Good afternoon. My remarks at this moment
in our commencement rituals are
officially titled
"A report to the alumni." The first time I
delivered them in 2008 I was the only
obstacle between all of you and JK
Rowling. I looked out on a sea of eager
children, costumed Dumbledores, and
Quidditch brooms waving impatiently in
the air. Today you await Mark Zuckerberg
whose wizardry takes a different form
one that has changed the world and
although he doesn't seem to have
inspired an outbreak of hoodies, we
certainly do have some costumes in this
audience today; I see we're now handing
out blankets. This is a day of joy and
celebration of happy endings and new
beginnings, of families and friends, of
achievements and hopes, it is also a day
when we as a university perform our most
important annual ritual, affirming once
again the purposes that animate us and
the values that direct and inspire us. I
want to speak today about one of the
most important and, in recent months, most
contested of these values. It is one that
has provoked debate, dissent,
confrontation, and even violence on
campuses across the country, and one that
has attracted widespread public
attention and criticism. I am of course
talking about issues of free speech on
university campuses. The meaning and
limits of free
speech are questions deeply embedded in
our legal system. In interpretations of
the First Amendment and its
applications. I am no constitutional
lawyer,
indeed no lawyer at all, and I do not
intend in my brief remarks today to
address complex legal doctrines; nor
clearly can I, in a few brief minutes,
take on even a fraction of the arguments
that have been advanced on this issue.
Instead I speak as one who has been a
university president for a decade in
order to raise three questions: first,
why is free speech so important to and
at universities? Second, why does it seem
under special challenge right now? And
third, how might we better address these
challenges by moving beyond just
defensively protecting free speech which,
of course, we must do, to actively and
affirmatively enabling it and nurturing
environments in which it can thrive? So
first why is free speech so important to
and at universities? This is a question I
took up with the newly arrived
first-year students in the college when
I welcomed them at convocation last fall.
For centuries I told them universities
have been environments in which
knowledge has been discovered, collected
studied, debated, expanded, changed, and
advanced through the power of rational
argument and exchange. We pursued truth
unrelentingly but we must never be so
complacent as to believe we have unerringly
attained it. Veritas is
inspiration and aspiration. We assume
there is always more to know and
discover,
so we open ourselves to challenge and
change. We must always be ready to be
wrong. So being part of a university
community requires courage and humility.
Universities must be places open to the
kind of debate that can change ideas, and
committed to standards of reason and
evidence that form the basis for
evaluating them. Silencing ideas or
basking in intellectual orthodoxy
independent of facts and evidence
impedes our access to new and better
ideas, and it inhibits a full and
considered rejection of bad ones. From at
least the time of Galileo we can see how
repressing seemingly heretical ideas has
blinded societies and nations
to enhance knowledge and understanding
on which progress depends. Far more
recently we can see here at Harvard how
our inattentiveness
to the power and appeal of conservative
voices left much of our community
astonished, blindsided by the outcome of
last fall's election. We must work to
ensure that universities do not become
bubbles isolated from the concerns and
discourse of the society that surrounds
them. Universities must model a
commitment to the notion that truth
cannot simply be claimed, but must be
established. Established through reasoned
argument, assessment, and even sometimes
uncomfortable challenges that provide
the foundation for truth. The legitimacy
of universities claim to be sources
and validators of fact depends on our
willingness to actively and vigorously defend
those facts. And we must remember that
limiting
some speech opens the dangerous
possibility that the speech that is
ultimately censored may be our own. If
some words are to be treated as
equivalent to physical violence, and
silenced or even prosecuted, who is to
decide which words? Freedom of expression
as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
famously said long ago, protects free
thought for those who agree with us, but
excuse me, not only free thought
for those who agree with us, but freedom
for the thought we hate. We need to hear
those hateful ideas so our society is
fully equipped to oppose and defeat them.
Over the years,
differences about the implementation of
the university's free speech principles
have often provoked controversy and we
haven't always gotten it right. As long
ago as 1939, an invitation from a student
group to the head of the American
Communist Party generated protests, and
the invitation was ultimately cancelled
by the corporation. Bertrand Russell's
appointment as William James lecturer
just a year later divided the
corporation, but president Conan broke
the tie and Russell came. Campus
conflicts over invited speakers are
hardly new, yet the vehements with which
these issues have been debated in recent
months, not just on campuses but in the
broader public sphere, suggest there is
something distinctive about this moment.
Certainly these controversies reflect a
highly polarized political and social
environment, perhaps the most divisive
since the era of the civil war. And in
these already fractious circumstances,
free speech debates have provided a
fertile substrate
into which anger and disagreement could
be planted to nourish partisan outrage
and generate media clickbait. But that
is only a partial explanation.
Universities themselves have changed
dramatically in recent years, reaching
beyond their traditional largely
homogeneous populations to become more
diverse than perhaps any other
institution in which Americans find
themselves living together. Once
overwhelmingly white, male, Protestant, and
upper-class, Harvard College is now half
female, majority minority, religiously
pluralistic with nearly 60% of students
able to attend because of financial aid.
Fifteen percent are the first in their
families to go to college. Many of
our students struggle to feel full
members of this community: a community in
which people like them have so recently
arrived. They seek evidence and assurance
that to borrow the title of a powerful
theatrical piece created by a group of
our African-American students, evidence
and assurance that they too are Harvard.
The price of our commitment to freedom
of speech is paid disproportionately by
these students. For them free speech has
not infrequently included enduring a
questioning of their abilities, their
humanity, their morality, their very
legitimacy here. Our values and our
theory of education rest on the
assumption that members of our community
will take the risk of speaking and will
actively compete in our wild rumpus of
argument and ideas. It requires them as
well to be fearless in face of argument
or challenge or even verbal insult and
it expects that fearlessness even when
the challenge is directed to the very
identity, race, religion, gender, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, nationality, that may
have made them uncertain about their
right to be here in the first place.
Demonstrating such fearlessness is hard.
No one should be mocked as a snowflake
for finding it so. Hard,
hard but important and attainable.
Attainable, we believe, for every member
of our community. But the price of free
speech cannot be charged just to those
most likely to become its target. We must
support and empower the voices of all
the members of our community and nurture
the courage and humility that our
commitment to unfettered debate demands
from all of us. And that courage means
not only resilience in face of challenge
or attack, but strength to speak out
against injustices directed at others
as well. Free speech does not just happen
and require intervention when it is
impeded. It is not about the freedom to
out-shout others while everyone has
their fingers in their ears. For free
speech to flourish, we must build an
environment where everyone takes
responsibility for the right not just to
speak, but to hear and be heard,
where everyone assumes the
responsibility to treat others with
dignity and respect. It requires not just
speakers, but in the words of James Ryan,
Dean of our Graduate School of Education,
generous listeners. Amidst the current
soul-searching about free speech, we need
to devote more attention to establishing
the conditions in which everyone's
speech is encouraged and taken seriously.
Ensuring freedom of speech is not just
about allowing speech; it is about
actively creating a community where
everyone can contribute and flourish; a
community where argument is relished, not
feared. Freedom of speech is not just
freedom from censorship, it is freedom to
actively join the debate as a full
participant.
It is about creating a context in which
genuine debate can happen. Talk a lot I
urged the class of 2020 last fall; listen
more.
Don't stand safely on the sidelines; take
the risk of being wrong: it is the best
way to learn and grow. And build a
culture of generous listening so that
others may be emboldened to take risks
too. A community in a shared search for
Veritas: that is the ideal for which
Harvard must strive. We need it now more
than ever. Thank you.