For years, ideas of what constitutes hate speech and what constitutes free speech have twisted and spiraled into countless directions. This line seems impossible to distinguish and agree upon, resulting in almost inescapable institutional turmoil.
Last year, students of the Federalist Society at Stanford filed a complaint about a law student mocking their club — a complaint that ultimately placed a hold on his diploma. In July, the University of Chicago faced a period of social unrest in which lecturer Rebbeca Journey faced rancorous messages following the release of her undergraduate seminar “The Problem of Whiteness.” Just two days ago, Cornell University was pushed to halt classes after a student was arrested on the basis of antisemitic threats. These incidents beg questions regarding our own school. Are students at Andover afraid to speak up? And how come? At a school where differing opinions should be commonplace, how do we regulate the wildfire that is free speech? And how do we know when the flames have grown too large?
Free speech holds the most value when it is productive. Oxford Languages will tell you that free speech consists of one’s right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint. However, a surface-level definition of free speech neglects its true purposes and how to best access them. Productive free speech should not just prompt discourse from varying perspectives, but also cultivate the establishment of new ones. Look at what we hope to achieve with our own speech — it is often to influence and ameliorate our surroundings. Yet, the free speech that people seem to be the most desirous to protect is the free speech that is most unproductive.
The fallacy that free speech is required to intimidate and harm to fully be exercised is one that is all too common in today’s society. Disheartening acts of hateful targeting and intimidating dialogue add nothing to the true goals sought by free speech. When these coercing mechanisms become embedded in public discourse, people are driven from the idea of participating. Ultimately, what is free speech if not to encourage more of it? In order to truly protect diverse discourse at Andover, it is imperative that we focus primarily on slimming our own speech to its core purposes. One must realize that when their speech is unproductive, it only disables their own message.
Students might wonder why they should even care about the protection of productive speech. One way the importance of productive speech is articulated is within the concept of the “Marketplace of Ideas.” The concept follows the idea that since no person can reason perfectly, to seek the closest proximity to the truth, we need the ideas of society as a whole. Rotten ideas will not sell in the marketplace, creating a futile facade of public discourse instead. For society to operate in a way that provides for new ideas and open conversation, everybody must be able to participate, and everybody must feel comfortable doing so. Therefore, in order to improve and proliferate our own ideas, we must first acknowledge everyone else’s.
We see an example of a fallen marketplace in Journey’s experience at the University of Chicago. Although her seminar was controversial, the hateful messages she received afterward were unproductive in that they undermined the very ideas they hoped to convey. Thus, neither side could learn, and the entire situation was warped into an argument of hatred, rather than addressing the true motives behind both Journey’s course and exterior offense.
I believe Phillips Academy can be an institution where the marketplace thrives, so long as we produce fresh ideas that won’t poison others. As a home to students from over 49 countries and therefore hundreds of disparate experiences and beliefs, it is inevitable that public discourse may face difficulty. This means that as social conflict within educational settings progressively heightens, we only need to be more aware of our vulnerability to it. If Andover cannot be a place where ripe, productive ideas are free to roam, we lose access to the many ideas for which we arrived to gain.
