Forgive me if, like Professor of Biology Ken Miller ’70 P’02, who recently reopened the attack on the members of the Brown student body who prevented Ray Kelly from speaking here, I have not yet put this issue to bed. But in his Oct. 1 Herald guest column, in which he defended what he called “academic freedom,” I think some considerations were left out.
The issue isn’t that offering less than carte blanche to those who would invite controversial speakers fails to affect our overall level of academic freedom, as it clearly does. It’s that the freedom of the University and University groups is not the only freedom that matters. And though it may add an inconvenient level of complexity, there’s nothing wrong with asking whether the freedom of invitation may indeed be in conflict with overall campus freedom of expression.
We can learn a lot about the incidents of last year by talking about a much more recent high-profile speech cancellation, that of Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian, a cultural critic who has had the audacity to suggest, repeatedly, that there is sexism in the portrayal of women in media and elsewhere, was scheduled to speak last week at Utah State University. Then the school received threats of a massacre if she were allowed to speak, couched in vocabulary eerily reminiscent of the video Elliot Rodger made before he went on a killing spree at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The threat seems to have included the phrase, “Feminists have ruined my life, and I will have my revenge.” Sarkeesian actually had to cancel her own speech because the university claimed it couldn’t even search speech-goers for guns, due to Utah state laws.
Here we see many things I think Miller, and others who were appalled by the protests, fails to really consider. First of all, it’s obviously a case in which Miller’s proposition that the only thing required to counter speech is “more and better speech” falters. I doubt anyone really disagrees that giving both Sarkeesian and her would-be attackers a microphone is not exactly an antidote to the problems she faced at Utah State.
But there’s a greater issue here, which is the fact that Sarkeesian doesn’t have to face these issues just once, but daily. And this is for expressing a viewpoint far less controversial than the most innocent of Kelly’s policies. In short, Sarkeesian is less free to express herself every day than Kelly is any day, including the day on which he was prevented from speaking at Brown.
And once we acknowledge that there’s a lot more to freedom of expression than who gets to speak at official lectures, I think we can begin to see pretty easily where the protesters — of which, for the record, I was not one — are coming from.
We can argue about the level of difference between the threat represented by Sarkeesian’s experiences and those by Kelly’s policies, but we should note at the same time that equating the two isn’t as absurd as it may seem. In a year in which police violence against African-Americans has never been more visible, it is no stretch to say that Kelly, one of police discrimination’s foremost prophets, did indeed threaten lives, and in New York, this was entirely on purpose.
And we do not have to guess whether anyone at Brown was personally affected by these policies: Kelly’s tenure as New York City Police Department commissioner, in which he officially and systematically stigmatized being a minority in New York City, ended just last year. Even besides the serious threat to life stop-and-frisk represented, living under the policy, according to an American Journal of Public Health study released two weeks ago, seems to permanently heighten anxiety and decrease emotional well-being.
Indeed, this is a fact that is not likely to be news to Miller, who, two weeks ago, at a panel discussion on “white privilege,” recounted the story of a student of his who asked not to have to go to lab at midnight, lest he be — yes — stopped and frisked.
It’s one thing to allow an offensive viewpoint to air — and quite another to have been personally victimized by a speaker. It’s one thing to invite someone who believes a woman’s place is in the home — say, Phyllis Schlafly in her heyday — and another to invite whoever threatened Anita Sarkeesian’s life last week. The problem with Kelly is not his views, but the tremendous ability he had, for years, to enforce them. The students were protesting not Kelly’s words, but his actions.
The fact is, fear steals freedom, no matter what happens at the level of the institution. Sarkeesian’s daily freedom depends on her considerable courage. The freedom of someone who lived under stop-and-frisk is likely to be compromised permanently. It is certainly reasonable to worry what precedent the successful protest sets, but I think it gives our community far too little credit to imagine our undergraduates as incapable of showing discretion. Miller asks what will happen next time. But it has been a year, after all, and it had been a long time since it happened before last year.
In the sense again that students who suffered under stop-and-frisk now live on a campus that invited its architect to defend it, we can at least consider whether what these protesters were doing last year was not stealing Kelly’s freedom of speech — which, for all intents and purposes, cannot be stolen — but instead protecting one another. They weren’t showing their disregard for academic freedom. They were showing their commitment to each other’s safety and the academic freedom arising from that.
If the actions of last year made vulnerable members of our community feel that this campus was a safer place for them, then they were a blow struck for, not against, freedom of expression.
Andrew Tobolowsky ’07 GS is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies and can be reached at andrew.tobolowsky@gmail.com.
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