“They’re writing for the academic audience, but what about us high school students?” asked Suvanni Oates, a high schooler from Bronxdale High School who is an intern for the project. “What about us students who can’t receive that message that they’re trying to send in that way?” 

From June 14 through 16, Fordham welcomed 12 scholar-authors from multiple universities alongside local New York City high school students and Fordham undergraduates for a writing workshop where they could all learn from each other. 

Creating New Articles—and TikTok Videos

“High school students were introduced to undergraduates [and they are]working with linguistic anthropologists, our authors. We prepared student teams to each read one author’s paper and give feedback on what they understood, what they didn’t understand, what spoke to them,” said Ayala Fader, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Fordham and founding director of both the Demystifying Language Project and Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology, which is launching next year. 

During the workshop, held at the Lincoln Center campus, teams of undergrads and high school students worked with their author to “transpose” previously published articles into two-page digital pieces in language teens can understand. Students even spent a day making TikToks that conveyed the main messages of the articles.

“To hear [the authors’]perspective and actually work with them in person, that was the cool part,” said one of the Bronxdale high schoolers, Athalia McCormack.

The resulting 12 papers will be published as a multimedia open educational resource on the website for Fordham’s New York Center for Public Anthropology.

“Our long-term goals include housing these 12 digital pieces on an interactive website that will be free to use,” said Fader. “We hope that this is going to be a resource for high school teachers to use in existing curricula and also for high school students to experiment with social science, especially linguistic anthropology, which is not part of most curricula in NYC public schools.” 

Fordham Students See the Impact

Sitara Vaidy, who graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in May with a psychology and sociology major, was one of the Fordham students working on the project. She said the workshop “allowed the high school students to better understand the significance of fields such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, etc., and the interesting and important work that they produce.”

Theater and anthropology major Ashira Fischer-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, who also worked with the teams, said she appreciated the justice aspect of the work.

“I am very grateful for the opportunity to have met so many fascinating, driven people working for social justice,” she said. 

Expanding into Communities

The DLP is also planning to use the short articles in a summer institute for high school students, where they will study language and power in their own communities. The following summer they plan to host a teacher-training institute. 

“By demystifying students’ own experiences with language, the DLP strives to create a grounded, hands-on, potentially life-changing set of social justice tools for high school students and teachers and the faculty and undergraduates who collaborate with them,” Fader said.  

The DLP has been externally supported by a Spencer Conference Grant and a Wenner-Gren Workshop Grant. Internal support comes from an Arts and Sciences Dean’s Challenge Grant and Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, who hosted the pilot project in 2019, and will be collaborating on future programs. Fordham members of the organizing committee include Johanna Quinn, Ph.D. (sociology); Britta Ingebretson, Ph.D. (MLL); and Crystal Colombini, Ph.D. (the Writing Center), who were joined by Mike Mena, Ph.D. (Brooklyn College); Justin Coles, Ph.D. (UMass); Lynnette Arnold, Ph.D. (UMass); Bambi Schieffelin, Ph.D. (NYU), and high school teacher Scott Storm (Harvest Collegiate). 

In the keynote address for the conference “Hate Speech, Free Speech, A Workshop on the Politics of Language on College Campuses,” David Cole, National Legal Director of the ACLU, laid out three rationales for banning offensive speech, and then presented three reasons why the idea is counterproductive and dangerous.

College campuses are particularly important places to address the subject, he said, because a 2015 Pew Charitable Trust poll found that 40 percent of millennials support government suppression of speech.

“Those who care about maintaining a robust principle of freedom of expression on college campuses need to address our arguments principally to progressives, because I think that’s where the challenge to free speech on college campuses, at this particular moment, is coming from,” Cole said.

Arguments For and Against

His arguments against restricting speech on campus were that free speech is critical to the college experience because it promotes critical inquiry, and since students will be leaders of tomorrow, they will determine what free speech looks like in the future. Further, restricting speech is counterproductive, he said, because it elevates the same speech it seeks to suppress.

On the other hand, Cole said a case can be made for restricting speech, because some forms of speech undermine equality and enable speakers to intimidate others into silence. Some speech is also just inflammatory and not well thought out, and thus contributes nothing of value to society.

Of the first argument against restricting it, Cole said that universities have in recent years taken on a greater role as dialogue centers, because outside of campus, Americans are retreating to “safe spaces” organized by class, race, and ideology, and rarely encounter those they disagree with.

“The whole notion of diversity is we are stronger as an educational institution if we can bring different voices together and have them confront each other and learn from those different experiences. Because colleges are selective, they can actually do that,” he said.

Unintended Consequences

Stifling free expression has also long had unintended consequences, he said. In the 1990s, for instance, Cole defended the Old Glory condom company when it was denied a trademark for its prophylactics with American flags on them because the trademark office considered it offensive. As long as the company was losing its free-speech battle in court, it earned tremendous free publicity. But when it finally won, the attention evaporated and the company folded.

“Suppressing is frequently counterproductive. Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter know this, and they want to be suppressed,” he said. “They want to have the authorities or the students stop them from speaking, because that gives them a platform that they otherwise would not have.”

Cole was sympathetic to the notion that by protecting offensive speech, the First Amendment inadvertently promotes inequality, but he said that misses the point that other sections of the Bill of the Rights do the same. The right to private property, for example, allows those who can afford it to profit from it mightily, while the right to choose where you educate children means the rich can support private schools and advocate policies that deprive public ones.

The cost of sacrificing free expression is much higher though, and one only need look back to times when the U.S. did regulate speech from the 1920s through the 1970s. At the time, the governments’ rationale for suppressing speech that advocated violence or criminal conduct was that people could be harmed. It was a reasonable assumption, Cole said, but one that the government routinely took too far and abused.

“Who was targeted when the government had the power to target speech that advocated criminal conduct or violence? It was anarchists, communists, and civil rights activists—those who were challenging the majority,” he said.

When Censorship Makes Sense

Banning speech simply because it’s inflammatory and offensive actually makes the most sense in an academic setting, Cole said, where respectful dialogue is key. He made a distinction between a speaker who espouses ideas that could be offensive but does so in a respectful manner—Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial The Bell Curve (Free Press, 1994), for example—and one who’s nothing more than a provocateur, he said, like Yiannopoulos.

He said this sort of censorship should not be applied outside of the campus, however, nor should it be applied to student-organized events.

“Free speech is critical to the maintenance of democracy. What the First Amendment protects is civil society, which is an absolutely essential ingredient in a liberal democracy,” he said.

“It’s why when authoritarian figures take power, they target [the press]for suppression.”

Workshop sessions at the conference included “Keywords” and “Situations on the Ground.” Lane Green, language columnist for The Economist, delivered an afternoon keynote address. The event was sponsored in part by Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Fordham Dean’s Fund.

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.