Last week’s controversy over two opinions columns published in The Herald demonstrated the misconceptions and misgivings many members of the Brown community have toward the principle of free speech. Luckily, Brown’s mission statement provides a strong affirmation of this principle. It states, “The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation and the world by discovering, communicating and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation.”
This statement highlights the purpose of institutions of higher learning: to teach students how to think, not what to think. Universities need to produce students capable of asking hard questions, engaging in difficult conversations and refuting ideas they may find abhorrent. Judging by the reactions from students, The Herald and the administration to the articles published last week, it is clear that Brown is not living up to this mission.
In the face of controversial or offensive speech, many students at Brown respond with calls for censorship. Last week, multiple student groups published statements demanding The Herald’s editorial board uphold an “obligation to ensure that the pieces it publishes are … not racist, classist, cissexist, heterosexist, sexist or ableist.” They argue that lecture series, debate societies and student newspapers should not provide a platform for opinions that are offensive. Disregarding the fact that such a standard would be impossible to determine objectively, the more pressing issue is how students deal with speech that offends them. As Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, when confronted with opposing viewpoints, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Open dialogue forces us to critically examine our own beliefs and leads to the discovery of knowledge. Ultimately, students are well within their rights to ask for censorship, and The Herald is well within its rights to censor material it deems inappropriate for publication. Nevertheless, when students ask for insulation from unpopular, controversial or offensive ideas, they cheapen their own educational experience and fail to live up to the goals of higher education.
Many of the individuals calling for censorship are motivated by a bona fide commitment to social justice. What these individuals fail to understand is that freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental tools for promoting social change. It was only with the protection of free speech that civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s were able to protest injustice and bring about powerful changes in society. Censorship is a tool of oppressors; those who strive to overcome oppression should not adopt the same tactics of the institutions they criticize.
The Herald certainly deserves some blame for the way it has handled this situation. We recognize that The Herald has the right to editorial discretion. It can publish articles, retract columns and offer apologies as it sees fit. But as Brown’s oldest and most-circulated newspaper, The Herald is in a unique position to foster the marketplace of ideas on campus. It should not shy away from publishing ideas that inflame, provoke and offend, nor should it bow to the pressure of student outrage and apologize for publishing contentious opinions. The opinions section provides a forum for any member of the community to be heard. By publishing opinions, The Herald is solely a conduit for conversation and should not apologize for being such.
It is unfair to place blame solely on the student body and The Herald for misunderstanding the principles of free expression when the administration has had such a mixed record on the matter. This administration had a chance to respond to this controversy by unequivocally affirming the value of free discourse, no matter how objectionable the subject matter. They didn’t even have to look very hard to find an example of such a statement. President Michael Roth of Wesleyan University responded to students’ calls to censor and defund the school’s newspaper after it published an opinions column critical of the Black Lives Matter movement by saying, “Debates can raise intense emotions, but that doesn’t mean that we should demand ideological conformity because people are made uncomfortable. As members of a university community, we always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended. … Censorship diminishes true diversity of thinking; vigorous debate enlivens and instructs.”
In contrast, the recent op-ed written by President Christina Paxson P’19, Provost Richard Locke P’17 and Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ’91 MA’06 is a tepid endorsement of free expression. Their open letter to students states, “We can do all that we can to benefit from listening to, learning from and feeling the experiences of others, as well as bringing to bear the wealth of scholarly resources in our community to teach and learn about these issues. This is the commitment from those of us in the University leadership — a commitment we hope our entire community will share.”
But Paxson and the other administrators undermine this commitment in a previous paragraph by saying that “the current leadership of The Herald has forthrightly owned that they caused harm and did not live up to the expectations of the Brown community.” The latter statement seems to contradict the former. If there is an expectation in the Brown community of lively discourse and free inquiry, how exactly did The Herald fail to live up to that expectation by publishing last week’s columns? Is Paxson implying that ideas that offend people are outside the bounds of acceptable discourse at Brown?
A commitment to the free exchange of ideas must be unqualified; in order to truly embrace the ideal of free inquiry, the entire campus community must be willing to engage with all ideas, especially ones they oppose.
Daniella Dichter ’17 can be reached at daniella_dichter@brown.edu, and Rohan Gulati ’17 can be reached at rohan_gulati@brown.edu.
