Brown is talking about Ray Kelly again, but let’s be honest. The conversation isn’t about Kelly. It’s about Brown and academic freedom. Those last two words refer to many things, but at Brown, they include the right of any group, faculty or student, to invite a speaker of its choice to campus.
That right was trampled on last year, when former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was shouted down by a small but determined group of students and community members. Unfortunately, some saw Kelly’s silencing as a victory. One of those was Jenny Li ’14, who proudly said the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions “didn’t respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so today we canceled it for them.” In statements after the disruption, Li and her friends informed the University community that they would now determine who would and would not be allowed to speak at Brown, frivolous notions of academic freedom notwithstanding.
But Li’s elation at running Kelly off campus was not shared by others. One of them captured the dismay, I would suggest, of the vast majority of students when he told a reporter, “Personally, I applied to Brown thinking it was a forum for good discussion where everyone’s voices would be heard and where there wouldn’t be any silencing. But what I saw today is that a lot of people silenced Ray Kelly before he could even speak.”
Exactly right. President Christina Paxson declared it “a sad day for the Brown community,” and so it was. Protest, she noted, “has a long and proud history at Brown.” But this wasn’t protest. This was mob action designed to shut Kelly up and was a direct violation of Brown’s Code of Conduct, which states that “Halting a lecture, a debate or any public forum is an unacceptable form of protest.” Brown’s student body agreed. A poll published a week after the incident in The Herald showed that students disapproved of the actions of those who shut down the lecture by a margin of more than five to one.
Last week, Paxson responded to the reports of a committee charged to look into the Kelly affair. In a letter to the University community, Paxson offered a ringing endorsement of academic freedom and of the need for a campus open to even the most challenging and painful points of view. She cited the words of former President Ruth Simmons, who once took actions to ensure that Brown “permit a speaker whose every assertion was dangerous and deeply offensive to me (Simmons) on a personal level.” Why would Simmons have wanted Brown to provide a forum even for someone who “maintained that blacks were better off having been enslaved”? Because, as she so eloquently explained, to have canceled that lecture “would have been to choose personal comfort over a freedom whose value is so great to my own freedoms that hearing his unwelcome message could hardly be assessed as too great a cost.” Right again. One hearty cheer for Simmons’ and Paxson’s defense of academic freedom!
Next, Paxson rejected the committee’s suggestion that Brown needs a mechanism to inject opposing points of view when a speaker is regarded as controversial. She did not echo the committee’s inflammatory wording that “we” must “challenge expression with which we profoundly disagree and which may be harmful to members of our community.” Rather, she wrote, “The best response to controversial speech is more, and better, speech.” Bravo again! The committee’s insidious notion that speech can be equated with “harm” and therefore must be regulated was perhaps the most dangerous aspect of its report, and it was gratifying to see that Paxson did not accept it. One more hearty cheer for Brown’s president.
Why not three cheers? Because I worry about next time. The day after Kelly was shouted down, Margaret Klawunn, vice president for campus life and student services, told a Herald reporter that “the University does not plan to pursue disciplinary action against the students who disrupted the lecture,” despite the fact that their actions were a clear violation of University rules. Fine words in defense of academic freedom mean little if the University is not willing to back them up, and Klawunn made it clear there would be no consequences for those who “canceled” an invited lecture.
In apparent contradiction to Klawunn’s hapless response last year, Paxson’s most recent letter said the University will “sanction students found responsible for violations,” and that Brown “followed this process after the Kelly incident.” Really? If that is true, then what was the process, and why is it being hidden from the University community?
This was a public event, and those who appointed themselves as censors to shut down the lecture acted publicly beforehand and afterwards. Why, then, should the “sanctioning” of any students be carried out in secret? In one of Brown’s most famous protests, 13 students briefly interrupted a 1981 lecture by the then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency by standing to recite Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.” Brown then publicly found all 13 “guilty of infringement on the rights of others to participate in a University function.” That finding came exactly 22 days after the incident, making it clear that Brown would support free and open discourse on campus, and that disciplinary proceedings would swiftly follow any attempt to stifle or silence free speech.
Not so with the Kelly incident. Instead of a swift affirmation of academic freedom, we had the appointment of a committee, a full year of delay and now the announcement that an unspecified process took place behind closed doors. Will that serve to deter future disruptions when a determined group decides to “cancel” another lecture? I wonder.
The real issue is determining what kind of university we want. Those who silenced Kelly say they did so for the best of reasons — to ensure that voices of the oppressed and disadvantaged would be heard loud and clear against the tyranny of authority that Kelly represented. But the reality, as Simmons pointed out, is that their own freedom to bring those voices to the University is inextricably bound to the freedom of everyone else to do likewise. Once they have asserted a right to “cancel” the Taubman Center’s lecture, others may then assert a right to cancel the very voices they support so fervently. A truly open campus can exist only when we do not suppress the voices with which we disagree, however painful or disturbing we may find their messages.
Sadly, this is a lesson that has clearly been lost on those who silenced Kelly. But I hope that it has not been lost on the Brown community as a whole. In the years ahead, we’ll see.
Ken Miller ’70 P’02 is a professor of biology.
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