[1509] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
the AAUP's official policy on speech and expression
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kai-yuh Hsiao)
Mon Oct 13 11:55:45 2003
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 20:44:49 -0400
Reply-To: eepness@MIT.EDU
From: Kai-yuh Hsiao <eepness@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
I did a little more reading on the subject of protecting speech and
expression on campuses, and found that the American Association of
University Professors has an official position concerning freedom of
speech. I'm posting it below, both because it conveys a point which
I'm trying to get across here, and also because it hopefully carries a
little weight.
It's also available in PDF form at
http://www.central.edu/library/handbook/attach5.pdf .
To summarize, our administrative and student leaders are not wrong to
individually condemn the email. As leaders, they set a standard of
civility for the community to follow, and help to guide open
discussions of issues on campus. However, any official disciplinary
action will cross the line between opening a discussion, and
formalizing some sort of speech code. Official bans on speech are not
conducive to an academic environment.
Thus: Don't punish the students, and don't write a speech code.
That's my read of it. Full text follows:
[This is a policy statement from the American Association of
University Professors. The statement was endorsed by AAUP's Committee
A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and by its Council at their meetings
in June 1992. As with all AAUP policy statements, it is in the public
domain. It was published in the July-August 1992 _Academe_.]
On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes
Freedom of thought and expression is essential to any institution of
higher learning. Universities and colleges exist not only to transmit
existing knowledge. Equally, they interpret, explore, and expand that
knowledge by testing the old and proposing the new.
This mission guides learning outside the classroom quite as much as in
class, and often inspires vigorous debate on those social, economic,
and political issues that arouse the strongest passions. In the
process, views will be expressed that may seem to many wrong,
distasteful, or offensive. Such is the nature of freedom to sift and
winnow ideas.
On a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden.
No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it
may not be expressed.
Universities and colleges are also communities, often of a residential
character. Most campuses have recently sought to become more diverse,
and more reflective of the larger community, by attracting students,
faculty, and staff from groups that were historically excluded or
underrepresented. Such gains as they have made are recent, modest, and
tenuous. The campus climate can profoundly affect an institution's
continued diversity. Hostility or intolerance to persons who differ
from the majority (especially if seemingly condoned by the
institution) may undermine the confidence of new members of the
community. Civility is always fragile and can easily be destroyed.
In response to verbal assaults and use of hateful language some
campuses have felt it necessary to forbid the expression of racist,
sexist, homophobic, or ethnically demeaning speech, along with conduct
or behavior that harasses. Several reasons are offered in support of
banning such expression. Individuals and groups that have been victims
of such expression feel an understandable outrage. They claim that the
academic progress of minority and majority alike may suffer if fears,
tensions, and conflicts spawned by slurs and insults create an
environment inimical to learning.
These arguments, grounded in the need to foster an atmosphere
respectful of and welcome to all persons, strike a deeply responsive
chord in the academy. But, while we can acknowledge both the weight of
these concerns and the thoughtfulness of those persuaded of the need
for regulation, rules that ban or punish speech based upon its content
cannot be justified. An institution of higher learning fails to
fulfill its mission if it asserts the power to proscribe ideas -- and
racial or ethnic slurs, sexist epithets, or homophobic insults almost
always express ideas, however repugnant. Indeed, by proscribing any
ideas, a university sets an example that profoundly disserves its
academic mission.
Some may seek to defend a distinction between the regulation of the
content of speech and the regulation of the manner (or style) of
speech. We find this distinction untenable in practice because
offensive style or opprobrious phrases may in fact have been chosen
precisely for their expressive power. As the United States Supreme
Court has said in the course of rejecting criminal sanctions for
offensive words:
[W]ords are often chosen as much for their emotive as their
cognitive force. We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution,
while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has
little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically
speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall
message sought to be communicated.
The line between substance and style is thus too uncertain to sustain
the pressure that will inevitably be brought to bear upon disciplinary
rules that attempt to regulate speech.
Proponents of speech codes sometimes reply that the value of emotive
language of this type is of such a low order that, on balance,
suppression is justified by the harm suffered by those who are
directly affected, and by the general damage done to the learning
environment. Yet a college or university sets a perilous course if it
seeks to differentiate between high-value and low-value speech, or to
choose which groups are to be protected by curbing the speech of
others. A speech code unavoidably implies an institutional competence
to distinguish permissible expression of hateful thought from what is
proscribed as thoughtless hate.
Institutions would also have to justify shielding some, but not other,
targets of offensive language -- not to political preference, to
religious but not to philosophical creed, or perhaps even to some but
not to other religious affiliations. Starting down this path creates
an even greater risk that groups not originally protected may later
demand similar solicitude -- demands the institution that began the
process of banning some speech is ill equipped to resist.
Distinctions of this type are neither practicable nor principled;
their very fragility underscores why institutions devoted to freedom
of thought and expression ought not adopt an institutionalized
coercion of silence.
Moreover, banning speech often avoids consideration of means more
compatible with the mission of an academic institution by which to
deal with incivility, intolerance, offensive speech, and harassing
behavior:
(1) Institutions should adopt and invoke a range of measures that
penalize conduct and behavior, rather than speech, such as rules
against defacing property, physical intimidation or harassment, or
disruption of campus activities. All members of the campus community
should be made aware of such rules, and administrators should be ready
to use them in preference to speech-directed sanctions.
(2) Colleges and universities should stress the means they use best --
to educate -- including the development of courses and other
curricular and co-curricular experiences designed to increase student
understanding and to deter offensive or intolerant speech or conduct.
Such institutions should, of course, be free (indeed encouraged) to
condemn manifestations of intolerance and discrimination, whether physical
or verbal.
(3) The governing board and the administration have a special duty not
only to set an outstanding example of tolerance, but also to challenge
boldly and condemn immediately serious breaches of civility.
(4) Members of the faculty, too, have a major role; their voices may
be critical in condemning intolerance, and their actions may set
examples for understanding, making clear to their students that
civility and tolerance are hallmarks of educated men and women.
(5) Student personnel administrators have in some ways the most
demanding role of all, for hate speech occurs most often in
dormitories, locker-rooms, cafeterias, and student centers. Persons
who guide this part of campus life should set high standards of their
own for tolerance and should make unmistakably clear the harm that
uncivil or intolerant speech inflicts.
To some persons who support speech codes, measures like these --
relying as they do on suasion rather than sanctions -- may seem
inadequate. But freedom of expression requires toleration of "ideas we
hate," as Justice Holmes put it. The underlying principle does not
change because the demand is to silence a hateful speaker, or because
it comes from within the academy. Free speech is not simply an aspect
of the educational enterprise to be weighed against other desirable
ends. It is the very precondition of the academic enterprise itself.
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