academic freedom, right?

And the people who need academic freedom also need to be included.

And I think that's a way to kind of bridge the gap.

- And could I ask you about on this theme of inclusion, the rise in importance across the past 50, 75 years or more of these questions of identity and communities identifying a certain way, communities self-identifying as historically disadvantaged or formerly marginalized.

And on again, this general theme I'm posing about, about balances and tensions, how there's a particular tension in university communities and beyond between free speech, promoting free discourse to produce knowledge and seek truth.

And on the other hand, how you recognize past harms of racism or past harms of some identity group that feels marginalized, has been marginalized.

How that identity question especially about race, but maybe not exclusively about race, poses a particular difficulty in this entire conundrum that we're facing?

- Yeah.

So there was a time in which the university was able to kind of do things very simply because it was like science is objective and neutral, right?

And one of the things that happens when you kind of get more inclusion and diversity is that you actually realize science can be unobjective and non neutral.

And the question is, when is science being unobjective and non neutral?

And I think that's something the university has to navigate because when the university is seeking for truth, sometimes groups will say, "well, that search for the truth is biased."

And before that wasn't even something you could say because we were like, no, science is never biased.

But once we acknowledge that science can sometimes be non-objective and bias, then it's very easy to question truth.

And the search for knowledge becomes much, much more of a negotiation because there's always a chance that someone will say, "Well, we think this is a biased question, we think your starting point was biased."

- And you're using science broadly to mean like social sciences as well as humanities as well?

- Yeah, I think the, you know, the empirical sciences, right, were the one, the main ones that had this claim to objectivity.

But you know, when you think about, oh my gosh, you know, when they were like, yes, it's biological determinism, right?

And so... so I think that we see the problem more in the hard sciences just because they seem more objective.

But of course, like I think it's always been a problem in the social sciences, but I think because it's also kind of become such a thing that affects both, then it's become more aggravated I think in the social sciences.

And so what we consider to be truth and objective is much more contested.

And then I think that that does create a problem because sometimes you can say, well no, this is just knowledge, this is just truth.

This is just, you know, this is just my research, right?

But then it becomes open to question by these groups.

And I think you have to have some kind of way, right, of actually still being able to do work, but also kind of respect the concerns that other groups have.

And so I think we have to find another way other than, you know, either or, right?

I think we have to find a way to balance those two, right?

To understand like there are concerns sometimes about scientific research that can be harmful, but at the same time, you know, sometimes scientific research, harmful doesn't mean false, right?

And I think we have to get to that point where we can kind of acknowledge, even though science may have some kind of interested things going on, it may not always be purely objective.

We can't always equate harmful outcomes that say things we don't wanna say with false outcomes.

And so I think that's something that we're struggling to, navigate and it requires kind of dialogue to a degree across groups that we don't always have even at the university campus.

- So I actually went through a pretty horrible experience last year and got quote unquote actually canceled.

And I found out over the coming days that there was multiple people who hated me enough to be gathering information about me for the past three to four years and kind of all came out.

Ultimately my employer had to make the difficult decision to let me go.

It was one of the most miserable weeks and a half of my life, wouldn't wish it on the worst person in the world.

And my question is basically how do people who go through that experience learn to move on and be forgiven?

And how do we as a society learn to forgive others who, you know, are accused of these horrible things, are accused of things outta context, win the mob and basically everybody was piling on and then I was able to kind of prove that it was false and then it kind of died down.

But how do we not become part of the mob mentality and learn to slow down and think.

- Yeah, I think it's very hard.

I think your question kind of tells us, right?

Slow down and think, but I think we are very reactionary and it's very difficult sometimes to slow down and think and get all of the facts.

I'm gonna maybe, like I said earlier, like taking apology seriously.

And I would say not overreacting, keeping in mind that the speaker is human, the person challenged is human, and that it's only kind of a partial account, right?

I think no person is all good.

There was a movie, Anatomy of a Murderer, right?

No one is all good or all bad, right?

They're kind of complex.

And so I think for employers and people making those decisions, what I actually advocated, this is not this article, but in a different article is people having a policy in advance, right before the mob forms have a policy so that they know what's off the table.

And that can actually be protective because if the mob is already formed and you say, "I'm not gonna fire this person" it's enraging.

But if you have a policy like in advance before the mob forms that says we only suspend for two weeks, we only do da, da da da da, then that becomes the norm, right?

That you kind of set expectations and then people that ask when that is the background context that firing is not on the table, the ask will be different and maybe it'll be less harmful to the person.

So I think setting some norms in advance would be good.

- We used to have an understanding that different institutions in different areas require different levels of sensitivity.

To my mind, it would be very rude to go into a mosque and start decrying Islam and start saying, it's an awful violent religion that's the fault of hundreds of thousands of deaths.

But at the same time, there needs to be a public space and a private space where we can talk about policy, but then be respectful to the other person, the mine shaft and the cell shaft in a way.

Is there a chance to get that back?

Am I just a dreamy eyed idealist because I want to get that back.

Is it fruitful or should we just try and be, try and apply neutral principles across everything instead?

- I think people are are working to get that back.

And I think we do want to, to kind of, to get that back.

I think this is one of the, you know, one of the challenges, I recall, like there was a book like Bowling Alone, you know, and so I think we're so like disconnected that really the place where we see people is like social media, right?

And that's, you know, encourages all kinds of kinds of excesses.

And so can we have a new public space?

I would actually argue that that's the university, you know, that that's, you know, that in the university we should try to cultivate those spaces.

I know like for me, I like for the university to be kind of an intermediate space between free American society and like K 12 education, which, you know, sometimes you don't have a lot of free speech there.

And where we kind of, you know, scaffold, right?

We kind of create an environment where we try to use, you know, education, encouragement, discouragement, incentives, disincentives to get students to learn how to create that space out.

We create that space in the university and give them the tools to create those spaces outside of the university, like in the workplace, you know, break room, you know, in the teacher's lounge, you know, but I think we need a space first to try and figure out how that works, and I think the university could be that, that type of space.

And I think it's okay for different universities to try to try to create that space in different ways.

- And with that, please join me one last round of thanks to our speaker, Franciska Coleman.

(audience clapping) - [Narrator] The Civic Discourse project, ideological conformity on campus and in American society is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

(energetic music)