Free Speech in a World of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity

Both books reviewed here argue for the importance of free speech, though apart from that they have little in common. One, The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything by Eric Heinze is a case for the importance of free speech made by a philosopher at an Ivy League university writing for a prestigious University Press. The other, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and the Threat to Academic Freedom, edited by Martín López-Corredoira, Tom Todd, and Erik J. Olsson, is published by a minor press, and is a collection of twenty-six short essays criticizing the scale of censorship that has become routinized in universities. While Heinze’s book is a lengthy reflection upon a philosophical problem that has implications for the political deferment to human rights as providing unassailable principles for legislation and policy, the latter work mostly consists of testimonies by people who have been subjected to some kind of academic censorship. One of the editors who is a philosopher, Erik Olsson, discusses in a Postscript how the article he presents in the book, “Feminine Culture in Academia: The Threat to Academic Freedom Coming from Soft Values,” was censored for breaching policies of equality at the Institute of Astrophysics at the Canary Islands. As the title of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and the Threat to Academic Freedom indicates the widespread use of censorship in the universities stems from the managerial power of their administrative bodies. That the power of academic administrators has shifted from facilitating academic and student matters and assisting the enterprises of teaching and research to making the final decisions about the values of the university is but one further aspect of the corporatization and managerialization of Western societies more generally. That not only universities but also corporations have adopted policies of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) which have been advanced as primary to their “mission” is also largely due to the fact that those policies are strongly supported by student advocates