On May 8, Jerry Hughes ’88 moderated a panel about free speech at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy. Hughes was one of the Dartmouth students who took part in the 1986 sledgehammer attack on the shanties that were built on the Green to protest South African Apartheid.
The Dartmouth Free Speech Alliance — an alumni group dedicated to improving free expression on campus — invited Hughes back for the event. Seven people attended the panel, which also featured two Dartmouth administrators and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression program officer Conor Murnane. The panel was co-sponsored by the College’s ongoing “Dartmouth Dialogues” program, which facilitates conversations across differences.
In an interview after the event, Hughes said the DFSA planned the event with Dartmouth Dialogues and Alumni Relations to inform alumni about the state of free speech at the College.
“We have a lot of alumni who are very interested in what’s going on and just find it hard to know,” he said.
Hughes said that the state of free speech is different today than when he was a student.
“There were definitely issues in the ’80s, and there were lots of protests,” Hughes said. “Some things were easier — the day to day interactions with your fellow students.”
According to Murnane, who focuses on “campus advocacy” for FIRE, Dartmouth is better off than other colleges like Harvard. Dartmouth was ranked 224 out of 251 colleges in FIRE’s 2024 rankings, based on a survey of over 200 undergrads that asked about their perception of speech on campus, including how likely they were to self-censor or how likely it is for protests to be suppressed.
According to Murnane, 26% of respondents in the 2024 Dartmouth survey said it was “sometimes acceptable” to respond to speech with violence. Fifty-nine percent said it was acceptable to “shout down” a speaker.
Panelist and assistant dean of faculty Samuel Levey oversaw the update of Dartmouth’s Freedom of Expression and Dissent policy, which now states that any limitation by administrators on students’ expression must be “content and viewpoint neutral and narrowly tailored to serve a substantial institutional interest.” Levey said this was a “self-conscious” effort to mirror the First Amendment.
Levey said that a “key difference” between the First Amendment and Dartmouth’s policy is a “reciprocity principle — students need to respect the opportunity for other students’ free expression.” This includes “anti-heckling” policies.
After the College revised its bias reporting protocol that allowed students to report jokes and stereotyping and introduced the Dartmouth Dialogues project, Dartmouth became the only Ivy League university speech policy to receive a “Green Light” — as opposed to yellow or red — from FIRE, according to Murnane.
Panelists agreed that cultural solutions are needed to achieve more free and more respectful speech that allow for students to build dialogue skills.
Senior vice president for community and campus life Jennifer Rosales pointed to programs including Dartmouth Dialogues, the student-led Dartmouth Political Union and “Bring your Friend to Shabat” night at the Chabad Center for Jewish Life as examples of reducing harmful speech through community-building.
“These structures help demonstrate to our community the importance of relationship building — you can engage in conversation across differences and we support it,” Rosales said. “Some of it is skill-building, and some of it is facilitating the spaces where [dialogue] can happen.”
Rosales also said she worked with Town Manager Rob Houseman to change permitting requirements so that organizers can get a permit two days before an event instead of eight after hearing student feedback.
“Protests, demonstrations and vigils — they’re responding to the moment,” she said. “They need to happen now.”
Rosales also said that an Office of Student Life program that trains administrators in de-escalation techniques “ensures that deplatforming doesn’t happen.” She said she hopes to “scale up” the program.
“When we bring speakers in, there would be an administrator for students to have a support system,” she said. “This was someone who knew who to de-escalate [in case of] heckling or things that would disrupt the event.”
Murnane added that he was “excited” to see how these programs will affect this year’s Dartmouth survey results, which will come out in late August.
“I’ve been out there recommending Dartmouth’s programming to every campus I go to,” he said.
Levey added a “caveat” to the freedom of speech on campus.
“Speech can harm people, even where it’s not illegal,” Levey said. “We can track blood cortisol levels and see what happens.”
In the Q&A following the event, an audience member said he was “troubled” that cortisol levels are a justification for suppressing free speech.
Murnane agreed that suppression leads to more sensitivity to controversial speech.
“I think it’s a cultural problem that [my generation was] built up with this mentality of ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ and now that’s gone,” he said. “That came with the rise of speech codes.”
Rosales added that it is less about speech itself and more about “pedagogical practices” — the ways and structures in which speech is communicated.
“It’s really important to think about [Dartmouth] not as an open forum for anyone to say anything, but to think about those structures that need to be put in place for that to actually happen,” she said.
Attendee Peter Slovenski ’79 said it was “very good to hear Dartmouth is working on [heightening free speech]” and that the new speech policy is “helpful” because it promotes discourse. Still, he said he hopes for a better balance of speech from different ideological perspectives at Dartmouth.
“It’s hard to talk about free for both [conservatives and liberals] when the numbers of students and faculty who are on either side are not in a good balance yet,” he said.
