EDITORIAL: Standards of Speech

Community standards can-Community standards can-not be trusted to judge whatCommunity standards can-not be trusted to judge whatis OK to say.Community standards can-not be trusted to judge whatis OK to say.________________________________ Last week, Interim President Claire Fagin announced that the Racial Harassment Policy will not be revoked, but will stay in place pending its review over the next semester. This timetable calls for a decision on a new "set of principles and policies" to be made on June 30, 1994. Resigned to the fact that yet another committee will be handling this crucial issue, we would now like to shun any pretenses of obstructionism and offer some advice. In the University Statement on the Racial Harassment Policy, Fagin sums up by writing: "In the end, community standards of conduct – largely determined by student and faculty attitudes – are the best guardians of both freedom of speech and civility." Apparently meant to be an innocuous concluding statement, this clause has potentially dangerous implications for free expression at University. First, can "community standards" really be trusted to protect free expression? Before you answer, consider another campus in another era. If community standards were the benchmark for what was acceptable speech, would a student at the University of Alabama in 1958 have been able to call for the integration of higher education? Would students across the country have been able to voice their disgust and opposition to the Vietnam War? The answer, sadly, is no. Noted historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in a report on free speech at Yale that, "Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of the authoritarian or even majority opinion..." If not for our right to free expression, some of the most important social movements in recent history – the Civil Rights and the anti-war movements – would not have come to fruition. People will always have the freedom to express community norms. It is those that express the unorthodox, no matter how unpopular at the time or no matter how accepted afterwards, that need to be protected. As Woodward – who, ironically, was Sheldon Hackney's mentor – wrote in his report, a good university will not subordinate freedom of expression over other important ideals such as "harmony," "civility," and even "equality" because it would "override its central purpose." Freedom of expression is not only central to the intellectual debate needed at an University, but also vital to the progress of our society. We understand that working under such principles the University runs a risk that hateful and shocking things may be said. But we ask that the University take that chance and place the value of freedom of speech over that of civility, not along side of it. To protect the unpopular, not the community norm. This new committee's report may be the last word said about free speech at the University for a long time. We implore it to rededicate itself to this ideal. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate."