A protest encampment at the University of Chicago’s Main Quadrangle, featuring a sign reading: “As you go to class, remember that there are no universities left in Gaza.” Photo by wabisabi2015/Flickr.

Speechless Ric Esther Bienstock Good Soup Productions, 2026

Good Soup Productions, 2026

I’m invested. I was left speechless. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock’s two-part documentary essay Speechless claims to be concerned with the narrowing of free speech on campuses, particularly in the United States. Bienstock tells us that as her children headed to college, she became alerted to the culture wars raging on campuses and needed to investigate further. She heads directly to Evergreen State, a public liberal arts college in Olympia, Washington, to document young students seeking change. The story of Speechless unfolds from Evergreen with a trajectory that anyone paying attention to the contemporary university would recognize as inevitable.

In 2010, Macleans published an article claiming that many Canadian universities were becoming “too Asian,” casting the increasing number of Asian students as a threat to campus life. The article’s conceit was that this apparent demographic increase was changing the atmosphere at universities. The article was greeted with disgust, rightfully, and its explicit anti-Asian racism challenged, debated, and ultimately proven to be unfounded. Four years later, the Black Lives Matter movement arrived, largely outside universities, but quickly also found a foothold in political organizing among Black students and their allies on campuses. Taking the changed demographic shifts in the classroom and other parts of the university, alongside students’ demands for a more just world (and universities’ implication in helping to uphold an unjust world), debate over the role the contemporary university plays in wider society has been commonplace since at least 2010.

We should have seen it coming. By “we,” I mean those of us who have a critique of the university—who believe it can, if it wanted, be a shining example of what is possible for a just social formation—and those of us who see clearly its inadequacies and its insistence on the status quo. Those of us who want another university now take seriously William Haver’s insistence that the university, as an institution, is founded on inequity and cannot be made equitable. Contestations over how to make the conservative university better, which is all we can really do, are therefore fraught with significant pitfalls. Only another, different university can produce the just context for knowledge production and dissemination that many of us dream of. It is this struggle to produce another university now that Speechless plunges into, with a significant sideways glance at those of us who believe the university can do better than it has so far.

Speechless spans a period from 2017 to 2024 and intersperses that period with history lessons from the 1960s (though I believe the events that came to a head in 2017 were shaped by developments already underway between 2010 and 2016). If the film gets anything right, it is that the meagre gains of the ‘60s have been the object of sustained conservative and right-wing resistance from that time to the present. Bienstock, however, shows little interest in why such forces have mounted that resistance. Instead, she characterizes the ‘60s as the foundational problem to be reckoned with—presenting the decade as an infecting contagion. In her telling, the ‘60s mark the beginning of a left-wing takeover of the university. It is an early signal to any viewer invested in the university as an institution that Bienstock has not spent much time in them if she believes the left runs them.

The ongoing canard that universities have been taken over by the left has been useful to deploy so that the conservative institution of the university can continue, with minimal changes, its ongoing sorting, ranking, and ordering of peoples in service of dominant forces. Bienstock gives viewers a quick graphic crash course of the faulty claim that the arrival of critical theory, critical pedagogy, critical social justice, Black liberation, and, most important, a discourse that centres power—who has it and who does not—did not just change the university but took it over and indoctrinated students. If you are invested in the university, you would have heard this story before and will also know that it overstates the case tremendously. But you must be invested to know that it is a lie that the left runs the university, and that equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI)—commonly referred to as DEI in the US—reigns supreme is an untrue claim. Bienstock sets up the ‘60s as the source of all that went wrong not just in the university, but, by inference, in North American society and beyond. By doing so, Bienstock makes clear where she stands in the debate. It is clearly not on the side of those of us who would desire a world more just than the one we currently have.

Before I say more about Bienstock’s sleight-of-hand documentary essay, I would be remiss not to note that a British-Canadian production that excises Canadian campus free speech and academic freedom debates is one that begins from a place of obfuscation (the film hardly mentions Canada beyond the use of stock footage of pro-Palestine protests and encampments in Montréal). And yet Canada plays a central role in how this latest iteration of campus battles over free speech and academic freedom has unfolded. You cannot honestly account for these conflicts without reckoning with the rise and viral proliferation of Jordan Peterson while he was a professor at the University of Toronto. As early as 2016, Peterson was circulating as a budding guru railing against the so-called left takeover of the university, with his attacks on trans students cloaked in claims about violations of his free........

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