Free Speech on Campus

I was struck in the last weeks by the confluence of four events relating to speech on campus. The first was the drama surrounding the selection of a new dean for the University of California at Irvine new law school, which I believe ended appropriately. (Although Lord knows California needs a new law school like Bush needs to go lower in the polls.) The second was the denial by the UC Regents to allow the former president of Harvard to speak at a private dinner on the Davis campus. That ended poorly. As noted in an earlier post, Summers (regardless of how his views have been quoted) should have important things to say to any academic group about how universities should function. No reasoning person can suggest that the University of California acted to protect or promote free speech. Their decision was disgraceful. The third happened at Columbia with the invitation for the President of Iran to speak to a group of students. That ended marginally. At the time I applauded the President and the University for allowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. But President Bollinger's opening was totally inappropriate. The President could have said that in an academic setting that some of Ahmadinejad's ideas will be subject to questioning. But his introduction sounded like he thought the Iranian President was standing in the dock of a trial. It reminded me a lot of what probably happens to academic speech in Iran. Bollinger needed to find a way to welcome Ahmadinejad without accepting his absurd and dangerous ideas and actions. He failed miserably. The final one came from Duke where the President expressed regret to the Lacrosse students whose reputations were trashed by a university administration that was too quick to accept the politically correct explanation of events. While the apology was appropriate (and probably comes before a financial settlement with the students and the coach) it was a lot too late.

Colleges and universities should be a locus of ideas and discussions. A lot of those ideas will be unpopular with one group or another. In my first year as an undergraduate I took a course which was then called Western Civilization - something that many campuses would not accept today. About three weeks before the election the professor (I think we were on the Greeks) began a series of six lectures arguing that Goldwaterism was the equivalent of fascism. The claim was absurd on its face - after all National Socialism was a system to encourage additional state power not diminish it. But it was also absurd because it had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the class. I debated the professor over those two weeks, which was an interesting opportunity, because I did not know what he was going to argue in the next lecture, and got kudos and criticisms from my fellow students. The point was not that I took on the debate or that the professor was using my time to offer his warped views but that the debate and discussion was possible. The evidence from the last few weeks in academe suggests that the width of the acceptance of civil discussion on campus is much narrower than it was in the past or should be. That is indeed unfortunate.