The Chronicle of Higher Education has two interesting pieces today on free speech and openness to alien ideas (or not).
In the longer and more analytical of the two staff writer Peter Schmidt begins on a metaphorical (or is it allegorical?) note:
Imagine a world where people can say whatever they want but are forced to wear earplugs at all times. What value would free speech have? The First Amendment does not just protect our right to express ideas; it protects our right to take them in. Its whole point is to ensure access to the thoughts of others, based on a belief that a successful democracy requires an informed citizenry and open debate.
He could have been writing about the same topic that was the subject of Chronicle “Brainstorm” blogger and eminent Princeton professor Stanley Katz’s entry today, “The Bush Institute and SMU.” Katz was a trustee of SMU from 1988 to 2002, and he writes today that he
was disappointed to find that President Turner and the SMU trustees had agreed to permit former President George W. Bush to establish, alongside the Bush presidential library and museum, what appears to be a fully independent research institute to be operated by the George W. Bush foundation, not SMU. This has … provoked a serious division among the faculty as to whether the University should permit an institute on its campus, “to further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.” It is to be, if we are to take this language literally, an advocacy organization. It was apparently loosely modeled on the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, but it appears to be a more thoroughly focused political effort than the Hoover, even at its most partisan.
Schmidt, of course, was not writing about Bush and SMU but rather about one of Bush’s policies.
Over the past eight years, several of the world’s most prominent thinkers have not been heard on U.S. soil. Federal authorities, given broad discretion to deny foreigners entry in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been denying them visas or, more awkwardly, stopping them at airports and placing them on return flights home, their visas revoked.
The USA Patriot Act, signed into law that fearful and angry autumn, said federal officials can deny a visa to anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity” or “persuades others” to do so. That provision enabled the Bush administration to revive a cold-war practice known as ideological exclusion—the refusal of visas based not on actions, but on viewpoints or associations.
For the record: I am opposed to “ideological exclusion,” at the borders of either campus or nation (although, as long as we’re on the record, I’m not sure that whatever freedom to “take in ideas” that is protected by the First Amendment extends to the point of compelling the State Department to issue visas to whatever would-be visitor any individual, or even university audience, wants to hear.)
