Should You Police "Free Speech" in Your Business?
Entrepreneurs shouldn't duplicate the mistakes that universities are making in allowing extremists to poison civilized discourse. We need to exchange ideas, which means listening, not trying to shut down opposing views.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
When I was in law school, one of the most instructive and
important annual events was the multi-week Moot Court competition. Senior
litigators from the finest law firms in Chicago, along with well-respected
judges from the state and federal courts, were invited as guests to preside
over mock trials. The best law students acted as “attorneys” for the parties on
both sides of a hypothetical case, which typically raised important issues and
contemporary legal concerns.
This was a chance for schools and the students to
demonstrate their smarts and skills to their peers and, most importantly, to
future employers. In some instances, the “judges” in these proceedings might be
arguing or considering similar actual cases in real world courtrooms. An
especially persuasive presentation by a student team might eventually influence
the outcome of current and future cases. Everyone involved in these sessions
understood their importance and gravity and participated in a respectful and
professional manner.
But I’m not sure that any of those guests who happily
volunteered their time and wisdom will be looking forward to their next invite
or bother to stop by their alma mater any time soon. At businesses, school
boards, colleges and law schools across the country, seriousness and
professionalism are the last things we witness when speakers are invited to
address various audiences. Whether it’s a luncheon lecture at a business or a
law school speech at Stanford or Yale, these once friendly and informative
forums have been fully sucked into the culture wars. They have become theatres
of the absurd, where the prime directive seems to be mocking and attempting to
shame and humiliate the invited presenters. At Stanford, even the moronic DEI
associate dean took part in the beating.
What’s happening in the academic world is moving quickly and
inexorably into the business world and will soon poison those environments, so
that employee meetings, forums, and other gathering will also become platforms
for the same activists and actors to a much greater extent than they have been
in the past. New criteria, gates, and lenses will need to be applied to
determine whether any proposed activities on company premises meet all sorts of
new and emerging criteria - including those invented and promoted on the fly,
like introducing all events with apologies for stealing the land upon which the
participants are standing. None of this nuttiness is good news for any
business and especially one with new, young employees emerging from the insane
asylums that pass for colleges and universities these days.
Any pretense that these kinds of events offer community
instruction or education is delusional. The whole process has become a game for
trolls and idiots looking for attention and strokes from other idiots. They
want to be heard, but they never listen. One group invites the most provocative
and extreme speakers they can find (often proposed and supported by outside
groups with their own agendas) to prime the pump and trigger their fellow
students or employees; the other side then attempts to block, cancel, or
disrupt whatever forum the speaker is scheduled to attend. If the event goes
forward, the audience will typically be composed of equal parts of interested,
legitimate attendees along with aggressive agitators and other bad actors who
seek only to interrupt and interfere.
Typically, the clueless or unsuspecting employers or
administrators involved dispatch some hapless representatives who usually sit
passively by and watch the fireworks unfold. In the worst cases, like the
recent fiasco at Stanford Law School, hypocritical and self-promoting DEI
representatives of the university itself jumped into the broken process and
made complete fools of themselves. None of these obnoxious advocates seem to
realize that shouting a lie doesn’t make it true. They’d do the whole world a
solid to simply sit down, shut up, and remain on the sidelines while the circus
proceeds. Gravely and confusingly intoning “is the juice worth the squeeze?”
adds less than nothing to the conversation.
I tried a while ago to suggest that it might be possible to draw
some clear-cut lines between what kinds of topics and matters were appropriate
for discussions at work or at school and which belonged elsewhere. I knew
that this wasn’t going to be an easy task, but since it was clearly a very
slippery slope, I was trying to at least offer some kind of fair warning that,
once you opened the door, there would be no stopping the deluge of drama,
debate, and disinformation and the accompanying disruptions to your ongoing
operations. If your people and their energies are constantly being consumed by minor concerns, trivial
slights and offenses, and other pretend problems, they’re never going to get
anything great or important done.
I also thought that providing all of the concerned parties
with the best available and validated information sources might improve the content and quality of the
conversations. But it wasn’t so much a lack of access to information
(even if so much of it is crap these days) that accounted for the rampant bad
behavior we’re seeing all around us; it was a much more conscious and
intentional desire of the players to act out, to interrupt, and to interfere
with day-to-day operations of the targeted organizations. All in the corrupted
name of free speech.
Any patchwork plan by weak leaders to simply stand back,
promulgate some mealy-mouthed policies and “free speech” proclamations, and
then turn the proceedings over to their employees, students and various
internal and external organizations was doomed to fail miserably and to
actually add fuel to the ongoing fires. The people pushing these performative
productions know no limits and no amount of bending over backwards to
accommodate them is going to succeed in doing any sustainable good because the
goalposts are always moving. No enterprise of any kind can be all things to all
people and eventually the attempts to placate the impossible demands of the extremists
will only serve to encourage them and embarrass and aggravate your own people.
I understand that in these types of emotionally charged
discussions there are no right and simple answers, basically because in most
cases there’s no longer an agreed-upon factual foundation for any kind of
reasonable dialogue. Even if you assume that the parties are acting in good
faith rather than just stirring the pot, there’s no placating these people.
Worse yet are the attempts we’re now seeing at various
institutions to try to buy off the bitter little babies by assisting them
in “counterprogramming,” whatever that means, so they can offer their own
events. Aiding and abetting students or employees on the “other” side in their
efforts to bring their own speakers to the fray is - if anything - a futile and
textbook example of two wrongs never making a right. When you choose the lesser
of two evils, it’s still an evil. The fairly obvious conclusion that maybe
these aren’t the right times and places for these kinds of conversations seems
to escape everyone involved.
For businesses, this means senior management, not the HR
department or the DEI dullards, needs to step in and put a stake in the ground.
You can still stand for certain things without having to stand for
everything that anyone cares to do on your premises and in your name. If you
don’t draw the red lines early, clearly, and often as to what’s appropriate
within your business --whatever kind of business it is-- then there’s no end to
the problems you’re inviting. And, subsequently, no end to the damage that
could be caused to your organization, to the morale of your people, and to your
own reputation.