Canadian director Ric Esther Bienstock said Speechless, the new documentary about campus speech controversies, 'might be the most dangerous film' of her prolific career.Elad Winker/Supplied
Speechless, a new British-Canadian documentary about free-speech flashpoints on American college campuses, is receiving the Very Important treatment from the CBC this week.
The national public broadcaster presented the “decade-long investigation into the state of free speech” as a two-day, commercial-free, prime-time event, complete with serious post-show discussions moderated by Piya Chattopadhyay.
There’s an online engagement element too, where Canadians are prompted: “Is free speech a thing of the past?”
CBC’s promotion of Speechless has emphasized the claim by its Canadian director, Ric Esther Bienstock – whose past films tackled the trafficking of women and the organ trade – that it “might be the most dangerous film” of her career.
But that framing is perplexing once you watch the utterly anodyne film.
Speechless is a walk down memory lane of familiar U.S.-based free-speech foofaraws that entertained and distracted us on social media for years as that country slowly slid down an authoritarian slope. (It doesn’t include a single example from a Canadian campus.)
It is a doc that essentially restates the concerns of the Harper’s letter of 2020 (signed by, among others, Canadians Margaret Atwood, Michael Ignatieff and Jeet Heer), which argued that illiberal elements of the left were aiding in the rise of the anti-democratic far right.
That’s a pretty moot point now in the middle of Donald “a whole civilization will die tonight” Trump’s second term.
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Speechless does not feel urgent, but instead like cozying up on the couch with a ragged, much thumbed back issue of The Atlantic. Indeed, Bienstock was inspired to make her doc by The Coddling of the American Mind, an influential 2015 essay in that magazine that argued against trigger warnings, call-out culture and safe spaces.
Back in Bienstock’s day – she’s a young boomer – everyone argued civilly about sex, politics and war on campus, she says at the start of Speechless. But the climate had changed by the time her children were college age.
“Students didn’t just disagree with ideas, they felt harmed by them,” she says, as the doc shows her, tellingly, scrolling through context-free video clips of racialized young people yelling.
“And the only way to feel safe was to silence the people expressing them all in the name of social justice.”
Bienstock’s first and most compelling example of this is the 2017 student takeover of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.
The incident in question – also a central event in the book version of The Coddling of the American Mind – relates to a long-running annual “day of absence” in which minority students and professors stayed away from Evergreen to raise awareness of their contributions.
Speechless focuses its lens on the 2017 'day of absence' at Washington's Evergreen State College.Billie Mintz/Supplied
In 2017, some anti-racist activists thought it would be better to instead invite white students, staff and faculty to leave the campus for the day. (Bienstock omits their stated reason behind the shift: the first race-baiting rise to the presidency by Trump.) A biology professor named Bret Weinstein objected to this idea in a letter, calling it “an act of oppression in and of itself.”
Civil debate did not ensue. The camera-phone footage of the chaos and criticism circles that followed are as perversely captivating now as they were back then.
What would be interesting, in 2026, would be to catch up with former Evergreen students entering their 30s and, probably, the difficult housing market. Did they become more radical about critical race theory or soften their views?
We know what happened to Weinstein – though Speechless, again, doesn’t mention it. The podcast host has become – this is the McGill University Office for Science and Society’s description – “an ivermectin-pushing science contrarian and conspiracy theorist.”
Rather than exploring the full fallout of any free-speech flashpoint in the context of wider algorithm-fuelled polarization, Bienstock’s film mimics a social-media feed itself by superficially surfing from one campus conflict to the next.
Some of what she pauses to look at is marginal, such as a white writing professor who was offended by a DEI training module and unsuccessfully sued his university. Other examples seem worthy of their own in-depth doc, such as the evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and the philosopher at University of Essex (the film’s sole British example) whose traditional views about biological sex led to their academic ostracization.
At a certain point, Bienstock switches tack and starts following Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2023 overhaul of the New College of Florida, which saw the entire gender studies program abolished and all DEI programs dumped.
“This was where my film was supposed to end, with a warning: The campus culture war had come full circle and opened the door to a hostile takeover,” the filmmaker says.
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But Bienstock does not end there. The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, on southern Israel led her to continue her project. She forgets about delivering a warning in the lead-up to the 2024 election, and starts following pro-Palestinian protesters.
This is the most muddled, insufficient section of Speechless – though it was also when I realized the film is less about the ideological capture of colleges than the addiction of Bienstock’s generation to watching drama unfold.
In her interview with Chattopadhyay, Bienstock sounds completely disconnected from what’s actually going on off-screen, at least here in Canada. Asked who she thinks is truly silenced today, she responds: “The centre just doesn’t have a voice.”
I watched this the day after the ultracentrist Mark Carney’s Liberals secured a majority government through defections from Conservative and NDP MPs and winning a by-election in a Bloc Québécois riding.
In that same interview, Bienstock insists that Speechless, though it never mentions Canada, is equally about it – and that the campuses here are riddled with speech problems and self-censorship, same as the United States.
In an op-ed this week, she offered two examples: a free yoga class cancelled at the University of Ottawa in 2015 over “cultural sensitivity issues,” and an apology by the University of Guelph’s student union for including Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on a playlist in 2017.
If you’re still worked up about an exercise class cancelled more than a decade ago while the world is burning, it’s time to break from your phone and return to reality.