Kunz

In her letter to The Bulletin of Dec. 13, Cheri Helt advocates “the immediate resignation” of the presidents of Harvard and MIT and endorses the resignation of the President of U. Penn. Helt insists these presidents must be fired for permitting their universities to be a “safe haven for … genocide and hate speech.” However, university presidents do not create those policies. They are are employed to enforce policies created by faculty and boards of directors.

Ironically, they could be fired if they did not do so, not if they did. Helt’s call for their firing is simply political scapegoating which echoes U.S. Republican Representive Stefanik. Similarly, Helt calls hate speech of any kind “unAmerican.” Again the opposite is true. No matter how offensive, free speech is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While it is easy to be swept along by Helt’s “shock and horror” at what she finds “intolerable,” readers should not ignore her two false claims. Her reasoning is contrary to fact.

Apparently, Helt also expects her experience as a former Oregon state representative, school board member, and vice-chair of the Oregon House Education Committee to establish her authority on this issue. However, because this experience is narrowly limited, she makes an obviously false assumption about university students. When Helt claims “I know that students must feel safe to learn,” she makes a reasonable assumption about young students. However, for university students again the opposite is true.

The University of Chicago’s free speech principles adopted by over 100 universities and endorsed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression provides more useful guidance. It guarantees all members of a university community “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn” (Evan Mandery, “Don’t Create More Safe Spaces on Campus,” Politico). Only illegal, defamatory or genuinely threatening language is excluded. The job of university faculty is not to create intellectually safe spaces but to challenge college students with controversial ideas and views. Higher education’s task is not to make people comfortable but to make them think. Only by interacting with very different people and ideas can university students learn and evolve.

Soon after I retired after 36 years as a university professor, liberals invented the concepts “micro-aggressions” and “trigger warnings.” Leftists tried to persuade university faculty that educators needed to be more sensitive to how their students felt about free speech. Faculty were asked to be aware of micro-aggressions, i.e. how threatened minority students might feel by being called “gay,” “lesbian” or “African Americans.” Faculty were also urged to announce “trigger warnings” to their classes if they were going to introduce any controversial material, so students could ask for an alternative assignment or simply avoid class because they might be offended by having their beliefs challenged. It took years to demonstrate how misguided such attempts to protect students from free and open debate were, that they prevented students from learning to think, to defend or abandon their convictions, to become articulate, thoughtful adults.

More recently, conservatives have tried to pack school boards or threaten violence against members whose views they did not agree with, to demand censorship in schools and libraries of books they considered offensive, to force teachers to avoid exploring the more shameful aspects of American history (like the genocide of indigenous tribes or the kidnapping and enslaving of Africans), to demand a curriculum which excluded some topics they considered hurtful like gender identity formation, and to fire teachers who did not follow that curriculum because they were “woke.”

In light of this, former Republican state Representative Helt’s outrage about hate speech seems not just inconsistent but hypocritical. We should measure it against her party’s attempts to control speech they consider offensive and to uncritically support a presidential candidate whose primary campaign strategy is indulging in hate speech.

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