Free speech on campus

I applaud the Herald for printing the exceptional op-ed by Nicole Neily, which highlighted the unsettling activism, cancel culture and “wokeness” that is suppressing or silencing the voices and viewpoints of any university or college student or employee who dares challenge the preferred campus orthodoxies (“Activism faces off against academia at Smith College,” March 8).

Roughly six years ago, acclaimed author Salman Rushdie said: “The university is the place where young people should be challenged every day, where everything they know should be put into question, so that they can think and learn and grow up. And the idea that they should be protected from ideas that they might not like is the opposite of what a university should be.”

Rushdie delivered these remarks in 2015, when he received the Chicago Tribune’s Literary Award. During his acceptance speech, he eloquently spoke against the trend on college campuses to censor or silence disagreeable speakers and viewpoints, a trend that has only intensified in recent months. It was an impassioned rebuke of anyone who would dare attempt to limit the free speech of others.

A university is a place where minds should be opened, not closed; where new and contrary ideas should be embraced, not debased; where perspectives should be broadened, not narrowed; where biases should be challenged, not confirmed. It would appear that many of our universities are failing at this critically important role.

Without freedom of expression, all other freedoms fail. We are right to denounce the recent incidents at Smith College and the University of Central Florida. Such behavior is a dangerous assault on one of the very cornerstones of our democracy.

— Michael J. DiStefano, Jamestown,

R.I.