The primary beneficiaries of free speech are shouting it down. Students benefit most from free discourse, their education itself dependent on the reasonable exchange of ideas.
Students are protesting on university campuses across the nation, shrieking about “safe spaces.” They claim a right to retreat into a place (be it physical, ideological, social) where they can escape from “microaggressions,” violations — intentional or not — of their self-esteem.
Their inability to withstand challenges to belief, heritage, or feeling has annihilated any capacity they might have had for liberal learning. What is a liberal education but a work of long, painful formation? Liberal education is a dangerous thing; so, too, free speech. And the two are inextricably connected.
The university ought to be a space where the reasonable exchange of ideas is preserved as a means of developing its students, not a space where its students can be protected from ideas they dislike.
Dedication to free speech entitles students who feel marginalized to protest, yes, but not to intimidate or browbeat peers and administrators into submission. Freedom of speech rests upon one crucial prerequisite: all parties’ ability to engage with one another rationally.
Regrettably, American college students opposed to “safe spaces” have proven to be relatively docile in the face of screeching social paranoia. Not until Princeton University students formed the Princeton Open Campus Coalition on Monday did these infant tyrants face any meaningful opposition on campus.
Sofia Gallo, a member of the POCC legislative committee, said the coalition’s very existence is regrettable.
“The sad thing is that we’re the first group to speak up against the protests, at least within the campus,” Gallo said this week. “I also think it’s pretty sad that freedom of speech is something that needs to be defended now. That should be a given within the university. But our existence shows that it’s not.”
Free speech is a deeply necessary precondition for human flourishing. A liberal education helps us articulate and defend the things most dear, most dangerous, and most delicate about human life. This education is impossible without freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas.
