Opinion

Preserving the forum, acknowledging the burden

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Also by Josh Orton and James Robert Hunter:

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With a budget crisis in the state and throughout the country, the question of speech and censorship on college campuses may not be at the top of many lists of pressing concerns. Nevertheless, it should be.

Whenever speech becomes threatening, someone will ask, “When should we censor?”

The Daniel Pipes lecture on the UW campus was an easy call. The Wisconsin Union Directorate addressed concerns regarding the content of Pipes’ past ramblings and the concerns of some students who opposed his appearance but still decided to keep him as a speaker. Now, we’re as hesitant as anyone about paying a hypocritical political gangster such as Pipes to speak, but we’re satisfied WUD made the right choice. His lecture came through a formal channel, was clearly presented to spur debate, and as a result opposition organized against Pipes’ speech and countered his message (hopefully respectfully but forcefully).

A slightly harder call regards a lawsuit filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, against Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

The University has instituted what can only be seen as a ruthless regulation of speech, guising a ’90s-style speech code in a student code of conduct, demanding that the “expression of one’s beliefs” does not “provoke” or “demean.” In addition, the school’s code only protects speech up until the point it becomes “inflammatory, demeaning, or harmful towards others.”

Obviously, students at Shippensburg should fear a chilling speech effect. At best, the expression of one’s beliefs is provocative; at worst, without inflammatory rhetoric, discourse won’t sizzle the way it should. Why bother?

However, before dismissing the restrictive student code in Pennsylvania, it’s useful to examine its possible intent. It’s certainly a worthwhile idea to attempt to limit degrading epithets on a college campus; all should enjoy a freedom from harassment and degradation. In fact, placing some limits on any libertarian-type free market makes sense, since those who are in the majority often abuse their power to either intimidate the minority or further monopolize the venue. Is there a point where discourse is so dominated that the forum becomes corrupt?

The problem is where to regulate, but both arguments fail without some mention or deference paid to the alternative.

Organizations like FIRE ignore the context that speech regulations seek to address: a context in which students of minority identities or opinions can feel imposed upon or restricted in the expression of their own ideas and sentiments, due to an oppressive climate on campus. For a contemporary example of such a climate of oppression, one cannot deny the chilling effects that are inherent in the SEVIS program, which now requires international students to fund their own surveillance during their stay in the country. If you don’t think that such a panoptic system places fear in the minds of its subjects and forces them to limit their self-expression, read no further.

Restrictions on speech falter when ideas are squashed and discourse suffers. Even silencing a demagogue like Pipes might be the first step toward a quasi-Orwellian state of affairs.

The goal should be not only to preserve an open discourse that is both the means and the ends of a liberal education, but also to assure that the overbearing burden some minorities face is acknowledged and incorporated without being further stigmatized. Such a task will require much soul-searching on both sides of the debate — it is clear that we cannot restrict speech to the point at which students are unable to exchange ideas and synthesize new knowledge, but we cannot allow the manipulation of an ungoverned marketplace of ideas to enable the systemic and widespread silencing of minority students and their individually distinct voices.

Josh Orton is a junior majoring in political science and ILS, James Robert Hunter is a sophomore majoring in philosophy, political science, and ILS.