Why procedural defenses of free speech fail

Last September, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The results were a grim autopsy of campus discourse, for out of 257 schools, 166 earned a failing grade. A majority of students now say they would block controversial speakers, and one in three is willing, at least sometimes, to use violence to shut down a speaker.

The standard explanation is ideological capture. There is truth in that, but it doesn’t go far enough. The deeper problem is not that universities have failed to enforce the procedural rules of free speech; it is that they no longer produce the kind of students—or sustain the kind of culture—for which free speech makes sense. We are often told the modern university is a “marketplace of ideas.” It never really was. Historically, that language was merely a thin veneer over something older and more demanding: an institution ordered toward truth. In the Christian intellectual tradition that birthed the university, the central question was not which ideas should be permitted, but what is true, good, and beautiful—and how one ought to live in light of it.

The “marketplace” model was already a retreat. It was a procedural substitute for the older conviction that truth exists, can be known, and is worth loving. When we offer the marketplace as a cure for today’s illiberalism, we are proposing a slightly earlier stage of the disease. The marketplace vision gave way to the postwar university—expanded by the GI Bill and tasked with producing credentialed workers for a managed economy. As Christopher Lasch observed, this was the “revolt of the elites,” where education was instrumentalized. Knowledge became a commodity. Education turned away from the pursuit of reality and toward the acquisition of marketable skills: less what is true, more what will pay.

Once education is reduced to a means, truth becomes negotiable. If truth is negotiable, the practices that sustain its pursuit—argument, disagreement, and intellectual risk—become optional. Free inquiry is only worth defending if you believe there is actually something there to find. This helps explain the apathy of the majority: students who don’t care about speech because they only care about their own career advancement. But apathy doesn’t explain the intensity of the “woke” minority.

In Primal Screams, Mary Eberstadt argues that the hunger for identity-based belonging is the result of family dissolution. Students raised in fractured households, without the stable anchors of family and faith, arrive searching for a substitute identity. The campus becomes a surrogate family that must be guarded against anything that might unsettle the self it sustains. The push for safe spaces and the silencing of controversial speakers is, in part, a response from those without a stable enough identity to risk genuine encounter with others.

Mark Mitchell, in Power and Purity, traces the moral pathology of campus progressivism to an unstable marriage: Nietzsche’s will to power wedded to a de-Christianized Puritan moralism. The result is a worldview that simultaneously denies objective truth and prosecutes moral heresy with absolute certainty—relativism and righteousness in the same breath.

In this mixture, the dynamic that Nassim Taleb identified takes hold: An intolerant, intensely committed minority can easily transform an institution filled with an indifferent majority. Administrators, themselves creatures of this same managerial culture, find it easier to manage “risk” by capitulating to the loudest voices than to defend principles they only ever paid lip service to.

As Musa al-Gharbi documents in We Have Never Been Woke, institutional capitulation is often driven not by true believers, but by professionals rationally managing their careers. They are not advancing an ideology; they are securing their status.

We must realize that an open mind is not an achievement. To the contrary, it is a starting point. If it is trained to remain perpetually open—suspicious of commitment and wary of judgment—it becomes unable to close on anything at all. As G.K. Chesterton noted, the object of opening the mind is to shut it on something solid.

This is the hidden cost of the “marketplace” model. A mind that cannot close cannot resist. It is not liberated; it is merely unguarded. When the university refuses to offer a vision of the Good, it does not leave students free but leaves them a vacuum. And into that vacuum, the “will to power” and the search for tribal belonging rush in. Without a firm grasp on reality, the student is not a free agent in a marketplace—they are a target for whoever shouts the loudest. Procedural defenses of free speech keep failing because they try to preserve a practice without restoring the convictions that made it possible. You cannot defend a fence if you no longer believe in the sanctity of the garden it protects.

Universities cannot rebuild families, but they can stop pretending that education is a transaction. They can set before students something more demanding than employability: the chance to sit with a great book and be pressed by the weight of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. To be truly “liberal,” education must once again be a school in humanity—a training of the soul to affirm what is real.

In such a setting, students find that the encounter with truth does not diminish them but makes them more fully human. Free speech would still matter in such a place, but it would no longer carry the entire weight of the institution. It would be a tool in service of the higher calling of forming people who can face the world without flinching—who can hear what they dislike, test it against the reality of things, and reject error without needing to silence the speaker.

The university did not lose free speech by accident; it lost the habits and beliefs that made it necessary. Until we address the “why,” no amount of “how” will suffice.