The Collegiate Laws of Life Essay Contest asked Penn State students to explore ethical values and intercultural issues, and their talent for expressing their views in writing.
Brian Loane, ’19, aspiring Paterno Fellow in English and Comparative Literature, won First Place for his essay, below, responding to this prompt:
Given the recent events unfolding at the University of Missouri, Yale University, and countless other Universities across the country, what role do you believe a university should play when approaching the duality between preserving freedom of speech and standing in solidarity with its students?
The University: A Crucible of Ideas
A Saudi Arabian blogger faces a thousand lashes for publishing humanistic worldviews; theocrats slaughter cartoonists in Paris; and in the United States, a mire of self-censorship—enforced, not legislatively, but rather through intimidation and fear—permeates our national discourse as it stifles discussion. Freedom of speech is the freedom from which all others flow and is, therefore, the foundation of our entire society.
Nowhere is this right more essential than on a university campus where new generations of citizens develop intellectually. Yet even on the campus, where the sound of debate and discussion should be ubiquitous, freedom of speech has come under assault. It is the role of the university to allow all ideas, no matter how ugly or false, to be heard, criticized, denounced, agreed upon, or invalidated—never to stop expression.
In October of last year, Yale students became enraged about certain Halloween costumes and wanted the university to ban them on the basis that they were offensive. Eventually, a video surfaced of a young woman at Yale screaming at Headmaster Nicholas Christakis after he sent out an e-mail stating, “If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” The young woman in the video responded to this rational and level-headed response by saying, “It is not about creating an intellectual space…it is about creating a home.” Look how far the desire for censorship has spread: an Ivy League student screaming that a headmaster’s job is not to create an intellectual space. She thinks that the job of a university is to shelter her from ideas that she finds distasteful.
This student, and those who cheered her on, have forgotten the genius of classical liberalism. In his defining treatise, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote, “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing all mankind.” The university exists to promote this one person and to show the world new and different beliefs. The clash of ideas is always a productive endeavor. Either the new idea is correct, and we can change our wrong belief, or it is incorrect, in which case we have an opportunity to understand why we believe what we do. The university should be a crucible for all ideas to compete and argue so that truth becomes clearer.
It is important to note that the problems facing students at Missouri are different from those at Yale. At Missouri, racists abandoned debate and the free exchange of ideas and moved into the realm of vandalism and harassment, which inhibited students from participating in university life. Missouri did nothing, and it was wrong to do nothing. The students were in legitimate danger and did not need the “safe space” that the Yale students wanted, but instead a truly safe environment. When the expression of foul ideas becomes physically harmful, the university must stand with its students and protect them to ensure their safety and the health of the intellectual space.
Even in this case, however, it would have been wrong to silence the ugly ideas that racists spouted. The only way to truly expunge a bad idea is to drag it into the light and demand that the adherents defend it. As their ideas are exposed as falsities with scientific, historical, and moral evidence, they will wither away, instead of festering in the dark. Universities can create this platform, but for the debate to be productive, people must hear ideas they despise and then respond rationally. Racism is not just treatable, it is curable, but to purge our society, the belief must be defeated in a contest of ideas.
Do we want to live in a world where art and ideas are judged to be not-suitable, offensive, or unclean, and then suppressed? It has been twenty-seven years since the Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for writing a work of fiction. Thankfully, Rushdie and The Satanic Verses survived this trip to the gallows, but attempts at censorship have become more common over those twenty-seven years. If we begin to censor opinions, even repugnant ones, we will eventually lose the music of dialogue altogether and have only silence in its place. The university is at the forefront of this fight. Freedom of speech—freedom of thought—is the right that allows universities to operate. It is our most important liberty, and universities must defend it, or else pay for the rope that will hang them.