This piece was written prior to the collection. The last three paragraphs appeared in the zine, “The Rhetoric of Tolerance and Free Speech.” While incredibly grateful to be included in this zine and to those who compiled, edited and circulated it, I personally had no role in its actual production beyond submitting the excerpt from the piece below. In the words of its producers, “A group of students wrote this zine in response to Swarthmore’s decision to host Robert George. We spent the weekend writing, designing and producing this zine collectively. Those involved in the creation of this zine were not explicitly named anywhere within it.”
As Robert George and Cornel West’s visit to campus nears, campus politics have again begun seeping into our collective Facebook walls and school publications. Swarthmore’s self-appointed advocacy body for free speech, The Swarthmore Independent, has urged students not to interfere with the audience’s ability to “freely listen and engage.” Calls for and claims to tolerance and free speech, however, have emerged from across the political spectrum: the seemingly universal value of constructive dialogue has again become contested ground.
Even as participants in these debates express a range of concerns, the now-familiar calls for free speech have more in common than we might think; namely, a firm investment in a central tenet of liberalism: the “marketplace of ideas.” The concept, with its origins in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), asserts that truth is the inevitable outcome of the free, public exchange of thought. The email announcing the event borrows from this theory directly, explaining that both West and George share commitments to “pursuing truth, living with integrity, and engaging in honest, thoughtful self-critical dialogue.” In no uncertain terms, these phrases are as descriptive as they are suggestive. So long as all sides can be heard, reason will emerge.
What is troubling about this “marketplace”, though, is that all sides are rarely represented. The right, center-right and liberal position on free speech — as it stems from liberal thought — has little to do with freedom and everything to do with power. Arguing that “free speech” itself is being disrupted creates a mythology around the term that has little to do with how power actually operates. While questioning Robert George’s presence on campus means questioning his conservative views, it also means questioning the very logic of liberalism.
Exploring the concept of free speech deserves a look into its history; some of its earliest defenders fought the repression of student and faculty voices on college campuses. The free speech movement came to a head on the University of California’s Berkeley campus in the mid-1960s. Student activists, many from across the political spectrum, were responding to the UC Regents’ systematic denial of freedom of expression on campus. The body had taken away students’ ability to disseminate political literature on UC Berkeley property. Professors, like many across the United States at the time, were required to take a “loyalty oath” to the United States government. The students organized against a coordinated, national movement against free speech and marginalized political expression, a movement — by the way — with a body count. Just over ten years earlier, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the United States government under suspicion of being Soviet spies. In 1970, four students protesting the Vietnam War were gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State University.
Repression of protest and free speech on college campuses extends well into the present. Most recently, students in the United Kingdom confronted the draconian criminalization of protests on their campuses, just as their counterparts at City University of New York (CUNY) face expulsion and police brutality in their fight to keep the last student-controlled space on an increasingly militarized campus.
This specific history of the free speech movement and campus repression is just a small part of the United State’s much deeper, darker history of systemic censorship that continues to pervade communities of color along with queer, gender-queer, differently abled and working class people. Much as the conservative media may try to convince us of a liberal conspiracy against free speech, that alleged “liberal conspiracy” itself — the one supposedly waged by the likes of CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times — has historically benefited those already in power. Regardless of how those outlets treat the far right, they decidedly act against people of color, the working class and pretty much anyone seeking to make transformative social change. Corporate ownership over the mainstream media ensures that corporations and their friends’ voices are always heard. Try as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow might to challenge the GOP, not only is her salary paid for by their friends in the oil and gas industry, but their ads sandwich any statement she might make against their more egregious practices.
Who, disproportionately, are the victims of censorship? Of government repression? Assuredly, they have not been the Robert Georges of the world. Can we honestly look back on 2013 and say that it is conservative voices like his that need freeing? This summer, the Supreme Court gutted the fourth and fifth sections of the Voting Rights Act, easing the path for conservative election boards across the country to disenfranchise poor and elderly voters and voters of color. For fifteen days this fall, conservatives managed to shut down the government, starving millions of the state and federal welfare programs on which they depend for survival. If students decide to disrupt George, then let us celebrate the temporary elevation of these voices of dissent; his and his fellow conservatives’ free speech; after all, will continue to echo through the halls of the prison system, Congress and Wall Street.
Repression of free speech is not the disruption of an event. What repression of free speech has looked like for so long has been indefinite prison stays, murder, exile and bombed houses, not to mention the censorship wrought by the slow violence of environmental degradation and economic disenfranchisement that can so often limit working class communities and communities of color in organizing for their rights as they fight for their own survival. To protest is not automatically to deny free speech, and free speech itself cannot be boiled down to a single incident or campus. Much as we might yearn for the liberal arts to embody the unfettered intellectual marketplace, Swarthmore exists within this world and the forces (read: oppressions) that structure it.
By all means, defend free speech. Defend the right of every person to stand up and make their voice heard, but also acknowledge that they do not stand on a level playing field. Remember whose voices are already being heard: who is shaping the debate by deciding who gets to step on stage, and who is allowed to enjoy their constitutionally protected rights every day of the year.
Kate Aronoff is a senior at Swathmore College.
For the record, Julius Rosenberg -was- a Soviet spy; Ethel, almost certainly not, but both were convicted. Saying they were “under suspicion” displays a significant liberty with the facts.