Image Credit: Pexels/Cottonbro Studio

Free speech is dead when other opinions are blocked, says a UBCO professor who will debate the state of free speech in Kelowna next Tuesday.

“I think it’s bad for society if a broader variety of viewpoints are not incorporated or are so stigmatized and condemned that they are just not allowed to be thought about,” Greg Garrard, a professor of environmental humanities at UBCO, told iNFOnews.ca.

He is one of two panelists who will argue that free speech is dead.

Garrard’s interest in free speech was enhanced while doing research for and co-writing a 2019 book on climate skepticism - an attitude that, in many ways, is very similar to things like the anti-vaccine, and trans movements fuelling the culture wars since that time.

“It suddenly struck me that that nobody had ever looked at anti-environmentalist culture before,” Garrard said. “We’d only looked at books about climate change and books about nature or nature photography. But there’s a whole raft of stuff that’s quite overtly anti-environmentalist and it struck me that it was really incredible nobody had looked at that.”

Rather than try to convert the anti-environmentalists to their way of thinking, Garrard and the other researchers took an empathetic approach in an effort to decrease polarization and promote “constructive dialogue.”

READ MORE: Billboard company defends West Kelowna ad as free speech

Garrard argues that free speech is at risk because opposing and especially conservative views are often excluded from discussion.

“I am worried about the capacity for constructive dialogue within universities,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at a three-alarm fire moment or anywhere close to it because there’s still a lot of diversity of opinion and students are, I think, interested in constructive dialogue and debate but I’ve also seen, here at UBC in the last 10 years, some worrying kinds of proposals which have not come to pass.

“Those proposals would only affect what happens in the university and if people want to go on Facebook, or whatever, and have their arguments, they can. I don’t think the university or any of its parts are endangering free speech in an absolute sense but I do think there are threats to constructive dialogue within universities.”

Given that so many people do attend universities and those institutions have huge scientific and cultural impacts, limiting the scope of discussion is felt by students.

With the prevalence of social media, people are free to speak in any way on any issues they choose but, since Facebook likes were introduced in about 2013, polarization of opinions has grown dramatically, Garrard said.

“The point of social media is to monetize attention and attention comes with anger,” he said. “Our raison d’etre should be constructive dialogue. Their raison d’etre is entirely different so I think there is a case for regulation so the kind of financial incentives towards increasing polarization are counteracted in some way.”

READ MORE: Battle lines drawn over Jordan Peterson event in Kelowna

Garrard will be joined in his arguments that free speech is dead by Joel Baken a professor in UBC’s Allard School of Law, who is currently challenging X (Twitter) over censorship issues.

On the other side of the debate are Sue Gardner, a former journalist who served as head of CBC.ca and was executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007-14, and Margot Young, also from the Allard School of Law who, among other things, researches constitutional rights along with social and economic justice.

This is part of a new UBCO debate series that started last spring tackling artificial intelligence.

“Universities in general, and UBC, have a really important responsibility to be a place both for students but also for communities in which constructive dialogue can happen with appropriate kinds of protocols,” Garrard, who helped organize the debate series, said.

“That’s what a classroom is. Everyone doesn’t just come in and shout at each other. There’s a structure and there are protocols and we hope that those protocols mean that people learn from it and the same is true of this debate. We’re not trying to gamify it. We’re trying to set an example and be an example of constructive dialogue.”

That means there is no voting, no winner and losers, no one getting “voted off the island,” he said.

The debate runs from 7-8:30 p.m. at Kelowna Community Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 24. Tickets for non-students are $15 and are available here.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Rob Munro or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here.

News from © iNFOnews, 2023