Georgetown’s Cowardice on Free Speech
The Atlantic | David Frum
In this important piece, Frum asks, “How is a society ever to settle its most important questions if it follows the rule ‘The more important a question, the more strictly its discussion is forbidden’?”
Frum uses the Georgetown situation with Ilya Shapiro as the example: “For more than three months now, Georgetown University has pondered whether to discipline a staff member whose words offended a number of students and faculty. The university’s written policy on free speech pointed to one answer: No. Georgetown’s protections for free-speech policy are very broad….At the same time, the offended students and faculty are still riled up, and people do not rise through the ranks of university management by brave defiance of local opinion. So perhaps it’s natural that Georgetown has decided to … dither.”
What is the lesson from the situation? Frum argues that it is to go back to the entire purpose of a university with open debate.
“Punishing people for their words does not make the words vanish from memory. The unsayable is not unthinkable. Indeed, the punishment of the word may actually magnify the impact of the thought. Never mind abstract free-speech principles: Purely on pragmatic grounds, when a member of a community says something that bitterly divides the community, the way to a resolution is not to suppress the thought, but to argue it out…”
“If we all spoke circumspectly and wisely all the time, who would even need institutional free-speech policies?” he asks. “The point of speech rules is to allow space for the unguarded and the ill-tempered, for the provocative and prickly person as well as the smooth and sinuous. The smooth and sinuous will seldom say anything worth hearing in the first place.”
