To the Editor:
The only standard that you should use to determine whether to publish anything is the quality of what is written. If you made an error by publishing something that was of inferior intellectual quality and included factual errors or widely discredited and offensive or inciteful material, then you should be commended for admitting your mistake, highlighting it and publicizing it.
But you should be in the business of critical thought, which requires that students engage with different views, including those that are ugly and even contrary to substantive liberal ideas. The most sacred liberal idea, which I was taught at Brown, is the exchange of free ideas so they can be tested in the open marketplace of ideas.
If you publish garbage, let it be adjudged as such by the community. You are a newspaper not a censor, though you should maintain minimal standards particularly with respect to certain ideas that the community has long ago determined have no place in liberal society, such as overt racism. But other ideas, such as so-called micro-aggressions, which are largely imaginary and frankly political agenda items, could be censured if you are not careful.
You are always better off allowing the community to act as the arbiter of ideas. That is what a free press does in a free society.
Michael Lewitt ’79
