Understanding the Free Speech Issues at Missouri and Yale; HuffingtonPost.com, 11/11/15

Geoffrey R. Stone, HuffingtonPost.com; Understanding the Free Speech Issues at Missouri and Yale:

"How should we think about the free speech issues in the recent controversies at the University of Missouri and Yale? In my view, universities have a deep obligation to protect and preserve the freedom of expression. That is, most fundamentally, at the very core of what makes a university a university...

In my view, a university should not itself take positions on substantive issues. A university should not declare, for example, that abortion is moral, that undocumented immigrants have a right to remain in the United States, that the United States should abandon Israel, or that a flat tax is the best policy. It is for the faculty and students of the institution to debate those issues for themselves, and the university as an institution should not intrude in those debates by purporting to decide on the "correct" point of view.

On the other hand, a university can promote certain values both to educate its students and to foster an intellectual environment that is most conducive to the achievement of the institution's larger educational goals. To that end, a university can appropriately encourage a climate of civility and mutual respect. It can do this in a variety of ways, as long as it stops short of censorship. More specifically, a university can legitimately educate students about the harms caused by the use of offensive, insulting, degrading, and hurtful language and behavior and encourage them to express their views, however offensive or hurtful they might be, in ways that are not unnecessarily disrespectful or uncivil."