Some Actions Are Not Free Speech

DEFACEMENT OF PROPERTY. Death threats to reporters. Presentation of false scholarship in the classroom to serve a political agenda. Must such acts be protected by a university that is committed to freedom of speech?

The issue of what constitutes free speech has been raised with a new urgency in recent weeks, initially because City College decided to keep the infamous Leonard Jeffries as head of its African-American Studies Department, and then because of an incident of anti-semitic harassment at Yale. In both cases, "free speech" was invoked to justify decisions not to punish the perpetrators of bigoted acts.

Cases like these are often the place where absolute believers in free speech part company with those who make community standards their highest value. The former have opposed hate speech codes prohibiting the expression of racist and anti-semitic opinions, on the grounds that the principle of a university is compromised when ideas become punishable.

These same people now extend that principle (as they see it) to defend Jeffries' right to advocate racist theories in the classroom and issue death threats to members of the press, and the Yale student's First Amendment right to spray-paint a swastika on another's door.

Yet there is something about these incidents that makes the free speech defense--offered by City College and the dean of Yale, among others--not only incompatible with basic community standards but inconsistent with the very reason why freedom of speech should be protected in a university.

THE FUNDAMENTAL distinction to be made is between freedom of speech and freedom of self-expression. John Stuart Mill, the most eloquent defender of freedom of speech, outlined the basic reasons why it is a good that a civilized community (such as a university) should pursue.

Repression of ideas deprives the community of the means by which its own intellectual and moral errors can be corrected: if all views one disagrees with are suppressed, there is no possibility for growth, change or progress towards the truth.

This is quite different from the defense offered on behalf of Jeffries and the Yale student. The principle behind the respective universities' inaction is that individuals have the right to "express themselves"--the ideological equivalent of the right to "do your own thing."

While it is true that this is not the way the defenders have explicitly stated their position, there is no other belief that could motivate their arguments. Neither City College nor Dean Jerome Kagan believes that racism and Nazism contribute to the intellectual and moral growth of the university. Kagan even said he hoped the censure of the community would be sufficient punishment for the offending student.

In addition to being bigoted, the actions in question violate non-ideological community regulations: In the student's case, defacement of another's property; in Jeffries's case, unprofessional misuse of his position as a lecturer to present false and politicized scholarship, and death threats to a Harvard Crimson reporter.

The failure of Yale and City College to punish these violations implies an indefensible double standard: The perpetrator doesn't have to face the consequences of his actions if they were ideologically motivated. The principle underlying this stance is that such actions are the natural extension of one's opinions, and to punish the former is to discriminate against the latter.

This confusion is typical of the modern debate about free speech in the university. As in the case of Douglas Hann at Brown University, with whom Jeffries has been unfairly compared, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between speech and action.

Hann was permanently expelled last year for violating Brown's hate speech code, which prohibited "demeaning actions" directed against "a group or class of persons" based on their "race, religion, or sexual orientation." Hann's shouted racist and anti-semitic epithets outside a dorm. In this case, holding and expressing such opinions were considered actions and wrongly disciplined as such. In the cases of Jeffries and the Yale student, their illegal actions are being treated as nothing more than expressions of opinions. The reasoning in both cases is flawed.

EXAMINATION of this reasoning shows how far we have gotten away from the original ideal of the university as a truth-seeking community rather than simply a collection of truth-seeking individuals. From the point of view of the isolated individual, it may seem inconsistent to punish his "self-expression" depending on the form it takes: Aren't both actions and words equally authentic expressions of his viewpoint, which must not be suppressed?

Some forms of "self-expression," however, have a negative impact on the community that is quite apart from the effect of the ideas expressed: for example, defacement of property, violation of the professional relationship between lecturer and students, and death threats meant to abrogate freedom of the press.

In cases like these, it is time to recognize that the purposes of the university are hindered by infringement of the rules of civilized conduct, which are basic to the communal pursuit of truth. President Neil L. Rudenstine recognized this after the word "faggot" was scrawled on the door of a Lowell House resident last Monday night. As Rudenstine said, criminal acts such as defacement of property are "no longer in the bounds of speech" and should be prosecuted rather than protected under the First Amendment.

This is where freedoms of speech and opinion pass over into freedoms of self-expression and action, and that is where the line must be drawn. By not drawing it, those who think they are defending free speech are actually defending nothing more elevated than an egotistical bigot's will to power.

Both Yale and City College miss the distinction between speech and self expression.