Can colleges and universities help heal a backsliding democracy? Some see these institutions as culprits in the demise of democracy and point to students’ sensitivities or professors’ ideologies as reasons to lose faith in their contributions. I suggest instead that higher education in all its variety, from the Ivy League to community colleges, is well situated and ready to take on the challenges democracy currently faces. This book considers the struggles over the boundaries of speech in order to make the case for the active role that institutions of higher education can take in bridging political divides and helping reverse the process of democratic decline. Colleges are laboratories in which democracy is learned, practiced, and enhanced. As students, instructors, and leaders in higher education pursue and disseminate knowledge - and work to create inclusive and engaged learning communities— they seed democratic habits and practices. It is necessary to focus on the boundaries of speech on campus because of both the nature of work in higher education, where so much of the work involves speech, and the current state of democracy. 

We can understand and begin to address some of the most pressing challenges to democracy by paying careful attention to struggles over truth and to disagreements over belonging and inclusion. These controversies have taken center stage at many college campuses in recent years, especially in debates over the regulation and protection of speech on campus. I argue that the challenges of campus speech are the result of contestations over broader societal fractures concerning truth and inclusion and that campuses need to, in most cases, address these challenges through efforts to engage across differences rather than as breaches to be corrected through regulation or punishment. 

The boundaries of acceptable expression on a campus should be set by the mission of the institution, by the call to search for truth through shared work, and through the inclusion of diverse perspectives and voices in the process of inquiry.1 If a form of expression excludes some people on campus, it is the institution’s responsibility to correct the outcomes of that speech. In the vast majority of cases, this does not mean censorship, firing, or “canceling” but rather other types of action taken by the institution to ensure that equity and continued dialogue are both preserved. In this way, speech remains robust while inclusion is reaffirmed and sustained. This is a modified version of the “more speech” response encouraged by Justice Louis Brandeis: it seeks to not simply encourage more speech but also to place the burden of expressing, supporting, and sometimes sponsoring more and better speech on the institution as part of its educational and democratic role. 

College campuses have become flashpoints in the current culture war. In this book, I argue that the escalating struggles over “cancel culture,” “safe spaces,” and free speech on campus are a manifestation of broader democratic erosion in the United States. I take a closer look at how these tensions play out to illuminate a path toward revitalizing American democracy. In what follows, I consider the gray areas of permissible speech, taking a close look at their sources and offering solutions to the tensions they create. I situate open expression on campus within the broader polarization occurring in the political sphere to show that the fight over the future of democracy takes place in two battlegrounds: one revolving around truth, how to identify it, and how it is distorted; and the other around inclusion, exclusion, and “cancellation” from the public sphere. Taken together, tensions around truth and inclusion reshape the civic culture of contemporary democracies. Colleges and universities, along with K– 12 schools, are among the main arenas where these battles are fought, and they hold a key to surmounting the current democratic impasse.