The High Cost of Free Speech

We seem to be facing a time when the speech police are everywhere, a time when even the majority of progressive people simply seem to be losing faith in the value of free speech, all the while seeming to want to narrow the words that we can use.

“Don’t you see,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “the whole of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end,” he says, “We shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” Just what does free speech mean? Is it under threat today from the left and/or the right? Why is it also about safety and why are our colleges and universities front and center in this debate?

To talk about this I am joined by one of the intellectual guiding lights of the discussion of free speech, Professor Stanley Fish.

My conversation with Professor Stanley Fish: