Marketplace of ideas? Why neither side is buying anymore.

Mark Bauerlein has become disillusioned with the political and academic ideal sometimes called “the free marketplace of ideas,” especially in America’s institutions of higher education.

It’s always been a confident and even optimistic ideal, springing from the emergence of Enlightenment liberalism and its emphasis on freedom of speech and individual rights. As its capitalist metaphor suggests, the ideal maintains that only in a free and open encounter of opposing ideas can truth and freedom prevail.

It also presumes a particular danger in the suppression of ideas – even those a majority might consider loathsome or dangerous. Silencing opinions inevitably corrupts an open process of inquiry and discovery, the theory goes, thus privileging only the ideas of those with power.

“You know, the marketplace of ideas is a great concept, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” says Dr. Bauerlein, a conservative scholar who’s helped Florida educators revamp their English language arts standards over the past few years. “The problem is, there’s been a purge of conservatives from higher education for 30 or 40 years, and conservative opinion has grown abhorrent on campus, especially in this woke era.”

Librarians and historians, meanwhile, point to the record number of book bans last year – largely in red states, targeting works by Black and LGBTQ+ writers – as silencing voices speaking uncomfortable truths about America’s history. Last month, a Florida charter school principal lost her job when a middle school art class saw a picture of Michelangelo’s David. Two parents complained they were not notified in advance, as was school policy, while a third called the biblical masterpiece “pornography.” After another parent complained, a district in Florida will no longer show the Disney movie, “Ruby Bridges,” about the 6-year-old who helped integrate Louisiana schools.

“I just think that we are moving backward,” says Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. “A lot of us wanted to believe that we had free and open discussions in this country, and that we can talk about anything, and that we can make changes. It sounds great as cocktail-party chitchat, when we are all in the room with the same beliefs.”

The fighting faiths within this moment’s so-called culture wars have more and more begun to consciously abandon their ideals, but it doesn’t have to be that way, says Frank Buckley, professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

“It’s very heavy-handed of a legislature to instruct colleges in what shall and what should not be taught,” he says. However, he adds, “there is a problem of ideological uniformity on campuses. ... And further, if we are loyal to America in some way, that means that we remember all the good things about American history, and that we have a certain amnesia about the bad things.”

A Holmesian ideal

Throughout America’s stormy history, however, the free marketplace of ideas – or free speech embedded within a capitalist metaphor – has always been bitterly contested. It was coined more or less by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in an impassioned dissent in a 1918 Supreme Court decision. He used the free marketplace metaphor to decry the conviction of Jewish anarchists distributing anti-war and anti-government leaflets.

“Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical,” Holmes wrote. “If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. ...

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he continued, “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”

In the end, Mr. Holmes’ dissent over a century ago evolved, both legally and culturally, to become something close to a bedrock American value, especially within the areas of politics and education.

New College

Earlier this year, Dr. Bauerlein was at the center of an academic controversy after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, appointed him and five other conservatives to the board of trustees of New College of Florida, a liberal arts college with 700 students and 90 faculty members in Sarasota.

Despite the institution’s small size, academic associations and liberal thinkers around the country condemned these appointments as part of a conservative power grab. One association dismissed the conservative appointees as “would-be indoctrinators of views that undermine the purpose of higher education in a democracy.”

For Dr. Bauerlein and other conservatives, there’s a maddening irony in such complaints, since they believe American educational institutions have already been undermined by decades of liberal indoctrination, especially when it comes to the issues of race and human sexuality.

In only the most recent of many similar episodes, they say, students at Stanford Law School last month relentlessly heckled the federal judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the school’s Federalist Society chapter. Students shouted insults and waved banners accusing the conservative jurist of crimes against women, Black people, and LGBTQ+ people.

When Judge Duncan asked the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion for help to restore order, she walked to the lectern and turned to him instead. “For many people here, your work has caused harm,” she said. Stanford administrators later apologized to Judge Duncan, and announced a mandatory half-day session on the principles of freedom of speech. 

Political intervention in academia

The perceived purge of conservatives from institutions of higher learning has led many conservatives and Republican lawmakers to fundamentally rethink the idea of the free marketplace of ideas. Many have even embraced a robust new role for government intervention as they pass regulations banning the teaching of critical race theory and ideas about sex and gender. 

“At what point is it in any way justified for political authorities to step in and start making intellectual, academic decisions about what goes on in classrooms, about what books are assigned?” says Dr. Bauerlein, professor emeritus at Emory College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, where he taught English for almost three decades. 

“What do you do when the scholarly associations, when the institutions themselves, when professors and administrators are not upholding academic freedom?” he continues. “That is the point when you do need outside political intervention.”

Since January 2021, just months after the murder of George Floyd by police sparked nationwide protests, at least 18 states have imposed various government interventions on the teaching of critical race theory, an academic tradition usually taught in graduate school that analyzes the lasting impacts of American laws and institutions that maintain the legacies of racial inequality.

In many states, banned ideas include teaching students they “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order that defined critical race theory as “antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness. It emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values, which America has fought so hard to reject.” 

In Texas, legal restrictions against critical race theory include a ban of any concept teaching that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and Governor DeSantis’ administration is now seeking to expand this ban for all elementary and high school classrooms.

Florida’s new restrictions also mandate that school libraries must be age-appropriate and free from pornography. All books must now be approved by re-trained media specialists, who are charged to remove any books that violate the state’s new bans on race- and sex-related topics. That has included the removal of books and movies about Civil Rights icons from Rosa Parks to Ruby Bridges.

As these states continue to pass general bans of concepts of race and sexuality, efforts to ban books in local jurisdictions nearly doubled in 2022, according to the American Library Association. It tracked almost 1,300 attempts to ban related books, the highest number the association found in more than 20 years of studying censorship efforts.

Demonizing history?

As a local historian, Ms. White talks to longtime residents of Las Vegas and surrounding areas, compiling their memories of their experiences, with projects that include early health care in the city as well as a study of local musicians. 

But she doesn’t recognize what conservatives characterize as critical race theory. 

“I think very radical conservative Republicans understood immediately that this was going to teach the history in a way that it actually happened, and people were going to understand what systemic racism and structural racism does,” she says. “What really happened in American history, in all of its glory and all of its shame, and all of its ugliness and all of its beauty? All of it was going to be told now, and there was not going to be a way to keep it out of classrooms and to keep it out of textbooks.”

“But they don’t want that history told, and so they have done all kinds of things to demonize this history as indoctrination,” Ms. White says. And there’s an irony to the fact that as state governments begin to ban ideas, they focus especially on those of Black people and other marginalized groups.

For his part, Professor Buckley laments the increasingly nasty tit-for-tat creating a vicious cycle that risks silencing people of good will.

“The real problem is that mean-spiritedness at one end of the spectrum seems to provoke an equal and opposite reaction on the other,” Professor Buckley says. “And most people, I think, want to avoid all that. I think we’d like to go back to a time where we were permitted to feel generously about other Americans, but the people at the extremes are making that harder and harder.”