If we truly value free speech, we should value the right of other people to express any view, no matter how different it is from our own view. Personally, I think that last Friday's protest was pseudo-activism at its best. A self-righteous group of poorly organized, self-promoting students, aired a laundry list of feel-good socially engineered concepts that were poorly thought out, uselessly vague, and at times unintelligible. While I question the motivation of these protesters, and disagree with many of their principles, I support their right to voice these opinions. I also hope that they will listen when others choose to express conflicting opinions. Unfortunately, all too often this same freedom of expression is not afforded to dissenting points of view.
While Friday's protesters did voice some very valid concerns, many of these issues were lost because the huge scope of the list provided no unifying theme, thus alienating much of the campus. For example, I absolutely agree that the system should be reformed so that someone found guilty of rape should not be punished less severely than someone who violated the honor code. At the same time, the group failed to acknowledge that though the College's first priority when making reforms should always be the safety of students, steps must also be taken to assure the protection of those who are falsely accused. These are the types of discussions that would educate the campus and lead to productive changes at Dartmouth. While I would gladly participate in a discussion on fair adjudication for sexual assault and rape, I will not partake in a rally that also encourages the College to give money as an incentive for coed houses to leave the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council. In addition to the haphazard assortment of issues presented at the rally, the organizers didn't even do their homework before starting the protest. For example, as a nonprofit institution, Dartmouth is required by law to disclose the nature of its financial investments. I guess that knocks one item off their list.
I applaud those few brave souls who went to the rally with signs that expressed views opposed to those of the protesters. Many of these students were verbally harassed and even threatened with violence. It is incredibly ironic that some of the protesters who were up in arms about the verbal abuse of a female student in the Psi Upsilon fraternity incident did not flinch when verbal threats of violence were made toward students for having conservative points of view. Verbal abuse is wrong and should not be tolerated by our "community," but once again, the Left gets a free ride.
I walked by a certain dorm everyday this past fall and saw a huge poster of Mao Tse Tung hung in a first floor dorm room in a manner that put it on display to all passersby. Imagine for a moment that someone were to hang a poster of Hitler so the entire community could see it as they walked to class. There would be absolute outrage, and rightly so. Without getting into great historical detail, both men were cold-blooded murderers who massacred millions of people, and ruled over millions more through tyranny and fear. Hitler took conservatism to its absolute extreme in fascism while Mao took liberalism to its absolute extreme in communism. Thousands of Americans gave their lives to protect our freedom from the evils inherent in both of these extremes. Both are hateful to the American way of life, and both should be viewed as outside the scope of admirable political philosophies. Yet a student at Dartmouth can display a poster of Mao, and if someone were to complain, that student could immediately whine about their right to free speech.
The argument is not limited to this one incident. I have seen many t-shirts of Che Guevera, a man who is credited for starting violent leftist uprising throughout Latin America. Many dorm rooms are adorned with Rage Against the Machine posters that read "We support our troops in the field," with a picture of leftist revolutionaries who were responsible for the killing of innocent civilians. As a student whose parents emigrated from South America, I find the glorification of these violent insurrectionists to be disgusting, but no one else raises an eyebrow. What would Dartmouth students say if there was a poster of the Ku Klux Klan or of neo-nazis with a caption that reads "We support our troops in the field"? Many of us feel as disgusted by the Rage Against the Machine posters as we feel about a Klan poster.
Because we are a private institution, Dartmouth College has a right to control our free speech in just about any way that it sees fit. But as a liberal arts institution, they claim to foster a free exchange of ideas. In reality, the exchange of ideas is set up in a manner to stifle conservative thought while encouraging its underlying agenda of progressive social engineering. When copies of a certain conservative publication are torn up and thrown around the halls of a dorm it's no big deal -- there's no need to protect those right-wing weirdoes. If someone had torn up every copy of a controversial liberal (yet of course college funded) publication, the College would immediately investigate the vandalism. When this publication used harsh language and questionable subject matter it was called art, but when the humor magazine cracked a few politically incorrect jokes it almost lost College funding. Columnists in the D often mock President Bush for being stupid without controversy -- when I remarked about Clinton's sexual impropriety, many people called me a right wing extremist. Time and time again, liberals can spout off about anything they choose, while those with differing political philosophies have to think carefully about how their every word could possibly be misconstrued.
Last Friday's rally continued a trend that Dartmouth has come to know well. Liberal thinkers are given a free pass to be as extreme as they please, while conservative voices must watch everything that they say. The College claims to welcome discourse, but only if that discourse falls in the patterns of its embraced philosophy of social engineering and institutionalized liberalism. Dartmouth has a right to encourage whatever type of thinking it wishes because it is a private institution. But to then call itself a liberal arts institution that values free speech is hypocritical.
