Amidst a national series of controversial campus speakers, including self-professed Islamophobe Richard Spencer’s visit to Stanford this November, the complexity surrounding the issue of the freedom of speech continues to inspire political discourse on Stanford’s campus. On Wednesday, Jan. 17, Stanford Political Union, a non-partisan organization dedicated to promoting political discussion, dove head-first into the issue by hosting “A Debate on Free Speech.”
Stanford Political Union brought together panelists from all different spectrums of the political sphere such as Eamonn Callan, a professor at the Pigott Family School of Education, and Peter Berkowitz, Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute. The panel also consisted of four student speakers including Justin Hsuan (’18), Arnav Mariwala (’17, M.S. ’19), Anna Mitchell (’20) and Sid Patel (Ph.D ’18).
The structured debate, which took place at 7 p.m. at Bechtel International Center, manifested in four rounds: a series of pre-prepared speeches up to seven minutes in length, a two-minute rebuttal per panelist, an open forum for audience member questions and concluding remarks from each speaker.
Some of the issues debated before the roughly 75 students in attendance were bringing controversial guests to campus, the so-called “hollowing and politicizing of the curriculum,” as Berkowitz put it, the administration’s involvement in speech regulation, and the development of campus “echo-chambers” .
The question of the validity of a guest speaker came down to a disagreement regarding whether or not said speaker would enhance or harm the student experience. Berkowitz speakers may offer a challenge to students’ viewpoints rather than simply being, “noxious or worthless,” and that refusing to bring these speakers would only hurt a student’s education.
“It also deprives students of a fund of common knowledge that would enable them — you all — to communicate more effectively, both your agreements and disagreements,” Berkowitz said.
However, Mariwala brought up the concern that not all speech would warrant this type of learning. Certain speech, he argued, may echo inequalities in our society by putting marginalized peoples in unfair positions.
“To put it bluntly, when the views of a controversial speaker, for example, devalue the humanity of a group of people, they actively detract from the university’s mission,” Mariwala said.
Despite this concern, Mitchell, who is Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Review, stressed the necessity of protecting all speech, or at least all speech ensured under the First Amendment.
Mitchel argued that, “In short, freedom of speech means nothing unless it is applied in the most unpopular circumstances,”
The two keynote speakers also challenged each other on a few issues, including the importance of “safe spaces” and the role of the university when it comes to sexual assault.
In response to an audience question in the open forum regarding “safe spaces,” Berkowitz enthusiastically agreed they should exist — “They’re called dorm rooms,” he said. However, outside of a one-room double, Berkowitz discouraged the idea of safe spaces because they coddle the learning experience of a student.
Callan insisted the issue was “a bit more complicated.” Though he agreed that the University should be an “intellectually unsafe place,” Callan recognized safe spaces as a means of addressing Stanford’s history of racial and gender disparities, an effort he called a “work in progress.”
Another theme was the proper influence the administration should have in regulating speech on campus. While Mariwala hoped the university would take a more “expansive view” in terms of regulating speech that harms and devalues the community, Mitchell and Patel argued for less administrative control, but for contrasting reasons.
Mitchell projected that some students may be in favor of empowering the university to create an objective standard for acceptable speech, but she rejected this standard as “impossible” and “inevitably politicized.”
Patel recognized that the university’s already strict regulations on speech have had an unfortunate impact on a variety of political demonstrations on campus. Patel, who has worked with Students for Justice in Palestine and participated in the Spencer walkout this November, cited asking workers to take off stickers that said “Respect and A Fare Workload” last Friday, and the 2015 backlash against a peaceable fossil fuel protest.
“You do not want to give this administration the power to decide what opinions get voiced on campus,” Patel said. “In fact, we should push the administration to declare all of campus a free speech area and to rescind or substantially clarify and scale down the event disruption policy.”
Regardless of political ideology, most panelists, with the exception of Patel, agreed that a disconnect between the right and left is promoting a culture without proper dialogue. Though Patel insisted that “there is not a problem with campus culture,” and the debate of free speech is “a controversy dreamed up by the right,” Hsuan discussed the culture as “toxic” and encouraged students to rededicate themselves to avoiding the “pseudo-learning that comes within a thought bubble.”
Callan echoed these concerns, encouraging all students to “walk the talk” in the hopes of learning more about the issues through intellectual adversary.
“The apogee of polarization is that we have caricatured each other to the point that we just don’t hear each other any more,” Callan added.
Berkowitz closed on a similar sentiment, citing the words of John Stuart Mill in his work, “On Liberty”: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”