Between Free Speech and a Hard Place

The president of the university faced a no-win situation. A controversial speaker had been invited to campus, alumni were in an uproar, members of the faculty were outraged, even local business leaders protested.

The university president responded with a fierce declaration of principle: “It is my view that as long as our students can be orderly about it they should have freedom to discuss any problem that presents itself and in which they are interested.”

The writer was Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago. The year was 1932. The speaker invited to campus by a student group was the Communist candidate for president, viewed by many in that era as a national threat.

Controversial speakers have probably visited American campuses for as long as there have been campuses, and university officials faced with managing the situation have often reacted as Mr. Hutchins did, with a fervent defense of academia as a marketplace of ideas that must be kept unfettered.

Yet beyond agreement over the need to protect free speech, there are still no accepted standards for how college presidents should handle such divisive debates. If anything, the issue has grown murkier.

In the last two weeks alone, ugly spats over speech have erupted at the University of California at Irvine; at Stanford University; and at Columbia University.

At the University of California at Irvine, anger followed when the institution withdrew an offer to Erwin Chemerinsky, a prominent left-leaning law professor, to become dean of its new law school, and his political views were blamed; the offer was later restored when both conservative and liberal legal scholars objected.

When Stanford’s Hoover Institution offered a visiting fellowship to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, thousands of professors, students and alumni signed an online petition opposing the decision; the university’s president emphasized the free speech principles at stake, while other officials noted that the invitation was not from the university but from Hoover.

And last week, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia, Lee Bollinger, the university president, was faced with the question of how to protect open discourse involving a leader who denies the existence of the Holocaust and calls for Israel’s destruction. Perhaps trying to make lemonade out of lemons, he gave a blistering quasi-introduction that began by defending free speech and ended with Mr. Bollinger’s wish that he had effectively expressed “revulsion at what you stand for.”

In the end, few people were happy with that solution. But few can offer alternatives that satisfy everyone.

Disinviting a speaker can trigger as much or more fury as the invitation itself. And lofty defenses of free speech can sound cowardly to critics who believe the university’s choice of speakers is ideologically biased or that a particular speaker is uniquely evil and should be denied a public platform.

What magic formula could possibly satisfy a constituency that includes students, faculty, alumni and the community — as well as trustees and the big donors universities rely on so greatly these days?

Technology broadens the audience for such events, providing a way to rally the opposition even in the planning stages. (The Stanford petition against Mr. Rumsfeld exists online and began circulating even before students and many faculty were on campus for the fall semester.)

“It is incredibly complicated and difficult,” Mr. Bollinger said in an interview, one of many he gave to defend his combative stance during his introduction of Mr. Ahmadinejad. “And I think there are always strong incentives to withdraw from public discussion. My strong view is that that does and will impoverish public debate.”

Managing such controversies was hardly easier in the past. Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University, recalled protests during the Vietnam War era when the students did more than sign virtual petitions or hand out fliers to object to speakers.

One time, Mr. Bok recalled, Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor and a Harvard Law School professor, was drowned out while moderating a discussion.

“He had tears in his eyes because the principle was very important,” Mr. Bok said, adding, “It was a repudiation of all the best that universities stood for. I still remember his huge distress.” ...

This from the New York Times. Cartoon by Joel Pett of the Herald-Leader.