Burning Down the House Can be a Good Thing: A Defense of Freedom of Speech

Wesleyan University’s current controversy over reducing the yearly budget of
their newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, from $30,000 to $13,000 has caused the ever-
simmering debate about freedom of speech on college campuses to rise to a boil.

Though the current vogue across higher education in the United States to employ
trigger warnings and create “safe spaces” may be beneficial in some instances, it
necessarily masks, and perhaps even helps to create, a fear of speaking one’s mind. (By
“safe space,” I mean spaces safe for differing viewpoints, not that spaces are or are not
physically violent.) It limits freedom of speech, which decides where power lies. Who
has it and who doesn’t? Who can speak and who can’t? As soon as you say, “This is a
safe space,” the space becomes explicitly unsafe. “This is a safe space” tells me that you
want me to feel comfortable, but that you expect me to say certain things and behave in a
certain way. It tells me that there are topics that I should not bring up for fear of your
reaction. It allows you to hide behind your professions of liberal open-mindedness and
tolerance that all too often do not appear to backed up by action. (Tolerance of difference,
by the way, is not enough. Using tolerance as an intermediate step, work to move forward
towards acceptance of respect of difference. Ask for help in this work.)

We end up saying what we think our interlocutor wants to hear, as many students’
habit of beginning seemingly every response to a classroom discussion with “going off
what [they, the previous student,] said…” attests to. We don’t feel comfortable admitting
our discomfort, which only perpetuates the discomfort.

No space is completely safe anyway. That’s impossible to achieve, and that’s
okay. It’s a good thing, even. As a friend reminded me recently, you do not learn in a safe
space. You learn when you feel unsafe, unmoored and are open enough to the world that
the world can hurt you. You don’t learn in your comfort zone. You learn when you’re not
sure whether you can do something but try to accomplish it anyway.

How, then, do we combat our fear of speaking our mind and impositions upon
freedom of speech? Critical, thoughtful journalism, done by individuals who research as
many sides of a given story as they can and who aren’t afraid to burn down the house is
one way to do this. Indeed, burning down the house can be a good thing, as it offers an
opportunity to build a new one. Journalism continuously creates and recreates the
community that it serves.

Journalism makes the exercise of power visible. A piece of journalism is a
necessarily subjective record and snapshot that reflects its author’s views and its subject
at a single moment in time. It allows you to develop your views. It doesn’t matter if you
don’t know what you’re doing – I almost never do – because journalism, and writing in
general, allows you to write towards a view, not simply write a view. Not knowing quite
what you think about a given topic is exactly why you should debate it, orally or in
writing. You should be out, every day, to learn something. And anyway, knowing what
you’re doing is not nearly as interesting.