I am an apostle of total academic freedom. This stems from my perception of the true nature of the genuine university. A real university to me is a temple of total truth. It is a place where scholars and students come together to contemplate and worship truth, to seek absolute truth.
I believe that absolute truth exists, but I must confess, this is largely a matter of faith. Philosophically, I believe that something must be true, even if we are not at all sure what it is. I do not believe that truth is relative, although it seems that our mental grasp of it must be. At least, I know that truth perception has been a progressive affair for me. Many things I was sure of, I now see as error or only partially true.
The deadliest philosophical error is grasping some beautiful and wonderful fragment of truth and declaring it to be total truth. Creatures such as we, granted only partiality of perspective, are highly prone to this dangerous mistake. Its worst result is that it renders us blind to further truth. When we think we know everything, we perceive no need to quest for greater knowledge.
One of the odd things about my concept of the university as a temple of truth is that this lofty and noble appreciation of truth must necessarily be built on discord. The search for knowledge, wisdom, and truth is necessarily disputatious. We discover truth by peeling away error. Truth is what remains after we subject ideas and ideals to the fiercest scrutiny. Truth is what stands the test of total examination. The search for truth is like the purification of gold.
Perhaps because truth, like gold, is so hard won, we cling to the results of our search earnestly. What we have learned seems so valuable to us that we resist the clarity of certainty it gives us. This means, in practice, that it is not easy for us to simply sit down and calmly see our most precious beliefs and attitudes and convictions attacked. Our deepest ideas are so important to us that we have a strong tendency to resist giving them up or changing them.
This is why it requires great intellectual courage to be a true student and great teacher. If we become unwilling to change our ideas -- to learn -- then we sacrifice the intellectual integrity which is an essential character trait of every true teacher.
While man might be the only animal that reasons, he is not very good at it. It is almost impossible to remain totally unbiased. Our ideas are accompanied by feelings. Things that matter greatly to us arouse our passions.
Recognizing this, it is not hard to understand why some people want to establish speech codes, force people to show respect.
Intellectually, I do not see any alternative to radical "anything goes" free speech. It seems to me that tolerance must be total. The situation is something like that in
Evidently, I am trying to incorporate into my academic values two conflicting elements. One is a firm conviction that an essential condition for the untrammeled pursuit of truth is complete freedom of expression. Everyone needs to feel free to express the unallowable, the forbidden.
The other conviction is that the pursuit of truth depends on civil discourse. I believe that reasoned discussion and debate, the free and open examination of beliefs, opinions, assertions in a robust and dynamic marketplace of ideas is the best possible way to discover and share truth.
"Come now and let us reason together."
It's worth noting that this familiar scripture is a quote from God himself. God probably has little difficulty in calm and serene reasoning, but his creatures find the process more challenging. True, in theory, we are capable of reasoning.
But, in practice, discussion can easily degenerate. Argumentation becomes altercation. Disagreement become disagreeable. To maintain civil discourse, there seems to need to be some limits on what we say and how we say it.
The conflict is clear. If everyone is completely free to say whatever they want, then the collegial climate of sincere disagreement and respectful dialogue is at risk when passions run high. If all speech is protected speech, then fighting words and name calling can quickly make disagreement disagreeable.
But if we limit speech in order to protect the climate of community, we hamper the free exchange of ideas. Resolving this issue is as difficult as defining pornography.
Words can hurt
Some years ago, a student at Brown University was expelled under their "hate-speech" prohibitions for shouting racial and homophobic epithets on campus. Yet the president of Brown University claimed that the university had "never expelled anyone for free speech, nor will it ever do so!" The conflict between the school's commitment to free speech and the condemnation of racism was, unsurprisingly if illogically, resolved by re-defining "speech" so as to exclude racial epithets.
In short, all free speech at Brown University is sacred except words like "nigger" and "faggot" or any terms that might offend someone. But it's not your speech that gets you kicked out of the university, it's the racist outlook that such speech reveals that earns you the boot. All free speech is protected at Brown so long as it is <i>approved </i>free speech. But, of course, there's the rub. What is "approved" depends on who's in charge. A century ago, Democratic party leaders nearly had a Duke professor's head, because he dared to suggest that a black man, Booker T. Washington, was second only to Robert E. Lee as a great son of the South.
Things change. Today, you can hardly find a film that does not employ frequent use of the once-forbidden "f" word. Its status as the ultimate taboo term has been taken over by the "n" word. Things change, but principles of free thought and expression do not.
Snigger is OK but watch that "s"
Snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger,snigger, snigger.
Funny thing, if you move the "s" from one end to the other a synonym for "snicker" or "titter"
becomes the plural of the primary prohibited racial slur.
Evidently, black people have been so brutalized by their great great grandparents having been slaves a century and a half ago that someone using using a derogatory term completely destroys them. Frankly, I don't get it. There is no one on the planet who does not have a forebear who was a slave. Somehow knowing that some of my ancestors some hundreds or thousands of years ago were enslaved does not weigh heavily on my psyche. It doesn't keep me from getting through the day or discourage me from trying to make my life and that of my family better. It doesn't make me want to try to collect reparations or blame others for my own failure.
Slavery is nearly universal throughout all history and pre-history. Freedom from slavery is what is exceptional and rare. A society free of slavery was the invention of white men. Slavery existed in Africa for thousands of years. Black men captured, bought and sold and enslaved other black men for many centuries before they ever sold a black slave to a white man. Today, Africa is the only continent where slavery still exists.
I believe that all men are brothers, children of a loving Heavenly Father. I believe that all men are equal in the eyes of God and should be treated equally before the law. That doesn't mean that I believe that all men are equal in intelligence, talent, strength, beauty, or character or any other human attribute. God loves us all, but that doesn't make us identical.
It was wrong of Brown University to expel a student for shouting racial epithets. It was NOT wrong for university administrators to decry this offensive behavior. The way to deal with unacceptable free speech is with more free speech. The light of truth needed to shine on this instance of hurtful speech. Kicking this student out of the university did nothing to change his racist attitude. In fact, it probably only hardened it. Expelling the student did nothing to change the attitude of others on campus who felt the resentment or frustration that made this student shout out insulting terms for blacks and homosexuals. All they learned was that they must hide their real feelings and that some thoughts, some feelings and some ideas were not safe to express on campus.
Brown University administrators missed a real opportunity. Instead of ejecting the student for saying out loud what other students may have thought and felt, the university should have sponsored an open forum where everyone and anyone part of the university community could have spoken openly and freely on the topic. Sunshine is indeed the best disinfectant.
