To the Editor:
Jon Wisniewski '07's op-ed titled "Supporting Free Speech When It Matters Most" (Oct. 24), recently caught my eye, mostly because I assumed it would take a pragmatic look at the issue of free speech on campus, claiming that there are some times when free speech rights are the most pressing concerns and other times when it is more productive to look at other factors.
Does that sound harsh? Well, it probably would to Wisniewski, who argues bombastically, "Dartmouth as an idea, and as a community and not just an administration, does have an obligation to us to respect this freedom in all its forms. Without this, our degrees would mean nothing. Yet many involved in this educational process would do nothing other than destroy the very idea of free speech at Dartmouth." Not what I had hoped for.
I had hoped for something different because I thought that maybe Wisniewski would not fall into the same trap nearly all bristling free speech supporters bump into. In talking about rights, and solely about rights, they rarely account for the fact that some rights claims conflict.
In talking about professor Ronald Edsforth's protest, Wisniewski's op-ed reduces to, "You can't protest here! This is a free speech zone!" In talking about Paul Heintz '06's Jesus cartoon, the argument reduces to, "You can't be offended here! This is an open society!"
The point is, Edsforth's freedom to express his opinion conflicts with the rights of others to dispute the merits of torture. Paul Heintz's right to make crude line-drawings conflicts with the right of many people to be natural human beings and have a reaction and their further right to express that reaction. The conflict is indissoluble -- you cannot justify someone's right to free speech by taking away somebody else's rights to react openly.
This all results in a merry-go-round of finger-pointing and question-begging. I am not trying to say Wisniewski should be prevented from making these claims. I am, however, saying they are not logically coherent and should not be viewed as such. Those are two entirely different claims, and it is on the second kind of claim that we should be basing our arguments for or against an expression or speech-act.
Wisniewski almost makes it there when he argues that professor Edsforth is working against his own cause by suppressing the debate, but he moves right back into talk of rights being trampled and Soviet or medieval ideals triumphing over our own open standards.
Appealing only to rights instead of logic and reason is a circuitous argument, and it gets us nowhere. That should not be the goal of a free and open society. And you are more than welcome to tell me I am wrong.
