The Easy Target

FREE SPEECH--everyone's for it, nobody's against it, what's the big deal? Obviously something, or else the president of the University would not have been moved, as he was last week, to set down his views on the subject in an open letter to the Harvard community. Not since the early 1970s have college campuses had to confront the specter of angry hecklers drowning out or scaring away invited speakers, but with the return of the custom, President Bok thought it time to explain why the thing is important. But though this is a good, workman-like job, Bok's discourse leaves a sour taste--and the feeling that he has expended a lot of hot air at the expenses of moral leadership.

A lawyer by training, Bok's mind takes keenly to the idea of due process which is at the heart of the free speech question. His letter is an elegant defense of the conviction that "truth will emerge more often from a process of free discussion and debate than it will if the government or any other group undertakes to decide which ideas will be heard and which will be suppressed."

Bok understands that defending free speech means more than mouthing pieties about its importance in a democratic society. Thus, after a brief detour to explain first principles, he devotes the bulk of his letter to commenting on individual issues relating to free speech. While he admits, with Bokian modesty, that he cannot "pretend to answer all the questions and problems that could arise involving free speech," he does manage to provide a good number of thoughtful answers.

A particular strength of Bok's letter, for instance, is his skillful handling of the important question of the rights of hecklers, an issue that has particular immediacy on a campus where in recent years the Secretary of Defense, Jerry Falwell, and a representative of the P.L.O. have all had difficulty getting their messages across. Pointblank, Bok disposes of the numerous red herrings thrown up by proponents of the idea that drowning out a speaker is sometimes admissable behavior.

The president correctly points out that no one has the right to decide for others what is appropriate for public debate or what has already been so thrashed out that nobody needs to hear about it anymore. Further, he has no truck for the mistaken notion that somehow hecklers have an equivalent right to protection in their effort to drown out an unpopular speaker.

While Bok argues, with merit, that hecklers have the right to communicate their disapproval of a speech, he makes a useful analogy to suggest that this right exists only in so far as it does not interfere with a "speaker's ability to communicate and the rights of other members of the audience to listen," Bok invokes the maxim: "Your freedom to swing your first stops at the point of my nose." Bok could have gone further; absent is perhaps the most potent argument against the hecklers--that the democracy they epitomize is one in which the loudest voices prevail, which is no democracy to speak of.

IF BOK'S ARGUMENT is so cogent, then why does it strike a hollow chord? It does so, we venture, because it once again points up the president's proclivity to pontificate at the expense of action, to take on the easy target as opposed to the difficult.

Bok quite rightly takes up the issue of the celebrated Pi Eta Club newsletter, which depicted women in almost the lewdest, most sexist language imaginable, as a case study in which free speech must be extended to even the most offensive of communications. He goes on at length about why he issued a strong public denunciation of the letter, and how this denunciation, rather than inhibiting free speech, is part and parcel of the market-place of ideas to which free speech is supposed to contribute.

So far, so good. But why does Bok stop, both rhetorically and in actions, at this ugly incident? At the beginning of his letter, he mentions in passing several other examples of violations of free speech at Harvard, but with the exception of the Pi Eta incident, he fails to return to them. No harsh words are reserved for those Jewish students who disrupted a speech last year by a representative of the P.L.O. nor does Bok directly condemn members of the Black Law Students Association who did not allow Jewish students to question a P.L.O. official at a symposium of their own.

The point is not that Bok should take every opportunity to hammer away at injustice in the world, but that he must be timely, and he must be consistent. The moment so come down hard on violations of free speech is not in a letter--no matter how eloquently written--a year after the fact, but directly after the violations occur.

This imperative becomes all the more urgent if the critic, as Bok has done, gives the appearance of being picky about what he is going to criticize. What is singular about the Pi Eta incident in the free speech arena? Why action here and not in other similar instances where a voice of moral leadership was called for? Why didn't Bok take the initiative and use the Weinberger and the P.L.O. incidents to vent his spleen on the necessity of free speech?

The most revealing aspect of Bok's latest epistle may well have nothing to do with its substance, but rather with what it shows about the character of leadership in this University. Bok writes a good letter. His denunciation of the Pi Eta Club was proper. But is he willing to do more than come crashing down on the easiest target of them all?