Ensuring genuine freedom of speech
During most of President Wright’s tenure, Dartmouth had the worst possible free-speech rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”), a free-speech watchdog group.
A major reason was that Dartmouth openly applied policies that allowed the College to discipline students for “offensive” speech. All the while, though, President Wright insisted that Dartmouth had no speech code. FIRE, however, wasn’t fooled. It said that Dartmouth’s policy amounted to a speech code because it “condition[ed] free speech on the reactions of the least tolerant listener, [wa]s vague and ambiguous, and clearly single[d] out certain kinds of speech for punishment simply because they advocate allegedly unacceptable points of view.”
Following FIRE’s pronouncement, President Wright changed tactics. The offending policy was recently removed from the College’s website, and Wright including in his 2004 convocation speech a resounding endorsement of free speech on campus. These are welcome, if long overdue, developments, ones that recently led FIRE to upgrade Dartmouth’s rating.
Was the administration’s new stance an empty gesture or a real commitment to free speech? Unfortunately, subsequent actions by the administration suggest the former may be the case.
To this day, years after its alleged transgression, Zeta Psi fraternity stands derecognized – driven off campus – because of a column in an internal fraternity newsletter. The column was unquestionably in poor taste, but free speech isn’t limited to tasteful speech. Although President Wright now claims to be a defender of free speech, Zeta Psi still stands subject to the severest punishment the College can impose on a fraternity – and for what? For fraternity brothers who have long since graduated having engaged in free speech that others found to be distasteful.
Moreover, in a letter to the student body last semester addressing the latest controversy surrounding the Indian symbol – whether Dartmouth should host or compete against athletic teams that have retained Indian symbols – President Wright has made it clear that the right to free speech doesn’t apply to “offensive” speech. He wrote that he “take[s] it as a matter of principle that when people say they have been offended, they have been offended,” and rejected it as “condescending to insist that they shouldn’t be offended.” Letter from President Wright to Dartmouth Students Dated Nov. 20, 2006 (available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~presoff/speeches/2006/112006.html). He continued: “it is the worst form of arrogance for anyone to insist that they will continue to offend [i.e., make statements that others find ‘offensive’] on the basis of a ‘right.’” Students who insist on expressing ideas that others find offensive, in his view, “are simply bullies.”
This position is the very antithesis of freedom of speech. As FIRE itself has explained:
“Note that President Wright clearly places the ‘feelings’ of others over the ‘right’ to free speech. When a person’s subjective feelings can trump the objective right to speak, then no one’s speech is free. At Dartmouth, if a student wants to make a controversial argument on an emotional topic (such as affirmative action, abortion, or the war on terror), that student must take great care that no one in class or in earshot will be offended by the content of his or her speech. A person is simply not free to speak if he or she can be punished based on complaints from even the most thin-skinned member of the community.”
The University of North Dakota, the school that very publicly drew the ire of President Wright and his athletic director last Fall for calling itself the “Fighting Sioux,” was lucky in that all they could do was criticize the university and wring its hands over whether or not to host it in this year’s hockey tournament in Hanover. Dartmouth students, however, are in a far much more vulnerable position. A marketplace of ideas cannot flourish as long as self-censorship casts its pall over the Dartmouth campus and the price of speaking out may be bullying by the College administration or official discipline.
To be sure, no responsible person – least of all me – believes that racial, anti-gay, or other epithets are appropriate or protected forms of expression. In First Amendment jurisprudence, those sorts of statement are called “fighting words,” and they are unprotected. Nevertheless, genuine speech is entitled to protection even if others might find it to be offensive, even deeply so. The Supreme Court has long rejected the concept of the “heckler’s veto” – the idea that speech can be restrained or punished because listeners are offended by it – and Dartmouth should do the same.
As FIRE has noted:
“Dartmouth is more than just a college; it is an institution of national importance – a place where many of our nation’s leaders are educated. It is shameful that those students are being taught that the best way to address dissent is through censorship and that hurt feelings trump fundamental rights. A nation cannot long remain free if its elite institutions continue to teach their students that fundamental freedoms can be sacrificed on the altar of distorted notions of ‘community’ and ‘tolerance.’”
I will work to make sure that students are as free on the Dartmouth campus as off to express sincerely held points of view.
