To the Editor:
Your article on the Stanford disruption speaks of “a national debate over how to balance free expression and student safety” (“Disruption of Speech at Stanford Prompts President to Apologize — and Criticize Staff’s Response,” The Chronicle, March 14). That mistaken formulation of the issue is at the heart of the problem. There is no conceivable way that allowing Judge Duncan to speak about the decisions of the Fifth Circuit would have threatened any student’s safety. In reality, the disruptors’ notion of safety would entitle them to silence anyone who made them feel uncomfortable. It is the definition of safety of a terrified despot.
However, what does in fact threaten their safety, especially as future lawyers, whose jobs may well involve supporting unpopular clients, is precisely their own actions, the silencing of dissent. If they, drunk with the power of current elite fashions, silence Judge Duncan today, they are making it all the more likely that, if and when, political power shifts, their enemies will have no compunction at all about silencing them. They then will not have the least credibility in their pious pleas about fair treatment or their right to speak.
Freedom of speech is an example of what Aristotle calls reciprocal justice. What goes round has a strong tendency to come round. Some call that karma. The reason it works that way isn’t mysterious. People apply rules to others they apply to themselves and they cheerfully break rules when others don’t apply them to themselves. The diversity dean who grudgingly defended Judge Duncan’s right to speak but bemoaned the fact that he was invited in the first place would have done much better, precisely as a defender of “diversity,” to remind the disruptors about the that fundamental premise of all legal systems and all free societies, namely that the law that protects your fellow citizens, ideological enemies though they be, protects you and your clients too, and that your safety depends on theirs.
Fred Baumann
Professor of Political Science
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio
