The Right Way to Protect Free Speech on Campus Communities of higher learning should work to make all of their members feel included, writes the president of Middlebury College, but not at the cost of free speech and robust debate By Laurie L. Patton
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-way-to-protect-free-speech-on-campus-1497019583
Dr. Patton is the president of Middlebury College and a scholar of South Asian history, culture and religion.
In my inaugural address as the new president of Middlebury College a year and a half ago, I spoke of my hope to create a robust public square on campus. I said that I wanted Middlebury to be a community whose members engage in reasoned, thoughtful debate openly and without fear, where we are resilient in argument and generous to those we disagree with, and where the conversational circle expands to take in more and more people. I had no illusions about how difficult and messy it might be to achieve these goals, but I also had no doubt that we needed to pursue them.
We experienced a hard test of these aims in early March, when student demonstrators at Middlebury shut down a speaking event featuring the political scientist Charles Murray. A rash of similarly disturbing incidents on other campuses this spring has reminded us of the fragility of the principle of free expression and why all of our institutions, but especially our institutions of higher learning, must be vigilant in safeguarding it.
At Middlebury’s commencement last month, as I shook the hands of 550 graduating seniors, it was difficult to overlook the challenge that lies before them. These young people—our newest alumni—are a remarkable group, full of promise and hope. But the unfortunate reality in America today is that they are embarking on their life’s journey at a moment when our nation is sharply divided—politically, economically, culturally, and in seemingly every other way. As historian Jon Meacham said to our graduates in his commencement address, “A decade and a half into the 21st century, what do we love in common? The painful but unavoidable answer is: not enough.”
A number of groups at Middlebury were upset by the prospect of Dr. Murray’s appearance and asked the administration to cancel the event. In the spirit of a robust public square, we thought it was important to allow students and others in the community to engage with Dr. Murray about the issues on their minds.
Students protested when Dr. Murray took the stage. They prevented him from speaking and went on to disrupt attempts to continue the program, including a question-and-answer session moderated by Prof. Allison Stanger, via video feed—a backup plan that we had created to ensure that the talk could continue even if it was disrupted in the hall. Later, when Dr. Murray, Prof. Stanger and a Middlebury administrator left the building, a crowd of about 20 people, most of them outsiders but some students as well, physically confronted them and surrounded their car. Prof. Stanger was injured in the melee.
Like many at Middlebury, I was deeply upset by these events. As a community of learners, we must extend the same privileges and rights of speech to others as we would ask others to extend to us. Given my call for more resilient conversations and debate, the disruption of Dr. Murray’s talk was especially disheartening.
The college immediately asked independent investigators to give us an impartial account of what happened. They reviewed photographic and video evidence, interviewed a number of eyewitnesses and gathered other statements and accounts. Their work provided the basis for disciplinary proceedings under the college’s long-established, community-based judicial procedures. The college charged a number of students with violating policies that prohibit disruptive behavior at community events and that call on students to “respect the dignity, freedom and rights of others” and forbids “violence or the use of physical force.”
The Community Judiciary Board (which is made up of students, faculty and staff members) heard the most serious of these charges, made the final determination of wrongdoing and assigned sanctions. Neither I nor anyone in the senior administration had the authority to impose penalties unilaterally.
When Protest Crosses the Line
In a March 5 article on the American Enterprise Institute’s AEIdeas blog, Charles Murray wrote about his experience at Middlebury:
In the 23 years since “The Bell Curve” was published, I have had considerable experience with campus protests. Until [the event at Middlebury], all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.
Middlebury tried to negotiate such an agreement with the protesters, but, for the first time in my experience, the protesters would not accept any time limits. If this becomes the new normal, the number of colleges willing to let themselves in for an experience like Middlebury’s will plunge to near zero. Academia is already largely sequestered in an ideological bubble, but at least it’s translucent. That bubble will become opaque.
Worse yet, the intellectual thugs will take over many campuses. In the mid-1990s, I could count on students who had wanted to listen to start yelling at the protesters after a certain point, “Sit down and shut up, we want to hear what he has to say.” That kind of pushback had an effect. It reminded the protesters that they were a minority. I am assured by people at Middlebury that their protesters are a minority as well. But they are a minority that has intimidated the majority. The people in the audience who wanted to hear me speak were completely cowed. That cannot be allowed to stand. A campus where a majority of students are fearful to speak openly because they know a minority will jump on them is no longer an intellectually free campus in any meaningful sense.
In the end, the board took disciplinary action against 74 Middlebury students. Most received probation, which means that they will face more serious penalties if they violate these policies again. A few, who took an especially prominent role in the episode, received what we call “college discipline,” which places a letter in their permanent file noting their infractions. Because students often must disclose such information in applications to graduate programs and employers, it is a serious penalty, with potentially long-term consequences. For its part, the Middlebury Police Department investigated the events outside the hall and found no evidence to support criminal charges.
On campus and in press coverage of these events, some praised our effort to hold the students accountable, noting that we had followed Middlebury’s longstanding policy of drawing a clear line between peaceful and disruptive protest. Some dismissed the sanctions as a slap on the wrist, and others criticized our actions as overly punitive, arguing that all protest is inherently disruptive. Not everyone was happy with the outcome of the disciplinary proceedings, but we were all committed to the integrity of our established practices, including the role of the community-based judicial body charged with deciding such cases.
For Middlebury and other schools where such confrontations are sure to arise again, it is now time to look ahead and to think about principles that can help us to avoid future escalation and to ensure respect for the rights of both speech and protest. I would suggest the following:
· Embrace freedom of expression and inquiry as an educational value for everyone, regardless of their background or political views. Controversial speech is especially difficult at a time when issues that should be addressed and debated become the exclusive province of the left or the right. In our current state of high tension, it is hard to explore vital, fraught topics such as the history of oppression or the nature of freedom, but we have a responsibility to teach and discuss them openly and honestly, with mutual respect.
· Move beyond the false dichotomy between free speech and inclusiveness. Our dual commitment to free expression and to making all students full members of our communities must be embraced fiercely and with conviction. But an educational institution does not become more inclusive by limiting freedom of expression. Nor does it achieve greater freedom by reducing its commitment to building an inclusive, robust, brave public square where all students are equally welcomed and valued.
‘Educational institutions have a primary obligation to foster open and civil discourse.’
· Let students know that, when these values come into conflict, as they did at Middlebury this past spring, educational institutions have a primary obligation to foster open and civil discourse. Schools have to be prepared to enforce this commitment, as we did in this episode. Free speech lies at the heart of our purpose as an institution, and we cannot allow force or disruption to undermine it.
· Ensure that students have a basic understanding of the First Amendment and its history as well as of historical and current models for creating a more inclusive public square. It is essential to include such topics in student orientations and to ask them to reflect on them at regular intervals throughout their careers.
· Prepare students for our polarized politics by actively acknowledging and learning about the full range of perspectives on the important issues of the day. Faculty should regularly ask themselves and their students if anyone is afraid to speak about his or her views—including conservative students, who tell us that they often feel alienated in the classroom and social settings of left-leaning campuses.
· Reflect on who is and is not included in different public debates, and ask why. Many students from underrepresented groups tell us that they get the message every day that they do not belong at elite colleges. Are there ways to create new traditions of dialogue and argument that can expand the definition of who belongs? Our public square must be as energetically invitational as it is educationally rigorous.
I believe that this dual commitment to free expression and inclusiveness is crucial to the well-being of our institutions of higher learning and to the health of American society as a whole. But I won’t pretend that the tension between them is easy to negotiate or resolve. If we manage it well, however, it can be a force in our public life for creativity rather than for distrust and division.
‘Once censorship becomes acceptable in principle, those who have walked on the margins will become even more vulnerable.’
At Middlebury and other schools, we must respect and engage students who have walked on the margins of American society. This means not turning our back on the accumulated injury that some of them have confronted in the history of our nation. But this is yet another reason to remain committed to the fundamental value of freedom of expression and inquiry: Once censorship becomes acceptable in principle, those who have walked on the margins will become even more vulnerable, putting at risk the gains we have made in reducing disparities in access and increasing participation.
We must prepare young Americans, whatever their background, to take on arguments that offend them; to enter the public square with better ideas supported with better reason, better research, better logic, and better data; to risk being offended and to argue back even when they might feel afraid.
Committed speech, reasoned speech, courageous speech, speech countering other speech—these are essential to higher education and to sound democratic politics. It is simply not acceptable to shut down speakers and interfere with the right of others to hear them, learn from them and challenge them. Only when we’re able to listen to each other, across our many differences, will we begin to discover, for our own times, what we are still capable of loving in common.
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