The New York Times has published an important piece on free speech on American University campuses. I'd like to share some thoughts from the perspective of urban economics.
Back in 1986, I was living in London because I was a Visiting Student at the London School of Economics. On some weekends, I would go to Hyde Park or Regents Park and there would be a small crowd listening to a charismatic speaker standing on a box and he would be talking about Karl Marx or Ms. Thatcher.
Standing on his "soap box", the park solved a co-ordination issue. Some people showed up to hear him speak because they thought it would be interesting. He showed up to speak because he anticipated that there would be a crowd. His platform was local and fleeting (in the space and time dimension). Nobody recorded the event and nobody who wasn't standing there heard it. Think of the Beatles Song Eleanor Rigby!
By giving his talk in a big city (i.e London), this created an incentive for the speaker to prepare his remarks and invest some time to give a good talk. Similar to a restaurant competing for business, this public speaker was competing for attention. This was a local market because people from Scotland or France were not going to travel to London to compete with him.
Flashforward to 2021 and the Economics of Superstars now plays out. In an era with Zoom, YouTube, blogs and Twitter, this public speaker from 1987 would now face much more competition for attention but there are billions of people who might use Google to "find him".
Note that Google directs traffic to his platform if their algorithm identifies him to be a star.
This introduction is relevant for the New York Times piece. University students at Columbia and NYU are concerned that their famous universities are offering a platform to speakers who they disagree with. If these students knew that nobody would listen to a speech, then I doubt that they would bother devoting effort to expressing their concerns.
When a famous University allows its "platform" to be used to host a zoom talk, then this has several effects. Moderates who do not have a prior opinion on an issue are more willing to take the content at face value because the famous University has implicitly endorsed it. So, my claim is that the same message has a larger treatment effect on a person's worldview when a "Harvard" is the host for the same talk. Has this been tested using a statistical research design?
With a Zoom talk, it is recorded for posterity and can be played over and over again and can take on a life of its own. Given that social scientists have not made much progress in understanding "social interactions" , would we have a more stable society if there are no permanent recordings of charismatic speakers? Do we want less persistent shocks to occur to our society?
If Sarah gives a speech in Hyde Park London in 1987 that is not recorded, this is a less persistent shock then the same talk at LSE in 2021 on Zoom.
Returning to the University Zoom meetings, what is the University trying to maximize here? Dialogue? Mutual respect and understanding? Debate? Donations to the school?
Each university has a reputation and a platform. While a cure for cancer is not controversial (except perhaps the ethics of who are the guinea pigs for being the first to take the experimental drugs), how does a university use its platform for controversial topics? Would there be a greater willingness to explore free speech if the records created at the event were not permanent and at zero cost able to be shipped by email anywhere in the world?
Returning to urban economics, has the reduction in the marginal cost of shipping ideas to zero actually diminished free debate as people fear showing their true line of thinking?
Did the high cost of "shipping ideas'" reduce political correctness back in the 1980s?
Or is this logic backwards? Since idea "shipping costs" are now zero, there are new entrants who want to give extreme Zoom talks in order to be a partisan superstar? Could both stories be right as some people "exit" the platform domain and others will "enter" because of the permanence and low cost of distributing zoom content?