When Presidents Speak Out, They Encourage Students to Do the Same

This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “Fostering Students’ Free Expression,” available in the Chronicle Store.

Teaching students to express themselves clearly and persuasively should be one of the core outcomes of a college education. Too often, however, our pedagogy on free speech seems woefully inadequate as campuses wrestle with fallout from confrontations on the quad, heckling that shuts down speakers, and rules banning certain forms of speech. Notorious cases like last semester’s incident at Stanford Law School, in which student hecklers prevented a federal appeals-court judge from speaking, demonstrate that we are not doing enough to teach students how to exercise their free-speech rights effectively. Debating Judge Kyle Duncan would have been far better than shouting him down. The more recent outbreak of campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war has sharpened the free-speech debate.

Modeling examples of compelling speech can be good pedagogy, but higher education imposes paradoxical rules about who may speak. We claim to promote freedom of speech, but some of the best practitioners of effective speech — college presidents — are told to remain silent on the most important issues of the day lest we chill, if not intimidate completely, the free-speech rights of our students and faculty members. Calls for presidents to remain silent have grown louder with rising contentiousness over their statements about the Middle East crisis. This line of thinking infantilizes both presidents and our constituents, and debilitates the ability of the academy to respond to the crises we must face together. We need student voices to be loud and courageous in the contemporary debates about their education; if we expect them to learn how to advocate before governors and legislatures, we should not assume that students are too fragile to hear the president’s voice as well.

Higher education is under severe assault as politicians attempt to rewrite curricula, repress historical and scientific facts, exclude undocumented students, censor faculty members and librarians, abolish tenure, marginalize LGBTQ students, and ban programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action has left many students of color wondering if there is any place left for them in higher education.

Presidents betray their responsibilities when they remain silent in the face of these grave threats to our students, our faculties, and the very purpose of our work in higher education. Presidents must exercise their freedom of speech — prudently but purposefully as advocates for our students and as stewards of our mission. Presidential voices can be even stronger when they join in solidarity with students who have so much to lose in the current dystopian struggle for control of our intellectual enterprise.

As a president who does not hesitate to speak out on issues that concern our community at Trinity, I try to keep several points in mind as I craft my texts: the relevance of the topic to our campus constituents, the different points of view on the issue, and how to give student perspectives a space for expression.

Trinity students are activists on many issues for which they have a great deal of personal experience, from gun control to immigration policy to Black Lives Matter to women’s rights and protection for LGBTQ persons. When I speak out on those issues, our students tell me that they feel affirmed. I encourage them to share comments on my blogs, and I invite their own essays for publication. Sometimes the students will ask me to address a topic publicly because they feel it’s important for Trinity’s leader to take a position. Trinity students never hesitate to raise problems, to disagree with me, and to point out where I’m flat-out wrong.

For example, in early October, after the Hamas attack on Israel, I issued a statement to our campus community in which I said, “There can be no justification for the deliberate infliction of so much suffering; the Jewish community has borne the evil consequences of virulent antisemitism for centuries, and still it continues. We must stand firmly and clearly in solidarity with our Jewish sisters and brothers, and we must continue to confront and root out the racial and ethnic hatred that has consumed and debilitated so many lives.”

Immediately, I received some messages of thanks from Jewish members of our community, but several students also wrote to condemn my statement as lacking any acknowledgment of the suffering of Palestinians. I quickly followed up with a more complete blog statement that acknowledged the disagreement, quoting one of the students with her permission. Following that, we also had a virtual town-hall meeting during which students and faculty members engaged in the debate robustly. Publicly modeling the management of even passionate disagreement is an important part of presidential leadership on free speech.

For me, part of modeling good free speech is also modeling how to accept the criticism that comes with it.

I’ve also learned that I have to be sure to respect how students want to express themselves since their styles will be different from mine.

I learned that lesson early in my presidency. In January 1991, when the first Gulf War broke out after Iraq invaded Kuwait, our campus community gathered to discuss the war and possible responses; faculty and staff members reminisced about our Vietnam War protests, while the students looked on, increasingly bored with the baby-boomer tales of the 1960s. As I gave my own little speech about how we should rally to protest war and work for peace, a student stood up and asked for my permission to set up a table in the lobby to collect signatures on an antiwar petition.

I replied, impatiently, “Why are you asking my permission? You should just do it!”

The student drew herself up righteously and retorted, “We’re not hippies like you were. We want to do this the right way!”

Her lesson was humbling: Don’t tell students how to speak; they must be able to choose their own styles and methods of advocacy.

I’ve also learned that encouraging students to exercise their right to speak can have a boomerang effect; as we help students to discover their voices, we should not be surprised when those voices create consequences for us. I learned that lesson in my advocacy for our undocumented students, known as Dreamers, many of whom have private scholarships. One of the donors asked to meet with the scholarship recipients; he happened to be an executive with Amazon.

During the meeting with our Dreamers, the donor called on a student who proceeded to read a statement against Amazon’s alleged technological cooperation with federal immigration authorities to facilitate deportations. The other students looked aghast, but our benefactor thanked the student for her comments and responded to the issues she had raised. At the end of the meeting, I reminded the students that speaking out for causes we believe in is a hallmark of a Trinity education.

But the protest was far from over. The student who spoke out had also invited some anti-Amazon grass-roots protesters, and as I escorted our guest to his car, an angry group of people surrounded us, chanting in protest. Our benefactor listened calmly as the protesters shouted at him while holding up cellphones to record the moment. After a few minutes, I told them that we had heard their message, and now it was time for them to leave; the crowd broke up. Our guest departed the campus without further incident.

Afterward, some of the Dreamers came to me, afraid that the benefactor would withdraw his support for their scholarships. I had already spoken with our donor, and he assured me that the scholarships were secure — even for the student who had challenged him. Especially for her.

When we teach students to raise their voices, we have to be willing to live with the noise. We talk a lot in higher education today about making students feel safe, and safety is an important objective to make learning possible. But real higher learning cannot occur in comfort; our work requires us to make students feel uncomfortable and uncertain and, yes, even angry. Our responsibility is to teach our students how to channel their passions, their demands, their anger, and their sense of purpose into persuasive expression that leads to action. When we teach our students how to exercise their freedom of speech well, we are teaching them how to be leaders for social change.