Withdrawing an invitation is not censorship
As readers of this blog may or may not be aware, Cambridge Student Union’s Women’s Campaign has a petition running at the moment, calling on the Union Society* to withdraw its speaking invitation to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on the fairly reasonable grounds that he’s a deeply unpleasant individual who seems to have a serious problem with the way he treats women. And some people, including this Cambridge student blogging for the Guardian, aren’t happy about this:
[U]niversities exist to open our minds. If we can’t listen to controversial speakers during these three hallowed years, when can we?
[…]
Freedom of speech is a double-edged sword. If the tuition fees rise has proved anything, it’s that students can get moving when we really feel strongly about something. The question is whether students who cherish their own right to protest should also allow DSK his opportunity to speak.
Most of the writers of this blog are Cambridge alumni, so I’m aware of the danger of parochialism when it comes to stories like this, but I think this has wider significance because it’s symptomatic of a particularly naïve and ill-thought-out conception of free speech which is alarmingly widespread. Whenever an organisation or public figure faces protests or condemnation for acting in a way that offends or upsets people, a large number of other people pop up to decry this as ‘censorship’ and trot out variations on the theme of “you know, supporting freedom of speech means you have to let people speak even if you don’t agree with them”, as if they think the people they’re arguing with aren’t aware of what the term means. What’s particularly annoying about this is that everyone who takes this line seems to believe that doing so makes them some kind of lone radical freethinker singlehandedly holding the liberal line against the censorious hordes, ignoring a) the fact that they’re normally saying it on the internet, where the risks of blowback from saying something controversial are negligible and b) the existence of countless others saying exactly the same bloody thing.
More importantly though, this kind of reasoning is completely, utterly wrong. A private organisation is not the public square. Strauss-Kahn’s freedom to write articles, give interviews or otherwise express himself is in no way curtailed if it’s decided that he’s no longer welcome at the Cambridge Union. When he exercises his freedom of speech, he doesn’t run the risk of being attacked, arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured. There’s a world of difference between censorship and merely withdrawing an invitation, and to conflate the two is ridiculous. That’s not to say that there always has to be a hard and fast distinction between them, or that the State is necessarily the only entity capable of censoring others. But here, the difference is abundantly clear, just as it was in the row over retailers selling clothes with sexist slogans a few months back, and – despite what the likes of Brendan O’Neill would have you believe – just as it was a couple of months after that when people were trying to stem the tide of misogyny, hatred and overt threats of violence which women writers face online. (The fact that online abuse was itself having a censorious effect and deterring many women from writing is an irony that appears not to have occurred to O’Neill. Depressingly, it’s probably not a coincidence that debates in which the ‘censorship’ line gets erroneously trotted out tend to be those which have a feminist dimension to them.)
Fighting censorship matters. But it’s not the same thing as merely expressing disagreement. Equating cases like the DSK issue with actual serious constraints on freedom of speech and expression only serves to trivialise the latter, and are – fittingly enough – pretty damn offensive.
*To forestall confusion, the Union Society is the student debating society at Cambridge, and has no official link to either the Students’ Union or the University.
