Americans must never forget why free speech matters
Clark Kerr, who was fired as president of the University of California in 1967 for defending free speech on campus, had a good answer for his critics. “The university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students,” he liked to say. “It is engaged in making students safe for ideas.”
Kerr’s famous quote came to mind as three university presidents — from Harvard, MIT and Penn — immolated themselves before a congressional committee by declining to denounce antisemitism and calls for the destruction of Israel. In widely derided comments — Penn’s Liz Magill lost her job — they said hate speech can be censored only “when it crosses into conduct.”
From a limited legal perspective, they were correct. Our Constitution
fiercely protects even odious and offensive speech, unless those words directly threaten the rights and well-being of others. In a sense, the three presidents were agreeing with Kerr. Students should not be kept “safe” from challenging ideas, they should be taught and empowered to deal with them. That’s the whole point of education.
But the presidents made major mistakes. The first was to focus on the legality of the situation, not the morality. Students have every right to criticize Israel and support the Palestinian cause. University leaders have a right — even an obligation — to criticize and condemn statements that veer into antisemitism and advocate genocide.
Danielle Allen, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote in The Washington Post: “In the classroom and out, it is perfectly within our rights to tell people (kindly) that their arguments are bad or their views weak or erroneous and then to work with them to correct them.”
The presidents’’ other error had to do with hypocrisy. They have been part of a long campaign to restrict speech under a suffocating blanket of political correctness and liberal orthodoxy. Progressive ideas are welcome, more conservative ones are not.
“For decades now,” writes libertarian columnist David French in The New York Times, “we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive. … The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. … It’s more than fair to ask: Where was this commitment to free expression in the past?”
The Times noted, “All three institutions have … punished or censored speech or conduct that drew anger from the left.”
Harvard revoked a deanship held by a Black law professor after he defended former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. MIT canceled a planned scientific lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot, pointing to his criticism of affirmative action. The Penn law school is seeking to impose sanctions on a tenured professor, Amy Wax, for deriding the academic performance of students of color.
Professor Danielle Allen, who is Black, helped formulate Harvard’s policy on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). She admits that many colleges “have lost our way in pursuing” those policies. “Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense,” she writes. They create “a shaming culture” that fosters “accusation” not acceptance, tantrums not tolerance -- the exact opposite of what Kerr counseled.
“Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship,” writes French. But they have to mean it, and not make inclusion and equity an excuse for exclusion.