Hostility toward free speech and civility on college campuses has found itself in vogue since the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in October 2023. For example, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the morning of November 8 to better understand the distinction between free speech and hate speech amid reports of rising antisemitism on campuses. But the advent of this form of cancel culture, which some have termed “shoutdown culture”, unquestionably predates the conflict in the Gaza Strip, with some estimating that it has been percolating through universities for nearly a decade.
“We rate cancel culture as beginning around 2014,” said Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit free speech watchdog group commonly known by the acronym FIRE. Regardless of its age, shoutdown culture is a phenomenon with which many intellectuals from across the political spectrum are familiar. Such intellectuals include fifteen panelists—among them Lukianoff—who will participate in a November 15 symposium on the topic of free speech and civility on college campuses hosted by The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, colloquially known as Catholic Law.
Two of Lukianoff’s fellow panelists, Ilya Shapiro of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, made headlines in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Their appearances at law schools were halted by student protestors. Loud demonstrations prevented both Duncan and Shapiro from beginning their respective lectures.
“In the classroom here, you had students hurling sexual innuendos at me,” Duncan recalled as he discussed the March 2023 visit to Stanford Law School that saw him heckled by students protesting some of his previous rulings and chastised by the Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “There was nothing rational about it.”
In Duncan’s estimation, the rise of shoutdown culture is the result of now college-age students having been conditioned throughout their adolescence to believe that “childish, rude gestures of contempt and public shaming” are appropriate reactions when exposed to views with which they might not only disagree, but also consider disconcerting. “I find it reprehensible,” he added, emphasizing that such exposure to opposing viewpoints is a crucial aspect of receiving a legal education. “I find it astonishing to me that a student at a law school would find that appropriate.”
“It was like an Occupy Wall Street meeting,” said Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. He was referring to his March 2022 appearance at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco—formerly known as University of California Hastings College of Law—as a guest of the University’s Federalist Society chapter.
Shapiro, whose visit to San Francisco was disrupted by student protestors, was at the time an incoming administrator at the Georgetown University Law Center, which had a few months prior placed him on leave. That measure was taken after he made a tweet suggesting that President Biden should nominate Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as retiring Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer’s replacement, rather than then federal appellate judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. He later admitted in advance of his visit that the tweet was in bad taste. That summer, Georgetown cleared him of wrongdoing—on what he called a technicality—and reinstated him as executive director of the school’s Center for the Constitution, but he resigned the following week.
“The institution has failed to select students and teach them some basic skills of legal advocacy,” Shapiro, who considers himself a classical liberal, explained. This phenomenon of shoutdown culture, he added, is a product of what he calls the illiberal takeover of legal education. He noted that “Hastings is known to attract activists” and that the faculty there leans further to the political left than they do at other institutions.
“It’s a matter of culture: How do you change a culture?” said former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, another panelist participating in the symposium. “On college campuses in particular, a very strong signal has to be sent from the top,” she advised. She mulled over potential solutions to what her copanelists have called a systematic hindrance of civil discourse. “I think this is necessary but not sufficient. There cannot be a singular solution to such a complicated, multifaceted, multivector problem.”
The need for solutions has seemingly served as a catalyst for Catholic Law professors A. G. Harmon and Marshall Breger to organize the November 15 symposium at which Strossen, Shapiro, Duncan, and Lukianoff, among others, will speak. Breger acknowleded that solutions might prove difficult, but noted that identifying the underlying issues at hand will ensure that every panelist at the symposium can tackle the same problem.
“I think that we have a diminution of the value of free speech on campus—in the university and in society, and the diminution occurs not because people are saying ‘I dislike free speech,’ but because they are valuing now the students’ notion of feeling comfortable in this environment,” Breger explained. “It has to do with a whole change in the nature of the university, from a place where intellectual challenge—and therefore free speech for intellectual challenge—is the foremost value, to a place where it has to be balanced among these other concerns.”
Harmon, who believes shoutdown culture has given birth to a mentality in which “opponents don’t have a right to their opinion,” added that he wanted to emphasize his optimism about finding solutions. “We don’t want this be just a day where people catalogue their grievances,” he said. “These people are here not so much to express grievances as to find solutions. So many issues have become 'settled' in student’s minds, so that they think there is only one position to have about them, which makes dialogue and debate impossible.”
What that solution will be, however, remains to be seen, and there is no clear consensus. Lukianoff, the CEO of FIRE, believes the problem is so pervasive that the only fix is the establishment of alternative low-cost, high-rigor academic programs throughout the country: “I think we need entirely new institutions.” Others, such as Strossen, are less optimistic about such one-size-fits-all approaches. “I have no magic button solution,” she said. “It’s like what H. L. Menken said: ‘For every complex problem, there’s a solution that’s simple, elegant, and wrong.’”