My review of my own book

 

I contemplated writing In Defense of Free Speech in Universities: A Study of Three Jurisdictions, which was published last fall,  in the summer of 2018, a few months after the Lindsay Shepherd incident in Canada. Living in Canada at the time, I became increasingly aware of a free speech crisis on many of its university campuses. I listened to the recording multiple times, each time becoming more angered, until I became fully committed to writing the book. Nonetheless, it did not dawn upon me how serious the whole situation was, until something happened to me later that year.

That October, I travelled to a Canadian university to interview for a teaching job.  The interviewers, all lawyers, expressed a very keen interest in my book project that was already taking shape. “It is highly relevant to law school,” they affirmed smilingly. They then inquired about its contents and arguments. Their inquiry was reasonably expected, though, in hindsight, quite sneaky.  In retrospect, I should have considered the atmosphere on Canadian campuses and offered a more general, perhaps vaguely-worded description if my goal had been to maximize my chances of getting the job. My passion for the project and my strong conviction nonetheless got the better of me: I was very candid about my belief that deplatforming speakers is generally a bad policy that should not exist in a democracy.  

That very night, I read from the local news that my interviewers had been desperately seeking to deplatform speakers invited to speak on their campus, whom they considered to harbor unorthodox views and who challenged their own deeply-held beliefs. In fact, by the time my interview took place, they had already done so multiple times.  My fear was confirmed—in less than days after the interview, I was notified by the Dean that I did not get the job. (For a fleeting moment, I was distraught and slightly regretful for being my true self at the interview. Yet any guilt on my part for not having fully informed myself about their repressive culture and practices and not having delivered the perfect performance soon completely vanished.)

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The free speech crisis no doubt is not unique to Canadian academia. The last ten years have seen a rising number of free speech disputes in western academia, including the United States and the United Kingdom. During the same period, numerous books on campus free speech have appeared on the market. However, they mainly focus on the United States.  They also use academic freedom and free speech interchangeably rather than examining their distinctions and interrelationship.  In addition, they do not provide critical, in-depth studies of concepts such as microaggression, trigger warning, and concept creep, let alone exemplify the analyses with examples and case studies.

My book is divided into three parts. The first part explores the history and philosophical foundations of free speech as well as the importance of free speech in Western universities. It also differentiates free speech from academic freedom and explains how they are nonetheless interdependent.

The second part examines a variety of concepts, including political correctness, trigger warning, microaggression, deplatforming, and safe space, all in a systemic and methodical manner. It explains why political correctness, if taken to the extreme, jeopardizes the freedom of inquiry. It also affirms the harmfulness of microaggression, while encouraging targets to assert their agency to resist microaggressive acts and reclaim their dignity. It further examines how deplatforming hinders freedom of inquiry and why trigger warnings should not be overused. It studies different meanings and concepts of “safe space,” and explains why turning the entire campus into a safe space might justify the use of pre-emptive violence against those unfairly perceived to threaten the safety of the bubble.

The third part contextualizes all the concepts in Part two in its discussion of numerous case studies in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Canada.  Whereas the U.S. has done a fair job in safeguard free speech in its university campuses, largely due to robust protection offered by its First Amendment tradition, the U.K.’s free speech bill holds some promise in improving the dire situation. Canada, however, lags far behind these two countries, due to the uncertainty as to whether its constitution (the “Charter”) applies to universities as well as the lack of courage of many university presidents and employees.

Finally, what distinguishes the book from all other books on the same topic is its emphasis on the rising threat posed by hostile foreign governments to Western academia, and its urgent call for protecting freedom of inquiry despite rampant attempts to suppress narratives critical of such governments on many Western university campuses.  Indeed, each chapter in Part 3 contains case studies in which administrators and teachers at Western universities seem indifferent to or wilfully ignorant of threats and violence posed by agents of foreign governments and are therefore complicit in their wrongdoing; others even unfairly and incorrectly label criticisms of foreign governments as “racism.” The book reiterates that even if “every man has a price,” universities in democratic countries must set the price as high as possible, resist temptations to bargain away its most fundamental liberties, and safeguard the university as a bastion of free speech.

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Getting this book published has been some of the proudest moments of my life.  It also earned me the Voltaire Preis offered by Potsdam Universitat in Germany (as well as Pen Canada’s Freedom of Expression Award). After I gave a discussion of “cancel culture” in my acceptance speech at the award ceremony, a few older attendees who spent significant time in former East Germany sought me out and expressed their approval.  Lamenting the younger generations’ tendency to take freedom of speech for granted, they attributed it to the fact that they were born long after the end of the Cold War and did not experience or witness first-hand the calamities in different communist regimes, as well as insufficient coverage of communism in high school curricular.  I agreed. While the younger generations’ intolerance of diverse opinions may be excusable, the stubbornness and self-righteousness of older adults, including their teachers, who should know better, is not.

Having spent my formative years in Hong Kong, I have not been oblivious to what happened north of the border. In fact, I was emotionally overwhelmed by the political turmoil in my birth city as I wrote and revised the book manuscript from 2019 through 2022.  I hope that my Western readers will heed the warning in the book and help safeguard this fundamental freedom.