Students received an email one month ago from administrators saying that "a number of Brown students were involved in an altercation after words were exchanged about homophobic remarks made by one of the students." This incident might not have been reported to Public Safety, let alone the student body, if it hadn't escalated to violence. But in dorms, on quads, and between the lines of Campus Safety emails, hate speech happens at Brown, and you probably don't even know it.
Brown is a world whose lifeblood is free thought and expression. But speech, in the era of diversity, has gained new power to both produce insight and to savage one's neighbors. Slurs are scrawled on student's doors and yelled at campus pedestrians, and they are often met with complacency in the name of free speech.
Suffering and fear are not unfortunate byproducts of spirited debate. But how can speech be regulated? For the answer we turn to Alexander Meiklejohn, Brown Professor, Dean, and class of 1893.
In 1954, shortly after the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Meiklejohn told the Senate subcommittee on Constitutional rights that the First Amendment "declares that with respect to political belief, political discussion, political advocacy, political planning, our citizens are sovereign." The amendment allows the state "to limit the freedom of men as they go about the management of their private, their non-political, affairs." This now famous bifurcation of speech into the political and the private is known as the Meiklejohn interpretation of the First Amendment.
Universities - including Meiklejohn's alma mater - do well to follow the spirit of his interpretation. It's easy to feel squeamish about being "thought police" or to ignore what seems intractable. But separating the personally damaging speech from the logically impaired is crucial to Brown's present and future.
In the marketplace of ideas, David Horowitz continues to trade in bullplop. First he expounded the illogic of reparations-as-racism, and now cries about the lack of "Academic Freedom" on today's college campuses. But the Meiklejohn interpretation offers a noteworthy distinction between Horowitz's two brands of manure.
A right to freedom from someone else's political views is antithetical to the Meiklejohn interpretation. But squelching someone's claim to such a right would be as well. What about Mr. Horowitz's earlier argument that "reparations are a bad idea - and racist too"? Part politics, part race baiting, this unholy fusion might not warrant total protection. As statements move across Meiklejohn's spectrum, institutions and academic communities are increasingly empowered to regulate their content.
Meiklejohn thus defines both what is protected and what isn't. The Daily Jolt poster who says "Aren't you the people who got f--ing burned in ovens in Europe during the 40's?" deserves little protection when Jolters vote to remove that post. By the time we get to language intended to hurt and intimidate, we have moved to private, regulatable speech, whose penumbra includes fraud, libel, verbal abuse and the pan-historic dictionary of violence and suppression which comprises hate speech.
Some may recall that the Supreme Court upheld the rights of the Nazi party to march in Skokie, Illinois. Hate speech is different. It is not a profession of one's public beliefs so much as it is an attack on another person. Political speech, Meiklejohn might say, is the spirit which giveth civic life. A slur is seldom a political statement.
Yet we seem reluctant to come down too hard on those who threaten other students with well-worn smears. Meiklejohn can't procure us a perfect equilibrium of freedoms. But he is clear: we need not protect non-political speech which harms members of our microcosm. In fact we are obligated, as President Simmons told the Student Body last Wednesday, to confront our neighbors.
Big institutions like simple rules, and unless students demand change, there will be none. The Roger Williams College Republicans, perpetual political pass blockers for the radical right, are peddling free speech to the Associated Press, and they are not alone. Orientation programs, disciplinary procedures, and police investigations must reflect the fact that some speech is intolerable. But real change is dependent on you standing up when someone says something wrong. Perhaps this is the approach that Meiklejohn might find most satisfactory - combating speech with speech. A University can change its rules, but only a friend can change a person's heart, and too often we are silent.
It is thus apropos that Meiklejohn has been immortalized in Brown's peer advising program, for the boy who cries "fag" is most successfully reproached by his suitemate. Brown can and must fight hate speech, but only you can make that task obsolete.
Ari Savitzky '06 combats speech with writing.
