You Can’t Handle The Truth: The Importance of Free Speech on Campus

Samantha Lee

We have a duty to offend. That duty does not fall to me, to you, or to any one individual—but make no mistake that it does fall to us. As with all issues that require collective action, we cannot afford to ignore that this duty is imperative.

This idea is by no account novel. The great philosophers of ancient Greece were acutely aware of the necessity to provoke society into questioning its hierarchies, its laws, and its values. Socrates called himself a gadfly, an annoying creature which stings society into consciousness of itself, impelling the society to re-examine what it does and what it ought to do. To actualize his vision, Socrates paid a high price, but his message was not lost. Long after his time, his admonition to induce continual societal introspection has lived on and thrived.

In its nascence, civil discourse was limited to matters that were deemed of no concern to the common people. Candid commentary on such weighty issues as governance, morality, or policy was exclusive to the stately marble halls of patricians, aristocrats, or whichever class was endowed with the privilege to rule. Gradually, civil discourse found its way outside these elite institutions and into the homes of the many—sometimes in trickles, other times in waves.

Time progressed, and this discourse grew from those initial experiments of hushed speech to the unremitting and thunderous assertions of today’s talking heads that are broadcast globally and instantaneously. At no small expense, speech became a phenomenon that was accessible to the many. The 17th century saw the British Bill of Rights allow for legally unimpugnable speech on the floor of Parliament. A century later, the French National Assembly set forth a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that claimed unhindered speech as a birthright and not a gift from a sovereign. Most recently, the United States Bill of Rights set into law the unambiguous right of the American citizen to act unrestrained by government with bold and unjustified speech, an ideal backed by the force of law.

My aim in this chronology is simply to bring forward the sharp contrast between the state of free speech as an aspirational end in times past and free speech as, at best, an arbitrary means among students at Georgetown. Throughout previous centuries, blood was spilled, monarchs were toppled, and popular assemblies were convened in the hope of someday achieving unrestricted speech. Today, far too many Georgetown students view free speech as a threat to some more noble and remarkably (though unsurprisingly) elusive goal.

When begrudgingly articulated, this ambiguous goal often takes the form of some newfound right to proceed through academic inquiry with one’s sensibilities unoffended. Too often among campus organizations, free speech is invoked only when convenient as a political instrument of the group or cause du jour. What this means-centric mindset fails to appreciate is the very basis for the conception of free speech: by advocating unhindered speech only in support of one’s own personal inclinations, one has adopted a de facto preemptive censorship. When speaking of censorship, it becomes tempting to appeal to legal protections rather than weigh the merits of free speech itself. We must as individuals proactively embrace free speech in Georgetown’s policies and, more importantly, in our dealings with one another.

Unfortunately, though our university has strong protections of free speech in its rules (from an objective, historical perspective), we Georgetown students have a less-than-stellar track record in its practice. The heckling of General David Petraeus during his 2010 speech, the disruption of World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim by GU Fossil Free, the calls for disinvitation of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius as a commencement speaker in 2012, and perhaps most egregiously, the exhaustive efforts to mitigate a speech on feminism by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers just last year each instantiate the culture of free speech on campus: a hinderance to our more important, subjective goals. It is this culture that is far more damaging than any university policy that allows a single vocal club to engage in free speech but withholds express university endorsement and material support.

It is not sufficient that, when confronted with a message deemed ill-conceived (to give a milder tone to the language used by predominant student pundits), we respond by quickly reiterating the opposing individual’s right to speak while simultaneously demanding the quarantine of the undesired speech and institutional denunciation of the speaker. The interjection of warnings before certain speech considered to be so grave as to trigger incalculable mental distress in any who may be so unfortunate as to suffer knowledge of it is but another example of our hollow words in support of free speech.

We maintain our elaborate institutional safeguards while undertaking as individuals extensive precautions to neutralize the substance of this very same free speech by constructing trigger warnings and “safe” spaces, demanding to rescind invitations, and launching crude but effective efforts to simply be louder than the undesirable speaker. To create a safe space devoid of free speech or permit an opt-out system is to say that free speech itself is dangerous and must be curtailed. To claim that this is a praiseworthy example of the practice of free speech is to make a mockery of its substantive value and be complacent with intellectual dishonesty.

To treat free speech as more than a pro forma observance and to practice it as individuals is to come face to face with those very discomforting words from which it has become not only acceptable but admirable to shield oneself. To hear them in their entirety, as harsh or unwelcoming as they may be is the duty that each of us has if we are to say we support free speech.

It is our obligation to be offended, for without being offended we cannot truly know our own values, beliefs, or limitations but simply succumb to the echo chamber that has become all too commonplace in academia. More importantly, it is our duty to offend—to say those things that others do not want to hear. To do this, we must make a collective effort to dispel the idea of a right to feel secure in our own thoughts and emotions, for surely, no such right exists. To engage in this effort, the endangered vestige that is free speech must once again be viewed by us, the students of Georgetown, as something more than a procedural formality. For, to develop a more ethical and informed individual, university, or society, and to formulate our own responses we must first hear what is being said by those with whom we could not disagree more.

Joe DiPietro is a sophomore in the College.