In America, it’s difficult to argue against anything described as “open.” We are the land of the cowboy, the open road, the big sky, the 24-7 convenience store. Everything is open all the time, for better or for worse, including but not limited to our hearts, our borders, and our pocketbooks. The siren call of America is the dream of social as well as physical mobility: anyone can do anything here, or so the story goes, without being held back by the caste system of the world they left behind. 

　　For those who aspire to join the educated elite, higher education is now part of this American dream. College is a rite of passage, like traveling by ship to America or traveling by wagon from the East Coast to the West. Our mythology all but demands, for this reason, that it should be open to all. But a university is not the same thing as a frontier. Limitation is essential to its character; to open it to everyone would be to destroy it.

　　The American mind tends to chafe at the very idea of velvet ropes. So, as a way of easing ourselves gently into accepting more readily what a university inevitably is, it may be helpful to invoke an older vision of what worldly bliss looks like. In classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, the ideal landscape was not an unpopulated and inhospitable wilderness but instead a walled garden. Our word “paradise,” for example, comes from an Iranian word for an enclosed private park. The American version, one might say, is the single-family suburban home.

　　The American dream is not a single static condition, however. Instead, it can be better understood as a story with a beginning and an end. The happy ending for the archetypal lonesome, penniless stranger is not to stay out beyond the horizon forever, living like a savage, but instead to join up with a select few other people, tame the wasteland, and establish an outpost of civilization. We romanticize the liberty of the righteous outlaw. But we want him to be able to come in from the cold and eventually enjoy a more settled and communal life. That means building homes and cities, complete with walls, gates, fences, and police, as well as less tangible social institutions such as schools and, in time, universities.

　　We are social creatures. As Aristotle says, we are “political animals.” We want to feel like our lives have meaning, and we can only find that meaning in the context of communities that we believe will live on after we ourselves have passed away. On the smallest end of the scale, we belong to a family; on the largest, a nation, and in a vaguer sense, humanity as a whole. We have a deep need, however, for communities in between these two extremes: intermediate associations that we ourselves choose and that allow us to realize a shared vision of the common good. Examples include churches, sports teams, labor unions, political parties, small businesses, charities, military units, volunteer firefighters, and civic organizations such as Rotary Clubs or the Knights of Columbus.

　　All of these self-selecting societies are necessarily closed. Membership is contingent upon each individual’s commitment to a predetermined purpose: an overarching mission or goal that is not itself up for debate. One might even say that the very phrase “an open society” is a contradiction in terms. Every society has some principle of cohesion that distinguishes it from other societies and that necessarily entails some measure of exclusion. In the case of a nation, this criterion might be citizenship. Or it might be bare geography. Either way, some people are in, and some are out.

　　In the same way that some nations make a concerted effort to secure their border and control immigration, most universities are exceedingly careful about whom they let in and whom they keep out. Faculty and students are not given places simply for the asking but instead are selected through complex processes of hiring and admissions. What is perhaps less obvious, however, is that the same kind of curation can, does, and indeed must extend to speech within these institutions, as well as other forms of expression such as writing and protests. If universities allowed anyone who had any claim to be part of their community to say anything he pleased without consequences up to and including suspension or expulsion, their essential project of teaching and research would rapidly fall apart.

　　For example, people sometimes speak of my home institution, the University of Austin, as a “free speech university.” But this nomenclature is a mistake. The University of Austin is not a “free speech university,” because a “free speech university” is a contradiction in terms. Our Constitution does not include the phrases “free speech” or “freedom of expression,” because these goals are incompatible with the provision of a substantive and coherent education. We are in favor of “pluralism,” but even that pluralism is not without limits.

　　The realization that universities cannot, in fact, accept any and all ideological commitments may come as a shock. Many people in the English-speaking world, especially conservatives, tend to think that the problem on campus is censorship and that the solution is free speech. In England, conservatives rallied to pass the recent Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In America, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been urging universities to commit themselves to the Chicago Principles, which extend a perceived right of “freedom of expression” to both faculty and students.

　　As an institution, in order for your message to be coherent, your society has to be closed. People can only be allowed to participate insofar as they are aligned with the mission.

　　The line of thought arises from some category errors. Most obviously, universities do not have the coercive powers of a nation-state. They are not the Hermit Kingdom; they are not the Eastern Bloc; they cannot trap faculty or students inside themselves, as if behind some sort of Berlin Wall. Belonging to a university is not an involuntary identity but instead a voluntary affiliation that can be severed at will. And replaced. As Shakespeare’s Coriolanus says, “There is a world elsewhere.” No single university is the entirety of the public sphere.

　　In debates about speech on campus, legal scholars such as Keith Whittington, David Rabban, and Greg Lukianoff cite the First Amendment repeatedly, as if it were an appropriate standard. The Bill of Rights prohibits Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” and their assumption seems to be that universities should be understood as analogous to Congress. But they are not; universities are more like “the press.” Institutions of higher education are small-scale associations, not sovereign states.

　　This distinction is important. Paradoxical though it may seem, free speech at the first-order involuntary level of a state requires allowing second-order voluntary associations such as publishers and universities to place limits on the speech of their members. If we want to draw on the First Amendment as a standard, the operative phrase for universities should not be “freedom of speech” but instead “the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” that is, the right of a subset of citizens to come together for a purpose and to ensure amongst themselves that everyone involved is committed to that aim.

　　Universities govern speech internally so that they can ensure that the speech they are producing is in keeping with their mission. And they are right to do so. Universities sometimes like to see themselves as the Second Coming of the Athenian polis. In reality, however, universities are not so much miniature republics as mission-driven media outlets. The correct mental model for how they operate is not the United States Congress but instead a media conglomerate. Some such companies are more partisan than others: The New York Times, for example, is a very different creature from our founding trustee Bari Weiss’s Free Press. No such collective enterprise can endure, however, if it allows its individual members complete freedom of expression. 

　　Universities may include legislative bodies such as Faculty Senates. But that does not mean they are egalitarian republics! On the contrary, universities are inevitably and necessarily hierarchical, given different levels of expertise and authority. Imagine, for instance, that a legal settlement required a movie studio to produce every script that any of its employees wrote. It would go out of business. Likewise, a university that could not regulate the speech of its students or employees, at least to some extent, would degenerate into chaos. Should every paper get an A? Should every article be published? Should every professor be promoted? 

　　To put the problem another way, effective speech requires coordination. The United States is a country of hundreds of millions of people. In order to reach even a significant fraction of that population, an individual has to work together with some sort of team. And that requires rules, including principles of exclusion. Media companies speak horizontally to the population at large. Universities speak vertically, handing down knowledge from one generation to the next. But the problem is the same: as an institution, in order for your message to be coherent, your society has to be closed. People can only be allowed to participate insofar as they are aligned with the mission.

　　With this necessity in mind, the whole question of “freedom of expression” on campus appears in its true light as a non sequitur. States should allow free speech; universities cannot. Advocating for free speech at universities is like insisting that candidates for public office endorse their opponents. Universities are mission-driven closed associations: the regulation of their members’ speech is their raison d’être.

　　Like political parties, publishers, and newsrooms, universities can and should allow some scope for internal debate. Practically speaking, however, they cannot allow anything like a First Amendment right to “freedom of speech.” So, reformers should stop banging their head against this wall. Instead, reformers should be focused like a laser beam on the deeper question of the purpose of higher education. What are universities for? On what grounds is their expense justified? “Decolonization”? “Diversity, equity, and inclusion”? “Social justice”? Or “the fearless pursuit of truth”?