Republicans and the lack of free speech
OPINION:
Last week, the House Committee on Education held a hearing at which the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn testified about the hatred and invective and sometimes actions directed at Jews on the campuses of those schools.
Unlike most congressional hearings, this one was worth watching — in large measure because Rep. Elise Stefanik (Harvard, ’06) asked University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill (Yale, ’88) whether calling for the genocide of Jews was contrary to Penn’s code of conduct.
Ms. Magill, a lawyer by training, tried to apply legal nuance to an emotional question and was promptly pilloried by Ms. Stefanik, and later by the media.
Ms. Magill may very well have resigned by the time this column appears in print, probably deservedly so.
The entire episode, however, is part of a larger, disconcerting and unfortunately, bipartisan effort to impose limits on speech with which one disagrees.
It is ironic that the speech and conduct codes that began to emerge on campus in the 1990s in a conscious effort to limit student exposure to conservative or reactionary ideas — Penn being among the first of the universities to adopt such a code — may very well be the undoing of at least one Ivy League president.
Those codes have corroded our ability to even think properly about free speech.
It is telling and disturbing that Ms. Magill, a product of Yale and the University of Virginia and a former dean of the law school at Stanford University, was unable to mount a defense of students’ right to say and think things even within the university setting and unable to clearly delineate the difference between words and actions.
Obviously, there are laws and strictures against threatening people or causing them immediate harm by mischaracterizing a situation (call out “fire” in a crowded movie theater, for instance). Those should be enforced.
Similarly, the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution — our only true bulwark against the natural expansion and aggression of the state — should be read and protected as expansively as possible.
We also value free speech because it is the first and best protection against politically motivated violence. If people are prevented from explaining themselves or their grievances, the likelihood of societal entropy greatly increases. That’s why the First Amendment is essential.
It is a discouraging commentary on the danger of our times and the limited intellectual and moral capacities of our elites that Ms. Magill was unable or unwilling to have simply said that the University of Pennsylvania values free speech and when its exercise approaches a legal limit, the school takes steps to sanction students, up to and including having them arrested or expelled.
It is equally discouraging that a member of Congress who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution — and is a member of that same elite — managed to conflate words with actions and generated outrage over what is, in most circumstances, speech that the Constitution protects.
For more than a generation, Republicans — who have been the primary if not sole targets of speech and conduct codes in schools and businesses — have been steady and reliable opponents of such codes. It is dispiriting to see some of them join the rush to claim victim status in an effort to constrain the words and, more importantly, the thoughts of others.
Make no mistake: The nominal purpose of speech and conduct codes is to limit “harmful” speech, but the real purpose is to limit thought that is harmful to those in authority.
Calling for the genocide of anyone is absolutely and without question unconscionable. But does the Constitution protect it, and is the ability to say it aloud worthy of protection, if only to protect our own ability to think and sometimes say things that may sound terrible? That is the real question.
The rest of it is merely political provocation and theater.
• Michael McKenna (Penn, ’85) is a contributing editor to The Washington Times.
