A Civil Tongue
It is time to talk about freedom of speech.
Recent events on the Homewood campus have provoked
allegations that the university is not sufficiently
protecting the free expression of ideas among our students.
In particular, the outcry and controversy surrounding a
racially demeaning invitation to a fraternity party, and
the resulting sanctions imposed by the Student Conduct
Board (which are currently on appeal), are being construed
as an attempt by the university to prohibit speech it
doesn't particularly want to hear.
I disagree.
Tempers are hot, and people (both within and outside
the university) are upset. So it is especially worthwhile
to step back for a moment to try to gain some
perspective.
Freedom of speech controversies are nothing new at
Johns Hopkins, as you would expect of an institution that
chooses as its motto "The truth shall make you free." Nor
is the university's unsettled history of race relations
— which is the other important factor at play in this
controversy — without its considerable weight of
unhappiness and bad feelings. As an institution, we have an
imperfect record in both regards.
In 1940, former Hopkins professor and Maryland
Communist Party branch chairman Albert Blumberg came to
deliver a speech called "The Communist Approach" on the
Homewood campus. But the speech never happened. Blumberg
and his audience of several hundred were locked out of
Latrobe Hall, apparently by order of Dean Edward Berry.
Undaunted, they marched across the street to Wyman Park,
where Blumberg was soon arrested for speaking in the park
without a permit and reportedly threatened by one of the
Baltimore City police officers with "We oughta bounce a
brick off yer head!" The student-run Hopkins
News-Letter was on the scene to record it all, but
university administration informed then editor (and later
professor of history) John Higham that his continued
enrollment at the university would be endangered if the
story ran. (The story did run, after Higham resigned as
editor just prior to the story being set to type. He went
on to earn his Hopkins degree the next year.)
Nearly three decades later, The News-Letter was
in hot water again, this time when a satiric cover story
modeled on Time magazine's Man-of-the-Year feature
lumped mass-murderers Richard Speck and Charles Whitman
with then president Lyndon Johnson, whom the paper
described as a former Texas ploughboy who killed Vietnamese
for profit and pleasure. My predecessor Milton Eisenhower
was apparently so incensed at the article that he suspended
the two editors, and defended his actions when interviewed
in the next day's Baltimore Sun.
In both these occurrences, and on other occasions in
the past 130 years, it seems to me there is legitimate
cause to question our commitment to free speech and to the
pursuit of that truth that will make us free. The
university did actively try to suppress speech it found not
to its liking — speech that, regardless of whether it
was distasteful to some, was of a substantive and serious
nature.
But I think we all know that it stretches our
credulity to assert that two crude and tasteless
invitations to a fraternity party posted on an Internet Web
site rise to this standard of seriousness of purpose or
intent. What I see here is not a courageous trespass of
taboo speech but rather a fundamental breach of civility of
the sort that is so commonly displayed in disparagement,
mockery or epithets drawn along racial or ethnic lines. It
is, simply put, common name-calling. This is what I believe
we should agree is unacceptable in our community of free
and open discourse. Let us not forget that true civility is
not a program of fair treatment for this or that
constituency but rather an underlying and fundamental
commitment to showing respect for everybody.
We are very fortunate at Johns Hopkins that one of the
nation's foremost experts on
civility,
Professor Pier Massimo Forni, is a faculty member here in
our Department of
German and Romance Languages. In the past, I have often
recommended his book Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five
Rules of Considerate Conduct, and it seems
appropriate in this case to quote Professor Forni directly:
"Respect for others is the core principle of
civility. And it's all-inclusive. You don't pick and choose
when it comes to respect."
That, in a nutshell, is what I think the university is
trying to address on this occasion. We are talking about
common respect and decency. We are talking about —
and here's what is truly politically incorrect —
basic good manners. Irrelevant in the 21st century, you
say? I wonder. The British statesman and philosopher Edmund
Burke had this thought on the subject: "The law touches us
but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex
or smooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or
refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible
operation, like that of the air we breathe in."
To any who doubt the consequence of teaching respect
and civility, or who claim we are out of line in demanding
that all members of our community comport themselves
honorably in their dealings with others, I say this: Look
around you. Look at the world we live in, where so many
societies are literally falling apart because group A would
rather encounter death and destruction than show basic
human respect for group B. These are not trivial matters.
Let us never underestimate the value of civility, not just
to protect people's feelings but to preserve the
possibility of freedom itself.
There are some who have suggested that this is a
matter for the courts to decide. Personally, I side with
Edmund Burke — the law is only capable of touching us
here and there, now and then. We don't need the lawyers. We
just need to show one another tolerance, and mutual
respect. Moving forward from here, I hope we will all
recommit ourselves to this bedrock principle of our
community.
William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.
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