Smith on Free Speech

Missed this the other day, but now it seems Stephen F. Smith, petition candidate for trustee, believes that Jim Wright is not only on his side about free speech but has a better idea of what it is!

What is the role of free speech at Dartmouth?
In setting out to answer this question, I found–as I often did as a student in his “History of the American West” class many years ago–that I couldn’t improve on the answers given by President Wright. In his 2004 Convocation address, President Wright gave an excellent speech on the value of free speech at Dartmouth that, in my opinion, everyone in the Dartmouth family should read... I couldn’t agree more with these [Wright's] views.

But before we think Smith has acquiesced to the fact that Dartmouth—as an institution and as a community—is not in the practice of suppressing free speech after all, he pulls back and reclaims the non-issue as a key plank of his platform:

Although President Wright and I have some disagreements, we are in complete agreement on the value of free speech at Dartmouth: to be true to its educational mission, Dartmouth must fully protect the freedom of expression on campus. One of my priorities as Trustee will be to ensure that the administration lives up to its pro-free speech rhetoric in practice.

So, although Wright's views on free speech are perfectly consonant with Smith's own views, and although Smith can't give an example of free speech actually being suppressed (as opposed to criticized—the "counter-speech pointing out the errors in what the speaker had to say" that Smith talks about), and although Dartmouth is one of only two Ivy League schools with a green light rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) we should still worry about free speech enough to elect Stephen Smith. Only Smith can truly ensure that free speech will be protected.

This leads me to a simple question: why should we trust Smith any more than he trusts the administration? He's a lawyer, sure—in fact, a law professor. But are we to presume that his mere presence on the Trustee Board will scare off any sinister suppressors in the administration or the student body? We've elected a law professor already (Todd Zywicki) and, judging by Smith's rhetoric, it must not have helped—Dartmouth is still in danger of a deep wave of censorship and oppression. Heck, we even have an old Reagan crony on the Board, the man who gave Reagan the words to stand up to Russian might, and we still are in danger of Soviet-style suppression. Perhaps it's the Armed Forces we should be calling in, not a law professor!

Seriously, though, if we look at the way Smith orchestrates his arguments about free speech, we can find good reasons to distrust his own commitment to the "marketplace of ideas" which he touts as free speech's Edenic equivalent. I take as basic values of the marketplace of ideas that you attribute other people's ideas properly, especially if you disagree with them; you don't focus your attacks on straw men; you don't misrepresent the opinions of another; and you acknowledge when you change your position. Stephen Smith has skirted each and every one of these fundamental values in his latest post.

First, acknowledging when you change your position. When Smith put up this page at the beginning of his campaign, he presented Wright as directly infringing upon free speech, "bullying" students into "self-censorship." Now, Wright is the greatest proponent of free speech. Wright's views at the beginning of the campaign were "the very antithesis of freedom of speech;" now, "we are in complete agreement on the value of free speech at Dartmouth." There is no attempt to explain this vast divergence—one month saying Wright is silencing students, another that he articulates the value of free speech better than Smith can do himself.

Secondly, not focusing your attack on straw men. Well, clearly Smith isn't shy about using Wright himself as evidence when he feels he can, but whenever he decides Wright isn't the proper target, who gets placed in the crosshairs? "The administration," typically, or in this case unnamed "administration supporters." If he's really intent on taking us shopping in a marketplace of ideas, it would help if he doesn't try to abstract the vendors into anonymity.

This leads, in fact to the third point—properly attributing opinions, especially when they oppose yours. Smith sets up these abstract "administration supporters" as straw men, but he gives them a very specific claim to hold: that "free speech is not a 'conservative' or 'libertarian' issue." It's possible that he's been talking to some professors or some people in the administration who have told him something like that but, and I know this will sound self-absorbed, the only person to have said anything like that in print is me. In this article, I said:

the “defense” of free speech is, in fact, not defensive at all, but rather an offensive maneuver designed to ensure that only these conservative alumni have the ability and grounds for determining what free speech is at Dartmouth. The purpose is not to protect free speech, but to reserve for these conservatives the exclusive right to decide when it has been sufficiently protected.

If you're looking for a time when an "administration supporter" has linked the crusade for free speech with conservative ideology, this is it.

However, and here comes the fourth point—the one about not misrepresenting others' opinions—what I said does not mean anything like "free speech is a 'conservative' or 'libertarian' issue." What I said was that this particular effort to protect free speech is driven by conservative interests—and in the interests of not using straw men, let me be explicit—Rodgers, Zywicki, Robinson, Smith, some (but not all) of the Smurfs, notably Malchow and Eastman, and those alums who have been supporting these figures monetarily—and these men have been supporting it by using a libertarian ideology that borrows from over-simplified free-market ideas. (I elaborate on that in the article.)

That doesn't say free speech is a conservative or libertarian issue, it says that the conservatives and libertarians who are using it as an issue right now are doing so for narrow and illegitimate reasons—namely, that they wish to control when Dartmouth's speech is sufficiently free.

If Professor Smith is truly intent on partaking in a marketplace of ideas, I ask him to conform to some baseline of open discourse. If I'm off-base on this and he's actually referring to the views of someone else, then I hope the next time he refers to them, he doesn't airbrush them out of the argument.