Free Speech

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In a March 9 article, Kevin Malisani attacks Harvard's free speech policy and proposes an ideological test for the provision of Harvard police protection to visiting speakers. He would deny police protection to any speaker whom he or a majority of students finds provocative, inflammatory or offensive, or whom anyone hates enough to supress through violence. In an astonishing moral inversion, Mr. Malisani complains that unpopular speakers "provoke other to riot" by peacefully expressing ideas which their opponents violently suppress. His proposal would allow private thought-vigilantes to suppress precisely thsoe ideas which free speech is primarily intended to protect, those which challenge the underlying foundations of prevailing beliefs and which are sufficently different from mainstream thought to provoke anger and hatred.

Like the First Amendment, however, Harvard's free speech policy envisions something far more ambitious; the free and robust exchange of ideas in which the most widely held orthodoxies may be vigorously protested and the most hated heresies may be passionately advocated. The extensive security precaution taken at the Coors speech (and the Rosales speech last year) did not "play into the hands of the Conservative Club"; they reaffirmed Harvard's commitment to freedom of speech and belief.