Self-censorship has become the safest form of expression

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Ric Esther Bienstock is a Canadian documentary filmmaker and the director of Speechless, which premieres on CBC and BBC this week.

A few years ago, I was in New York with my 21-year-old daughter. We visited museums, ate at great restaurants, did some shopping. During our trip, she found a pair of sandals made of embroidered Chinese fabric and fell in love with them.

But that summer, I noticed she never wore them. When I asked why, she said: “I just feel like there’s a chance I’ll offend someone.”

And in that moment, I understood that my daughter was coming of age in a world radically different from the one I grew up in. A world where even a pair of shoes could feel politically charged. Where self-censorship has become the safest form of self-expression.

That worry is what sent me back to school to produce a documentary. Both of my kids were soon heading to university, and I wanted to understand the world they were stepping into. So, when footage of protests at Evergreen State College, a progressive college in Olympia, Wash., started circulating on social media in 2017, I hopped on a plane.

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I’ve spent my career making films about difficult subjects: Ebola outbreaks, human trafficking, the black market in human organs. None of it prepared me for a university campus.

Within a day of arriving at Evergreen, a student informed me – not in anger, almost as a friendly heads-up – that I was a white supremacist. I am a Jewish woman whose mother survived Auschwitz, so “white supremacist” is not generally how I think about myself. They explained, patiently, that it wasn’t about intent. It was about the system I benefited from by virtue of being white. My intentions were irrelevant. My identity was everything.

That was the start of a nearly 10-year journey. What I witnessed, on campuses across North America and Britain, was a gradual shift. The pursuit of social justice hadn’t replaced the pursuit of truth exactly. But it had taken the front seat and, in some cases, hardened into ideology. And a generation was being taught, in ways large and small, that disagreement is harm.

Universities were once defined by their commitment to exactly the opposite principle. The University of Chicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression states their “commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some … to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.” What I found was that ideal was quietly under siege.

This isn’t only an American story. Canadian campuses are navigating the same tensions. At the University of Ottawa, a yoga class was cancelled because the instructor was white and that was seen as cultural appropriation. At the University of Guelph, a student union apologized for including Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side on a playlist because it was deemed transphobic. More quietly, students and professors told me they had abandoned certain lines of inquiry altogether, fearing professional or social consequences.

Words I thought I understood had been quietly redefined. White supremacy no longer referred to neo-Nazis. It referred to things like being on time, setting agendas, and believing in objectivity. Safe space no longer meant protection from physical harm. It meant protection from ideas that challenged your worldview. A documentary organization I was involved with arranged an anti-oppression training session. We were shown a pyramid that started with non-inclusive language and microaggressions (eg., asking someone “Where are you from?”) at the base and ended with genocide at the top.

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The language of campus identity politics had also found its way into Canadian film funding applications. One asked whether I was pansexual, asexual or questioning. No box to check for “married for 30 years so it’s not quite what it used to be!”

I know that identity matters, but I don’t need anyone to “do the work” to understand me – a term I heard constantly as I navigated through the world of academia. I don’t want to inhibit anyone from saying what they believe, from making a clumsy joke, from asking me questions even if they’re a little awkward. Because if every conversation is a minefield, and the slightest misstep results in banishment, it isn’t a conversation. And when honest questions get reframed as instruments of oppression, something essential is lost: the ability to disagree.

The people who pay the real price are educators and the students who deserve better.

Carole Hooven, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, stated on television that biological sex is binary – a position within her scientific expertise. She also made clear that gender is on a spectrum and that she was talking about biology, not identity. Within hours, her department’s diversity committee accused her of transphobia. Graduate students refused to work with her so she couldn’t teach her course. She eventually negotiated a retirement and later told me she thought about suicide.

Erec Smith is a Black professor of rhetoric who disagreed, in writing, with a colleague’s argument that teaching standard English to students of colour was an act of white supremacy. He was called a white supremacist by white colleagues. He described what followed as a degradation ceremony, public humiliation designed to silence him and warn others.

These are not right-wing provocateurs. They are educators who asked questions outside an increasingly narrow consensus and paid for it with their careers, their reputations and – in some cases – their mental health.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives were founded with genuinely good intentions: to open doors that had long been closed to women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups. That work mattered and still does. But in some institutions, DEI evolved from a support structure into an enforcement mechanism, less concerned with expanding opportunity than with policing thought. When the goal shifts from inclusion to ideological conformity, the institution loses something essential, including the ability to serve the very people it claims to protect.

What’s alarming is not that some students shouted down speakers. Students have always been passionate. What is alarming is what the institutions did next: capitulating, apologizing and sometimes building bureaucracies that enforced one set of beliefs as the precondition for employment. The professors who stay silent don’t make the news. They just quietly change what they teach, what they research, what they say in meetings.

My daughter and her sandals. Multiplied across a generation, a profession and an institution.

The campus culture I documented, with its excesses and its readiness to punish dissent, created a vacuum. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, identified it as political ammunition. He rebranded diversity initiatives as Critical Race Theory, took it to Fox News and then to U.S. President Donald Trump, and turned an academic debate into an executive order. Mr. Rufo told me on camera: this is the blueprint.

Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has led to funding freezes. Visa revocations. Deportations of student activists. The tools of suppression do not stay in the hands of the people who build them. That is the lesson campuses failed to learn.

Universities exist to teach people how to think, not what to think. When we tell a generation that disagreement is violence, that discomfort is harm, that the correct response to an idea you find threatening is to make sure nobody else hears it, we don’t protect them. We weaken them.

I think about my daughter and her sandals often. She’s not alone. There is a generation learning, quietly, to hold back – to say less, risk less, reveal less, for fear of getting it wrong. And fear is no foundation for a democracy.

Because once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us.