Some colleges and universities pay lip service to free speech, but continue to allow violations. It’s easy for officials to proclaim that they will protect it, but quite another to act when the usual suspects seek to silence people who “offend” them.
In today’s Martin Center article, Georgetown professor John Hasnas reflects on a piece we published recently, relating the good news that Davidson College has made a commitment to the Chicago Principles. His argument is that more than just that will be needed.
Hasnas points to his experience at Georgetown, where the university put a nice-sounding free-speech policy in place some years back. Nevertheless, the school now has a terrible FIRE ranking. He explains, “Georgetown’s new speech and expression policy was designed to restrain the ability of the university’s administrators to suppress unpopular speech. But who was in charge of enforcing the policy? The university’s administrators. Under these circumstances, how effective would you expect the enforcement of the policy to be?”
Hasnas recounts an incident in which a law professor was terminated because she privately said that black students in her class were not doing well — something she lamented. But when that conversation was made public, a number of students took offense and the administration sprang into action against her. The free-speech policy didn’t matter to the zealots who were determined to show their solidarity with the snowflake students.
Hasnas offers some advice to the pro-speech folks at Davidson. Here’s one idea: “Perhaps you can get the college to hire an executive vice-president for freedom of speech who is equal in status to the deans and chief diversity officer. If that is too much of a stretch, perhaps you can arrange for the creation of an Initial Review Board composed of people who have expertise in distinguishing protected speech from actionable conduct. Such a body would review allegations that an individual’s verbal conduct violated a university policy and dismiss those based exclusively on the content of protected speech.”
Protecting free speech is important, but some nice words on paper won’t alone suffice.