Hyatt: Speech issue is complex

Living in the Quadrangle has taught Executive Director of the President's Office Linda Hyatt a great deal about people and campus issues. One morning on her way out of her Quad apartment, which she shares with her husband, Political Science Professor Will Harris, she spoke with a housekeeper in her building about a student who made negative and hurtful remarks to the housekeeper. Hyatt said conversations like that let her understand complexities of free speech and civility. "Having the issue of free speech occupy such a prominent place in the campus dialogue over the last year has been one of the most constructive things I've witnessed during my eight years at Penn," she said. Hyatt said debate and discussion over the issue "challenges our fundamental beliefs and the way we act towards each other." In addition, she said, people evaluating these issues must "go beyond" themselves and the groups to which they belong. Freedom of speech, if used properly and fully, "is the most important device we have to break down the barriers that separate us, to connect us to one another and to define us as individuals," Hyatt said. "We have a tremendous individual responsibility to protect ourselves and work through exercise of free speech to protect our fellow community members," she added. Hyatt said it is difficult to draw a line, or even define a zone, illustrating where freedom of speech stops and the freedom not to be harassed begins. "There are legal definitions we can use as markers, but they are only marks on the landscape," she added. "They don't define our individual course of action." Hyatt said some people embrace freedom of speech without understanding and taking responsibilities involved with it. "If the student who spoke rudely to the housekeeper had imagined what it felt like to be on the receiving end, that unkindness might never have occurred," she added. These responsibilities, she added, apply to the freedom of press and that to protest as well. "I was a newspaper reporter [in college] and I've been an editor," she said. "I have had to recognize that with the almost monopolistic control of information to a community comes the flip side of a tremendous amount of responsibility to be fair and even- handed." Hyatt said she hopes the issue and the debate surrounding it "will go in a very constructive direction," saying she thinks "we have already made a good beginning." She added that as one who grew up with the idealism of the 1970s' "protest generation," she feels idealistic visions can produce "positive societal changes," which can endure into the future. The challenge for the future, Hyatt said, is to "focus our passions, which are sometimes very different, in ways that result in real and long lasting change."