Rescuing Free Speech at Brown

Many students, Americans, and believers in the First Amendment were rightly outraged by the protest of Ray Kelly at Brown University. The NYPD Commissioner was invited to talk on Oct. 29 about the role of proactive policing. But, after a half hour of raucous interruptions, Ray Kelly departed, unable to speak a single sentence.  When Marissa Quinn, Vice President for Public Affairs, attempted to intervene and told the crowd, “I have never seen in my 15 years at Brown the inability to have a dialogue,” protestors cheered. As one protestor put it, “They didn’t respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so, today, we canceled it for them.”

As someone who’s experienced similar struggles for open discourse at Swarthmore, I think of myself as an uncompromising proponent of free speech. But sometimes I wonder if there’s a classical way to defend controversial speech without collapsing into total relativism. Occasionally, I worry, that, John Stuart Mill in hand, my arguments amount to little more than a liberal quid pro quo. As in, “Don’t shout-down my free market economist and I won’t interfere with the your Noam Chomsky lecture.” But in making a purely libertarian argument for free speech, we risk downplaying the real power—and possible injustices—that speech can wield. We should be able to acknowledge that free speech is sometimes painful without calling in the censorship squad—or, in this case, a raucously illiberal cadre of Brown students.

In perusing the Brown Daily Herald after the Kelly meltdown, I came across one professor’s letter to the editor that offers real solace. Usually, when debating the merits of free speech, it’s only a matter of time before someone presents the “slippery slope” argument and asks, “But what if the University invited a Nazi?!?”  In the experience of Kenneth Miller, a Brown biology professor and Class of ’70 alum, the University did invite a Nazi, and it was still an educational experience. When Miller was a freshman, he heard George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, speak.

As Miller writes:

For the first time in my life, I understood the allure of fascism, the reason that “good people” could have supported the likes of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. I also understood why the notion that ‘it couldn’t happen here’ is hopelessly naive. It could happen here, and it most certainly would happen if we forgot the lessons of history, lessons that Rockwell brought to life with a sinister smile that evening in Alumnae Hall. I’m glad I was there. I’m glad the talk was allowed to go on. And I’m glad Brown was an open campus where those lessons could be learned in the most personal way possible.

Tuesday’s shout-down of another speaker makes me wonder about that. Ray Kelly, whatever his misdeeds, is no George Lincoln Rockwell.

You really have to read the whole letter to the true power of Miller’s argument. It serves as a wonderfully liberal and humanist defense of free speech—perhaps even enough to make Brown’s radicals reconsider.