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May 15, 2008
Baccalaureate, part of Smith's commencement weekend,
is an opportunity for seniors to pause, reflect upon and rejoice in their accomplishments,
challenges and friendships. President Christ delivered remarks to the
Class of 2008 in Helen Hills Hills Chapel.
Good afternoon. I’m glad to have the opportunity
to share some thoughts with you before this intense and celebratory weekend and before
you leave this community that you’ve shared for four years to take the next
steps on your life’s journey.
You came to Smith in an election year, and you leave
it during a presidential election campaign of particular historic consequence, in
which the Democratic party nominee will be either the first woman or the first African
American to be chosen by one of our two major parties as its candidate for the presidency.
Not only issues of domestic and foreign policy but issues of race and gender have
already shaped and will continue to shape the debate about who should become our
next president. Because we stand at a moment of such national consequence, I am going
to talk about our rights and responsibilities as citizens and the ways in which I
hope that Smith has prepared you for your role as citizen in a democracy.
You have attended Smith at a time when rights, privileges,
and responsibilities -- both personal and national -- have been the subject of national
debate. Throughout the past four years, we have been at war on two fronts, in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The threat of terrorism that has motivated both wars has served
as the rationale both for imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay without standard judicial
protections of individuals defined as “enemy combatants” and of increased
secret scrutiny of United States citizens under the justification of the Homeland
Security Act, an act which many have argued erodes fundamental rights such as the
right of freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and privacy. You have seen a national
debate about the rights of immigrants, and hundreds of thousands taking to the streets
to protest stricter immigration controls. You have seen a series of horrific natural
disasters, from the tsunami in South Asia in 2004 to the recent cyclone in Myanmar
and earthquake in China; the disaster within our own borders -- the hurricane Katrina
-- motivated an anguished debate in this country about wealth, privilege, racism,
and our own and the country’s responsibility both to aid the victims and rebuild
their communities. Many of you have traveled to New Orleans and to Mississippi to
help the victims of Katrina. In your four years, you’ve also heard debates
about affirmative action, as more states have put anti-affirmative action propositions
on their ballots, and about gay marriage, as Massachusetts became the first state
in the United States, and the sixth jurisdiction in the world, to legalize marriage
between two people of the same sex.
All of these historic events have stimulated debates
about the rights, responsibilities and privileges of citizens. We’ve had analogous
debates in the Smith community -- about divestment from companies doing business
in the Sudan, about our Coca Cola contract, about affirmative action, about blackface,
about anonymous racist postings on the Jolt, and, most recently, about the invitation
to ask Ryan Sorba to speak, his anti-gay views, and the disruption of his speech
by those objecting to them.
Many of these issues are hard issues, because of the
way in which they pit prejudice against freedom of speech, because of the ways in
which they assault the identities of people in our community, and because of the
emotional intensity with which they are felt. Particularly in a community that has
worked historically to extend women’s choices and opportunities, and that values
diversity as Smith does -- diversity of race and ethnicity, diversity of social class,
diversity of sexual identity and preference --the expression of prejudice is abhorrent.
But the complex relationship between rights and responsibilities that these issues
involve is genuinely hard, and many people have struggled with it.
In its first amendment, the first article in the Bill
of Rights, our constitution grants absolute freedom of speech, placing the burden
upon the state to demonstrate whether there are any circumstances that justify limitation.
This bar has been set very high; recognized exceptions involve immediate physical
or material harm like shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater.
The most difficult issue regarding free speech has to
do with speech that is discriminatory or harassing, that seems hateful in encouraging
negative views of a particular group. In the 80s and 90s, many campuses sought to
combat discrimination and harassment through speech codes, prohibiting hate speech.
Those speech codes challenged in court -- the University of Michigan and the University
of Wisconsin are two examples -- have been held to be unconstitutional. Furthermore,
the rights of invited speakers, once they have received a legitimate campus invitation,
have received particular protection from the courts. Campuses can determine who has
the right to invite a speaker, and what approvals are necessary, but they cannot
violate their policy selectively to exercise discrimination about what views can
be represented. Once invited, a speaker’s rights are protected by the first
amendment, even if members of the community find that speaker’s views abominable,
grossly reprehensible, as many at Columbia University felt about the views of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who was invited by a university department this past fall, or many at
various colleges have felt about Ward Churchill, who argues that the people killed
in the 9/11 attack were involved in provoking it.
It’s important, I think, to reflect on the assumptions
underlying such protection of free speech precisely because it can seem wrong in
the permission it gives to the expression of views that are noxious or abhorrent.
The philosophical justification underlying free speech, which has been most powerfully
articulated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions.
The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail;
any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error
for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority,
any government, even a government entirely at one with the people, to determine which
opinions are noxious or abhorrent.
My own views about free speech were largely shaped on
the Berkeley campus, where I spent three decades before coming to Smith. I arrived
at Berkeley just a few years after the Free Speech Movement. The Free Speech Movement
was a successful protest against the University of California’s ban against
on-campus student political activities, establishing students’ rights to free
speech. There were two issues that stimulated the protest: one was the efforts of
students associated with CORE -- the Congress of Racial Equality -- and SNCC -- the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -- to solicit donations for civil rights
causes; the other was an effort by campus Republicans to enlist volunteers for the
campaign of William Scranton against Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination.
This hard-won right -- of students and student organizations -- to free speech was
at the core of campus culture. Sproul Plaza -- a large public space at the Telegraph
Avenue entrance to the campus -- was the site of noon-time speeches and rallies of
many political perspectives. Despite the salient position that free speech had within
Berkeley’s values and culture, it was never easy. There were many difficult
issues involving fierce debates. The one most painful to me concerned an invitation
to David Irving, who denies the Holocaust happened. I felt his views were willfully
wrong, bigoted, and destructive in their social and political consequences. However,
I came to the conclusion that denying him the right to speak compromises that right
for others, that we needed to protect his right if we wished the same protections
for ourselves. The linguist, philosopher and political radical Noam Chomsky has said, “If
you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom
of speech precisely for views you despise.” Such protection does not weaken
the right to protest; indeed, I believe that it strengthens it.
Public universities like the University of California
are unambiguously bound by First Amendment guarantees. Private colleges and universities
have a greater degree of freedom to set their policies. However, I believe that students,
faculty and staff at Smith deserve the same rights to freedom of speech that they
would have at a public university. Smith has a proud history in this regard. Many
controversial speakers have appeared on campus, both those whose views have been
sympathetic to many in the community, and those, like Ann Coulter, whose were not.
Smith’s fifth president, Benjamin Wright, was particularly courageous in defending
the rights of faculty to free speech during the McCarthy era, when Smith became a
target of the House Un-American Activities Committee campaign to root out communist
subversion on college campuses.
I have been talking thus far about the guarantees of
free speech in a democratic society. But just because we have the right to say something
-- a right I would ardently defend -- does not mean that it is the right thing to
do. In any voluntary society, such as the academy, in which each of us chooses to
join the community, we have the responsibility of considering and being respectful
of the perspectives of others. We may have the right to wear a costume offensive
to others, but it may not be the right thing to do because it hurts the community
we are seeking to create. We have the right to invite a speaker who denigrates the
identity of a group in our community, but it may not be a good or wise choice. These
lines may be difficult to draw and the decisions hard to make because rights and
responsibilities are not perfectly aligned. We may have a right that violates our
responsibility.
In my own efforts to think through this difficult problem,
I have found it useful to distinguish between public and private space. We have --
quite appropriately -- a different set of expectations about our rights and responsibilities
in our own homes than in the public spaces that we inhabit -- town meetings, political
gatherings, public forums. In a college like Smith that so values the metaphors of
house and family, it is a challenge to create the kind of public space that encourages
the expression of controversial opinions and robust public debate. Such debate is
often not comfortable, because it can challenge ideas so precious to us that they
feel like the core of our identity. But that kind of freedom -- to speak and to hear
controversial ideas -- is at the very heart of colleges and universities.
As you leave Smith, I hope you take both of these values
with you -- a commitment to free speech and a commitment to seeking to understand
the perspectives and experiences of others. These may not always lie comfortably
together, but it is precisely at points of conflict that the opportunity is greatest
for learning.
Sophia Smith founded the college that bears her name “to
increase women’s power for good.” I fervently hope that the education
that you have received at Smith accomplishes that purpose in your lives. In 1924,
the college dedicated the Grecourt Gates, commemorating the work of the Smith College
Relief Unit, which went to France in 1917 to rebuild villages that had been destroyed
by the war. At the dedication ceremony, Ada Comstock, the great dean of the college
after whom the Ada Comstock Scholars Program is named, described their significance
in these words: “They form a wide gateway through which the graduates of this
college will go out year by year, ready as were the members of this unit to dedicate
all they have to the common lot.” I can wish you no better farewell than
this. This moment, in our country, is one of great public need. As you take your
first steps into the world after college, I ask you to consider how you can contribute
both in the work you choose to do and in the role you play as citizens to the great
challenges before us. |
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