Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones and the Violence of Speech
When Mike Pence spoke at the University of Virginia in April, some students and faculty labeled his address a “form of violence.” The Cavalier Daily, a student newspaper, editorialized that Pence’s speech “directly threatens the presence and lives of our community members.”
To be sure, the First Amendment doesn’t protect all speech, and not all speech should be allowed on college campuses. But when addressing a crowded audience at Old Cabell Hall, the former vice president didn’t incite violence and didn’t yell “fire!” When I wrote a weekly column for the Cavalier Daily twenty years ago, I can’t imagine my editors equating First Amendment protected speech with acts of physical violence.
The fury over the former vice president’s speech took place around the time I had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend. We talked about raising children, and I expressed a desire that they learn how “sticks and stones will break their bones but words will never hurt them.” Growing up, I heard this from everyone, including my parents, teachers, neighbors, camp counselors, and coaches. Heck, I even heard it from my bus driver. So it was surprising that my girlfriend didn’t believe this to be true.
Our conversation prompted me to rethink some things: Can hurtful speech constitute an act of violence? Will students suffer irreparable harm if they engage with ideas they find abhorrent? Taking a page from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), I sought out the opposing arguments.
In a New York Times op-ed, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, writes that speech can have powerful effects on our nervous systems. Citing scientific research of how certain types of adversity can make us sick, alter our brains, and shorten our lives, Barrett claims that “if words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then certain types of speech can be a form of violence.” Also in the New York Times, Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, defends the use of trigger warnings. According to Manne, the point is not to encourage students to skip readings or class discussions. Rather, it is to “allow those who are sensitive to these subjects to prepare themselves.” Manne argues that material that is “merely offensive to certain people’s political or religious sensibilities” shouldn’t merit a warning. The idea is to flag content that relates to traumas like military combat, child abuse, and sexual violence. For those who have suffered severe trauma, flashbacks can “overtake [their] consciousness” and make it hard for students to reason and think clearly.
Both Barrett and Manne make persuasive arguments in favor safe spaces and trigger warnings for those who have experienced severe trauma. But it is also true that the definition of trauma has evolved. In an article titled “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Nick Haslam examines how concepts such as abuse, bullying, trauma, and prejudice have “crept downward to apply to less severe situations and outward to encompass new but conceptually related phenomena.”
From reading about controversies on college campuses over the last number of years, it strikes me as self-evidently true that the meaning of safety has expanded to include emotional safety. That is what Jonathan Haidt, a former professor of psychology at University of Virginia, and Gregg Lukianoff, a free speech advocate, argue in their 2015 essay and, later, in a book called The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
According to Haidt and Lukianoff, “A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.” Challenging Lisa Feldman Barrett’s syllogism, they ask us to swap “speech” with “breaking up with your girlfriend” or “giving students a lot of homework.” After all, both of these acts can produce prolonged stress, but that doesn’t mean these stressful acts are the same as violent acts.
Thankfully, the study “safetyism” has begun. Hopefully this research can be less about culture wars and more about how to help build resilient individuals. A team of Harvard psychology professors recently released the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience. According to the study, subjects who believed that words caused harm experienced increased anxiety when they were presented with material preceded by a trigger warning, whereas subjects who did not already believe that words caused harm did not. They also found that trigger warnings and safe spaces could prompt even students who have not experienced trauma to perceive threat and harm where there is none. A related study provides more evidence that trigger warnings may actually increase negative reactions and another study indicates that trigger warnings lead people to have even more intrusive thoughts.
In this discussion of trigger warnings and safe spaces, I like what Van Jones, a former advisor to Barack Obama, has to say. “Of course, students shouldn’t be subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse….But I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong.…I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym.”
I sat down to write this letter because I’m particularly interested in the state of the ideological gyms at University of Virginia and other schools across America. A 2017 survey conducted by the Brookings Institution found that 19 percent of students thought violence was acceptable to prevent a controversial speaker from making “offensive statements.” In 2019, according to a study sponsored by the William F. Buckley, Jr. program at Yale, roughly 30 percent students either “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed that shout-downs and physical violence were appropriate actions in order to prevent a speaker from delivering their remarks. In 2020, Gallup released an annual campus survey. When asked how important free speech is for democracy, over 90 percent of reported that it is “extremely” or “very” important. Yet, around 25 percent of students felt that colleges should be able to restrict the expression of political views on campus that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups, and almost 40 percent considered shouting down a speaker, or using other means of preventing them from talking. Also noteworthy is that about ten percent considered the use of violence either “sometimes” or “always” acceptable.
It isn’t just that use of violence is seen as acceptable to prevent a speech, it’s also a problem that many young people self-censor out of fear. In a New York Times op-ed titled “I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead,” UVA student Emma Camp, a self-described liberal, offers anecdotes of how her more conservative classmates are afraid to speak honestly in dorms and classrooms. She then backs up the anecdotes with data. According to a recent survey, 57 percent of UVA students are afraid to speak their true thoughts.
Like Emma Camp, I sought out a college that promised a commitment to ideological diversity and free speech. It impressed me that, when visiting UVA for the first time in 2001, students and faculty quoted the University’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, with pride: “For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
Lately, it seems the defenders of free speech are pushing back. A year ago, the UVA Board of Visitors released the “Statement on Free Expression and Free Inquiry”:
All views, beliefs, and perspectives deserve to be articulated and heard free from interference….Free and open inquiry is the basis for the scientific method and all other modes of investigation that produce, expand, and refine knowledge….Likewise, the educational endeavor for students requires freedom to speak, write, inquire, listen, challenge, and learn, including through exposure to a range of ideas and cultivation of the tools of critical thinking and engagement. These tools are vital not only to students’ personal intellectual development but also to their futures as citizen leaders equipped to assess contending arguments and to contribute to societal progress….It is with humility that we remember] many commonly accepted views have proved mistaken, while many ostracized views have illuminated the path toward truth….
We ought to remember that when speech can be suppressed, the people with the least power are likely to lose the most. As Jonathan Zimmerman writes in Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn, “Every great tribune of social justice in American history—including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.—was also a zealous advocate for free speech. Without it, they couldn’t criticize the indignities and oppression that they suffered,”
I’ll end with a quote from a former psychologist of mine. “We control 0% of our feelings, 50% of our thoughts, and 100% of our actions.”
So yes, speech can cause painful emotions, and those painful emotions pop up in our bodies in an uncontrollable fashion. But we can choose the actions we take in response to those uncomfortable feelings. Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice. By rejecting the “speech is violence” view, we can use our opponents’ ideas and arguments to make ourselves stronger.