CAN WE RESTORE THE OLD IDEA OF FREE SPEECH FOR A VARIETY OF IDEAS?
By
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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There
was a time, in living memory, when Americans of all points of view
believed in free speech——not only for ideas with which they agreed but
for those with which they disagreed, even strongly, as well.”
When
I was a student at the College of William and Mary, I was a member of
the school’s debate team. We traveled around the country engaging in
debates on a given subject. My memory is failing me when it comes to
the subject college debate teams were debating in my freshman year, but
what I remember very well is that we all had to be prepared to argue
either side of the question. You never knew when a debate began which
side you would be asked to defend.
A
bit later, when I was teaching at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in
Alexandria, Virginia,I served as debate coach. Just as when I was in
college, students had to prepare themselves to debate either side of the
question. You never knew which side you would be asked to defend until
the debate began. This gave students an understanding that many public
issues were complex and the right and wrong answer was not always
clear. Most important questions are usually not so easily resolved.
Later,
when I worked in the U.S.Senate during the Vietnam War, I engaged in
many debates about the war. I was in support of the war and my
opponents were opposed to it. After our debates, we often went out for a
drink and continued the discussion. In retrospect, I think many of the
points my opponents made had a lot of validity. Many important issues
are complicated. There is often a bit of truth on both sides. For a
democracy to thrive, respect for divergent viewpoints is a necessity.
Consider the debates at the Constitutional Convention. If the delegates
did have respect for the men and ideas with which they disagreed and a
willingness to compromise, our country would never have been
established.
At the
present time, sadly, there is growing intolerance of divergent
viewpoints, particularly at some of our institutions of higher
learning. A Princeton University alumni group in favor of free speech
polled current students and found that 76% thought it was acceptable to
shout at a speaker, 16% supported the use of violence to stop a talk by
an unpopular speaker. More than three quarters of the Princeton
students said it was sometimes acceptable to stop a campus speaker by
shouting over them. Some 83%said it was acceptable to block other
students from attending talks they deemed disturbing.
Princetonians
For Free Speech was founded by Princeton alumnus, journalist and lawyer
Stuart Taylor, Jr. in 2020 “with the mission of promoting free speech,
academic freedom and viewpoint diversity.” In the 2022 College Free
Speech Rankings, the Foundation for Individual Rights and _expression_
(FIRE), Princeton was the lowest ranked school in the country.
In
March, Stanford Law School made headlines after students berated Kyle
Duncan,a federal appeals court judge who had come to give a talk.
Tirian Steinbach , the school’s Dean of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity,
intervened, ostensibly to instill calm, before launching into an
impassioned six-minute speech, which she had written down, condemning
the judge’s life work. She was accused of ambushing Judge Duncan and
put on leave.
Stanford
Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a 16-page open letter explaining
why she and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne rose above what many
viewed as the judge’s own reaction, including profanity aimed at
students. The letter went beyond university policy and the First
Amendment to articulate values which underlay them, specifically, the
relationship between reasoned discourse on the one hand and learning,
civility “and the special role of lawyers in our system of Justice” on
the other. She argued that there is no contradiction between free
_expression_ and diversity, equity and inclusion. And she notified
students that the school is planning a mandatory half-day training
session to reinforce these concepts.
Dean
Martinez wrote: “There is a temptation in a system, in which people
holding views perceived by some as harmful or offensive are not allowed
to speak, but history teaches us that this is a temptation to be
avoided.”
Throughout the
country, we see efforts to stifle speech with which some disagree.
After the campus newspaper at Wesleyan University published an article
critical of Black Lives Matter, students tried to defund the newspaper
for failing to create “safe places.” At Yale, 42% of students and 71%
of conservatives say they feel uncomfortable giving their opinions on
politics, race, religion and gender. Self-censorship becomes more
common as students progress through the university: 61% of freshmen
feel comfortable speaking about their views, but the same is true of
just 56% of sophomores, 49% of juniors and 30% of seniors.
According
to The Economist, “University administrators, whose job it is to
promote harmony and diversity on campus, often find the easiest way to
do so is to placate the intolerant….The two groups form an odd
alliance. Contentious campus politics have been a constant feature in
American life for more than fifty years. But during the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, students at Berkeley demonstrated to
win the right to determine who could say what from administrators. Now
the opposite is true. Student activists are demanding that
administrators interfere with teaching, asking for mandatory
ethnic-studies classes, the hiring on non-white or gay faculty and the
ability to lodge complaints against professors for biased conduct in the
classroom. This hands more power to.”
At
different times in our history different groups have done their best to
stifle free speech. When I was a college student, I was an officer in a
campus group, the Political Science Club. In the years of segregation
in the South, this was 1958, we decided to invite the first black
speaker to the College of William and Mary. The president of the
College called me into his office. At that time, I wrote a column in
the campus newspaper, which took a generally conservative position. The
president asked me, “You are a conservative, why are you doing this?”
I responded that, “Racism is not one of the things I want to conserve.”
The
speaker we invited was Alonzo Moron, the president of the Hampton
Institute (now Hampton University), later to become president of the
American Red Cross and Governor of the Virgin Islands. His talk
proceeded with no difficulty——but our group was then thrown off campus.
I asked the ministers of the various churches in Williamsburg if we
could meet in their facilities. All expressed support for what we had
done, but said their congregations would oppose such a move. Only one
minister opened his doors to us. He was the minister of the United
Methodist Church, a recent refugee from the Hungarian Revolution. I had
promised the president of the College that our next speaker would
be an advocate of segregation. He was James J. kilpatrick, then editor
of the Richmond News Leader. Even he later turned against
segregation.
Given my own
experience with free speech, it is sad to see its serious decline at
the present time. Liberals and conservatives should join together to
make sure that we continue to have a free marketplace of ideas,
something which seems to be diminishing. And the political life I
remember working in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was one
in which Republicans and Democrats did not view one another as
“enemies” but as fellow Americans engaged in the common enterprise of
government. Our free society cannot endure without it.
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