Secretary of Education Arne Duncan walks a thin line on free speech on college campuses in an op-ed published Friday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“We must make real the First Amendment guarantee of free speech — which is vital to a life of ideas on college campuses — but there is no constitutional right to perpetuate hostile environments or to engage in threatening speech,” Duncan writes.
That sentence may help to alleviate the speech concerns of both those who want unbridled, free speech and those who believe in “safe spaces” from people and ideas with which they disagree.
Both sides can’t have their way completely, but Duncan makes it look as if he supports both. Ultimately, the secretary of education doesn’t have to pick a side. He can let these instances play out and be resolved by each university’s administrators.
On cultural competency, Duncan again walks a fine line in the same op-ed. Racial activists have called on universities to make cultural competency courses mandatory. Duncan says cultural competency should be taught, but doesn’t call for it to be mandatory. “Teach cultural competency. Cultural competency is a core message that colleges and universities should be teaching (and learning) as a foundational component of what it means to be an educated American.”
Extremists have called to ban speech that is simply disagreeable. For example, Missouri University police asked individuals to report “incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech,” as if simply hurting someone’s feelings was a police matter. Duncan doesn’t use the word “hurtful,” but he does say it’s important to protect the speech of people who disagree with others. “Protecting free speech can sometimes mean protecting the right to hold and express views that are at odds with strongly held values. Campuses should not ignore the dissonance this creates, but use these moments to reflect, discuss and underscore the institution’s values independent of expressed views that may be anathema to those values,” Duncan writes.
In a September speech in Iowa, President Obama expressed even more support for free speech than Duncan does in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch op-ed. “I don’t agree that you — when you become students at colleges — have to be coddled and protected from different points of view,” Obama said. This happened well before the unrest in Missouri. Obama made no mention of protecting students from threatening or hostile speech at the time. One wonders if his comments would have been different had they been delivered after the Missouri protests.
Duncan will leave office at the end of the year. John King, currently a senior adviser to Duncan, will become the new secretary.
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
