Why freedom of expression is fundamental

By S.M.

RACIST incidents on several American college campuses, notably at the University of Missouri and at Yale, have sparked spirited student protests this month. As this newspaper reported last week, some of these demonstrations have provoked further debates about the freedom of speech. Is it acceptable for a faculty member to forcibly prevent a student journalist from photographing a public demonstration and to call for “muscle” to remove him from a scene where students are chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, reporters have got to go”? Should administrators bow to student calls to unseat a house master because she wrote a letter questioning Yale’s advice to students about how they should dress up for Halloween?

Some observers say these events show that campus politics have veered from liberal to intolerant. Others argue that highlighting offences to free speech are a “self-serving deflection” from the scourge of racism on campus. At the University of Missouri, recent years have seen white students littering the black culture centre with cotton balls and using social media to issue death threats against black students. The atmosphere of fear and intimidation is poisonous to college community. There is little doubt that systemic and interpersonal racism plague many American campuses and that administrators often fail to respond appropriately. Compared to these harms, the purported damage to an abstract principle like freedom of speech may seem paltry.

But there are good reasons to resist calls to quieten down about the freedom of speech. Democracy is founded on the proposition that people can govern themselves, and well-informed self-governance is impossible in an atmosphere where members of the press are excoriated for doing their jobs or where controversial ideas are subject to punishment. John Stuart Mill argued in "On Liberty"that unconventional views often contain a seed of truth that society should heed. The punitive impulse is inconsistent with searching debate that may lead to novel approaches to old problems. Even when dissenting views are completely without merit, he wrote, they might help others understand anew why their ideas are worth holding. And as Justice Elena Kagan said a year ago during a Supreme Court hearing involving a particularly nasty example of online speech, “the First Amendment requires a kind of a buffer zone to ensure that even stuff that is wrongful maybe is permitted because we don't want to chill innocent behaviour”.

Maintaining that freedom of speech is fundamental is not to say that it is absolute. America’s Supreme Court has held that there is no protection for libellous speech, for example, or for expression that is obscene or likely to ignite a riot or provoke a fight. Universities are perfectly within their rights to sanction students for issuing threats, whether racially charged or not. Speakers are fully protected when expressing their views about other people’s expression. But freedom of speech is not well served by official action against people who deign to raise their voice in a debate.