Free speech and the hardening of the American academic mind

Micah Stefan Dagaerag

Honest Engagements

No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet
be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are
accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust.
Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain
new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die. – Chief
Justice Earl Warren, Sweezy v. Hampshire (1957)

I wasn’t born yet during what became known in the United States as the Free Speech
Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. But by the time I went to college in the mid-2000s,
the impact and influence of the movement was already a natural part of Silliman academic
life. I had never experienced that level of intellectual openness and diversity before.
Students were simply not afraid of listening to ideas no matter what offense may be
received (and caused) because we all believed that the world will always be better off when
people are freer to express their opinions, and that any offensiveness caused along the way
could always be processed positively and productively.

While it was a nationwide phenomenon, there was one university in particular that earned
the right to be remembered as the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement – that is, the
University of California, Berkeley campus. But, as Thomas Fuller of the New York Times
wrote in February of this year, “Fires burned in the cradle of free speech. Furious at a
lecture organized on campus, demonstrators wearing ninja-like outfits smashed windows,
threw rocks at the police and stormed a building. The speech? The university called it off.”

Berkeley had canceled an invitation for Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor of Breitbart News
well-known for his aggressive, politically incorrect and racially-charged writing. More than
100 faculty members had also signed a letter opposing the visit by Mr. Yiannopoulos
saying, “We support robust debate, but we cannot abide by harassment, slander,
defamation, and hate speech.” According to Fuller, heated arguments eventually broke out
at Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza between students who said Mr. Yiannopoulos was too
inflammatory to be invited to the campus and those who argued that he should have been
allowed to speak.

What are we to make of this? Is it good policy for a university to disallow someone who is
adjudged to be too offensive to speak?

By offense, of course, we do not mean foul or abusive language, but rather the repulsion we
naturally feel when our personal beliefs are criticized and challenged. And there certainly is
a difference between free speech in general and free speech within the academic context.
There is considerably greater freedom within the academe for many kinds of utterances
which would face stiff regulations and sanction in the public square. But that is by design.
Universities are envisioned to be flexible and responsible enough for the widest range of
ideas to interact and relate with each other within a relatively safe and supportive context.
For it is only in the synthesis of opposing viewpoints wherein we can derive new
knowledge.

The net effect of a university reaching the point of downright choosing what opinions to
allow or disallow is to close and harden its mind, which is the antithesis of what it means to
be an educational institution in the first place. Antagonizing any and all opposing views, it
stagnates within its own Dead Sea of biases and presuppositions. As an aside, I am happy to
say that this is still less common in Philippine universities.

More than that, it festers into a toxic pool of intellectual grime, unhealthful, even hostile, to
the growth of civilization. Curtailment of free speech will always result in the intellectual
version of survival of the fittest: only the opinions and viewpoints of the most powerful will
eventually be allowed to be heard. Make no mistake: to desire free speech for yourself but
not for others is the beginning of tyranny.