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The era of the big tent is coming to an end. As someone who spent 15 years fighting for free expression and press freedom as the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, this realization is hard to accept. But given the current struggles facing organizations committed to fostering debate and dialogue across the ideological divide — universities, media, and civic and cultural institutions — the conclusion is inescapable.
This shift will have broad implications for foundations and donors who support free expression and see it as a bulwark of democracy.
The crisis at PEN America is the most striking example to date of the challenges confronting big tent organizations and the realities of operating in this evolving environment. During the years that I led the Committee to Protect Journalists, PEN America was a key partner. As an organization of writers, PEN America leaned in to its free speech bona fides to weather intense controversies, including its 2015 decision to honor Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine that published cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. In January of that year, two Al Qaeda-inspired gunmen forced their way into the newsroom and murdered 12 people.
But the crisis in Gaza has blown up the appeal of the big tent. A group of writers and PEN America members, with support from a portion of the staff, has denounced PEN America for its failure to label Israel’s military invasion of Gaza a genocide. Some have called on PEN America’s leadership to resign.
PEN America did manage to hold its annual gala in New York last Thursday, even as a small group of protesters from a coalition called Writers Against the War on Gaza greeted guests with fake programs claiming “our efforts to silence dissent and normalize genocide would not be possible without your steadfast support, engagement and, most importantly, your dollars.”
The struggles facing the organizations have most recently focused on a small group of young writers who in a scorching open letter published on April 17 proclaimed they wanted nothing to do with PEN America, which was considering them for various awards. “We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American imperialism,” the letter declared. “We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars.”
Another letter, originally sent in February and with 1,300 signatories as of mid-March, focuses on the failure to defend the rights of Palestinian writers. “Whose freedom does PEN [America} protect if outside of press releases buried on its website, PEN [America] has remained silent about Palestinian journalists, writers, and poets murdered by Israel?” the letter asks.
A Betrayal?
Such literary luminaries as Michelle Alexander, Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, and Hisham Matar then weighed in in a third open letter declaring, “In the context of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, we believe that PEN America has betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all, and to freedom and security for writers everywhere.”
In a series of letters and public statements PEN America’s CEO Suzanne Nossel has made the case that PEN America must accommodate all views. “PEN America exists to unite writers in defense of free expression,” Nossel declared in a recent edition of the organization’s newsletter, The Insider. But she also acknowledged the challenges, saying: “If PEN America had not existed for over 100 years, you could never start it today because the writers and supporters in our constituency would not be able to agree on much of anything.”
When I ran the Committee to Protect Journalists, the big tent was the rhetorical refuge where we sought shelter when facing criticism about defending journalists who were spouting state propaganda, banging the drums of war, or flacking for revolutionary causes. We argued that by defending the fundamental rights of journalists regardless of their ideology, we were creating space for public discourse and democratic debate. We believed we were empowering citizens around the world to make informed decisions.

But after I left the organization, I began to ask myself if that was actually true. Authoritarian governments, populist leaders, militant groups, and even criminal organizations were all using access to new technologies and weaponizing free speech to advance narratives antithetical to democratic discourse and accountability. If we applied our mandate consistently, we would be trapped in the paradox of defending speech that threatened the very outcomes we hoped to achieve.
Hard Questions
In an essay published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism last year, I argued that those involved in the defense of free expression needed to combine a rights-based approach with the articulation of the values that they represent. I believe the same principle should apply to the philanthropic organizations that support this work.
Free speech? Of course, but in the service of what goal? In practice, this means staying true to essential principles but imposing a hierarchy of action. What speech do we defend? What speech do we listen to and engage with? And what speech do we honor? Drawing the lines is a matter of judgment and discretion and a reflection of the community that the organization serves.
In 2023, the writer Masha Gessen resigned from the board of PEN America after a dispute over a panel at the World Voices Festival. Ukrainian writers had blocked the participation of Russian writers — even though they were anti-Putin and opposed the war. In light of this experience, I wanted to know what Gessen, who is my colleague at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, thought of the big tent argument.
“There’s no such thing as an infinite tent,” Gessen pointed out. “Every tent has its boundaries.” While writers obviously have the right to express support for Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom Gessen believes are authoritarian leaders waging genocidal wars, it would betray PEN America’s values to provide such writers any platform or amplification. From that perspective, they are outside the tent.
The question gripping PEN America and so many organizations devoted to the free expression banner is how much the tent must shrink. But shrink it must because the implicit bargain of the liberal order has less value. Access to social media means activists and advocates no longer need institutional cover to be heard.
Recent actions by college presidents who called in the police to uproot pro-Gaza encampments has also undermined the case for speech rights. Colleges and universities offered a variety of justifications for inviting police on campus, but invariably one was a defense of free speech itself. The encampments needed to be dismantled and suppressed, we were told, because by monopolizing the public space they were preventing others from speaking. Such logic is redolent of the Vietnam-era dictum reportedly uttered by a U.S. major following the Battle of Bến Tre about having to destroy the village in order to save it.
The novelist Dinaw Mengestu, who is a vice president of the PEN America board, believes PEN America can get past the current crisis if it’s willing to change. “I think it can survive, certainly. It can just look like something else,” Mengestu told me.
What will it look like? It’s hard to say. But one thing is certain. If the big tent was the symbol of the old liberal order, the rows of smaller tents lining college campuses have become the symbol of the new order taking shape. In this emerging world, those inside each tent are more closely aligned, ideologically and in terms of values. Public debate will more often take place between organizations rather than within them.
The sorting and shifting of the free expression landscape means that foundations that fund this work will also have to ask themselves some difficult questions. This is because free expression as a value divorced from a broader social and ideological purpose is losing its appeal.
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