To the Editor:
"Rather than asking the administration to regulate speech, let's start asking students to do the same things."
I read Margaret Kuecker's letter "Student Free Speech" in the May 4th issue of The Dartmouth with horror and bewilderment. Contrary to the letter's title, she does not argue for any "freedoms." She asks Dartmouth to elect a different censor under the guise of "student empowerment" -- you.
"We, as a community, should impose informal sanctions on each other." Divergent thought must be punished! Those who stray from the herd must be taught a lesson, for a lone sheep needs your help, comrades.
In 1964, students at the University of California-Berkeley successfully protested and demonstrated that through student power and organization, freedoms, particularly freedom of expression, should and could be extended beyond the yoke of their administration's opinions of what was "tolerable" and "civil." The student alliance staging the protests comprised a gamut of political activists groups, some with violently opposing viewpoints on an array of social issues, many inflammatory and deemed "offensive" to one another. Last November at Berkeley, students protested and successfully prevented a planned speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under the slogan of "No free speech for fascists!" The irony here is crushing.
"Allow the community of your peers to define those standards and hold each other to them." What could be more mind-numbing? Don't think for yourself, let your community do that for you. According to Ms. Kuecker's belief, today at Dartmouth we now share a full, common, and confident grasp of what values, modes of speech, and behaviors should and should not be tolerated. Now that we have reached this nirvana, what use have we for "free speech," for unique or (gasp) unpopular ideas? It is time for us to pick that discarded yoke back up, to enforce proper thought and expression not through top-down but bottom-up socialism, through negative reinforcement aimed at our peers who sidestep from our common values.
Voltaire once said "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Would he be welcome at Dartmouth?
