Large numbers of Safety and Security officers are usually associated with frat parties and big weekends, not academic lectures. However, there were quite a few members of S&S present at the lecture given by controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes last Thursday afternoon. They were there to keep the event peaceful and secure and to hand out little blue booklets about free speech at Dartmouth, ostensibly to prevent the stifling of discussion and civilized dissent. Neither of these issues, however, proved to be a problem. Indeed, the overarching opinion of the event seemed to be one of slight surprise at its civility. However, this civility did not reflect any particular actions on the parts of any of the participants. Rather, it was a direct result of both speaker and audience sticking directly to the topic of Pipes' lecture and avoiding discussion of issues that made Pipes a controversial speaker. Thus, while as Professor Meir Kohn said in his introduction, Pipes' presence was a "triumph over political correctness," the content of his lecture was a concession to those very forces.
Political correctness as an inhibitor of free speech has been in the news quite a bit lately. The recent controversy about the remarks made by Harvard President Larry Summers at a summit of the National Bureau of Economic Research has brought the issue of what can and cannot be said to the vanguard of national debate. Summers' remarks during a closed session about how innate biological differences between men and women may account for the under-representation of women in math and science are troublesome both for their content and for the message sent when the president of Harvard seems to justify sexism. However, the resulting discussion that raged in every form of print and electronic media has some value in that it has brought the issue of women's involvement in the sciences to the forefront of the public consciousness.
Pipes' presence has done a similar thing on the Dartmouth campus, bringing the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the accompanying questions about the relationship between Islam and terrorism into the spotlight of campus debate. However, unlike the debate prompted by Summers' remarks, the discourse that Pipes' visit has generated has been much more one of knee-jerk reactionism then of intelligent, thoughtful discussion. The two opinion pieces published in the The Dartmouth ("Intolerance Personified," Jan. 27 and "Recent History Repeats Itself," Jan. 28) were both emotive appeals that did little to foster a true debate.
This lack of debate, however, seems to be characteristic of the Dartmouth political climate as a whole. There are many student publications, innumerable campus blogs and hundreds of students with viable opinions. All these sources of input, however, seem to be ships passing in the night, rarely responding to each other. Even when responses are made, there is little chance that the critique or comment will be found by the person it purports to engage. In a column published last Wednesday in The D ("The Monolith on the Hill," Jan. 26), Dan Knecht bemoaned the one-sided education provided by uniformity of political views among campus faculty. Attempts to foster campus discussion, however, must go beyond breaking what often seems a liberal monopoly on academia. We must ensure that participants in campus dialogue are actually engaged in a dialogue, not just dueling monologues. Although one could say that on a rather politically inactive campus like Dartmouth it might be better not to foster debate on clearly polarizing issues such the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, once the issue has been brought up it is better to have the discussion then to allow hostility to fester.
Pipes' presence on campus was a step in the right direction, even if what he actually said and what was actually discussed did not at all address the reasons for the controversy surrounding his visit. Indeed, the lack of debate could be seen as a pyrrhic victory for free speech, since it allowed the tensions raised by Pipes' visit to simmer below the surface of the campus consciousness, breaking out only in a couple of op-ed columns and in posts on campus blogs. Even though his refusal to address the controversy surrounding his visit may have allowed us to listen to his remarks without being influenced by his reputation, the conflict that preceded his visit made that impossible.
In order for Pipes' appearance to be valuable in the long run, we need to expand the reach of campus dialogue, in spite of whatever controversy doing so might involve. Only then will the blue booklets handed out by Safety & Security at Thursday's lecture to promote free speech truly be unnecessary, and S&S can go back to assuming their more familiar role on campus.
