Wellesley editorial an opportunity to understand the Left’s distorted concept of free speech

The editorial was roundly criticized, and deservedly so. It is clearly predicated on a fundamental intolerance of any perspectives besides the Left’s. Without the board’s exceedingly poor decision to use the word “hostility,” almost implicitly condoning violence, the editorial likely would not have found viral circulation either.

But it is not often that liberal college students actually take the time to outline their reasoning, choosing rather to scream obscenities at their conservative peers or silence them entirely. I suspect many of them are not even capable of supplying such defenses.

The editorial provides a good opportunity to move the debate beyond the “Racist!” “Snowflake” back and forth. To be fair, it is not correct to blame the Right for escalating tensions on college campuses, but it is possible we could work towards a solution more efficiently if we engaged with the alternative viewpoint in a different way.

Conservatives charge campus liberals with infringing on free speech, but, here, the Wellesley students show us why that may not be effective. We are discussing two fundamentally different concepts of “free speech.”

Here is one important excerpt from the editorial:

Wellesley students are generally correct in their attempts to differentiate what is viable discourse from what is just hate speech. Wellesley is certainly not a place for racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech. Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.

Whereas society generally observes a significantly higher bar for what constitutes “hate speech,” these students see it as any speech that is perceived as anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Muslim, anti-trans, etc. That is a common perspective on campuses where young people increasingly believe criticisms of these special classes pose physical and psychological threats to their well-being. It’s easy to dismiss that as ridiculous, but doing so is not persuasive to those who disagree, especially when their professors are training them to think that way.

This next excerpt is absolutely key:

The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government. The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.

Again, the spirit of free speech is only “to protect the suppressed” inasmuch as the “suppressed” are citizens who suffer at the hands of an overreaching government, not people who experience discomfort based on the rhetoric of their political opponents. That is a distortion. It is the campus progressives, like these Wellesley writers, who function as the suppressive government in this equation, regulating speech to the point where it is only possible to defend liberalism.

The writers also argue that it is not appropriate to become hostile when people who do not know better traffic in hate speech. But “paid professional lecturers and politicians,” on the other hand, do not deserve that benefit of the doubt.

“This being said,” the writers contend, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.”

For those who desire a glimpse into the worldview of a “snowflake,” the Wellesley editorial is a good place to start. For them, regulating speech is an essential method of protecting disenfranchised classmates from emotional (and physical) harm. That is wrongheaded and absurd, but simply saying so, even though it is deeply tempting, will never be enough to persuade them we’re right.

Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.