On one campus, a group of student journalists have spoken out against “the destruction of the rights of others” that they have seen taking place at their college.
The editorial board of The Claremont Independent has declared that “silencing dissent is social injustice.” Responding to an editorial in the campus newspaper The Student Life that argued against Claremont McKenna College’s sanctioning students who had blockaded an event featuring conservative speaker Heather Mac Donald, the Independent‘s board points out that “[The Student Life’s] definition of social justice, which would empower any sufficiently motivated group of students to shutter the speech and assembly privileges of others, contravenes the very purpose of higher education.”
“The freedom to silence others,” the board writes, “suffocates all other freedoms, and it ushers in only a principle of power: whoever can silence speech is right to do so.”
The principle of might-makes-right, the board continues, “offer[s] no protection to the marginalized.” The Life‘s editorial board misses the point that, historically, “marginalized groups have wielded their rights to speech and assembly in order to force profound changes to the moral constitution of this country and its people.”
Sanctioning the students, the board argues, “reaffirmed [Claremont McKenna’s] commitment to the rights of all people to engage in free speech and assembly on its campus without fear of suppression and intimidation.”
During the civil rights movement, opponents of Black equality wielded their political power and preeminence in mainstream moral thought to oppose social and political freedoms for Black Americans. If not for the right to point out the wrongfulness of these prevailing views and to be heard while doing so, the status quo would have prevailed far longer—perhaps even indefinitely—against the sharp challenges posed by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. Indeed, if not for these rights to speech and assembly, many freedoms which African Americans now enjoy might never have arisen at all.
With this in mind, even when speech is profoundly immoral or objectionable, we must protect it. For when we may wield our own moral authority to silence speech we find objectionable, those in power have full license to silence our own on the same grounds. In such a world, when the winds of power shift, we are left without refuge from the tyranny of the strong, regardless of the righteousness of our views.
Let us be perfectly clear: students had every right to protest Heather Mac Donald’s visit to campus. No matter how wrong or ill-informed they may have been about the true nature of her views, their rights to free speech and assembly deserve the same protection as Mac Donald’s. For this reason, the college could not have justified relocating the protesters to a soundproofed classroom, where their rage could not have been heard or seen. Neither would CMC have been entitled to shatter a peaceful protest by force, to threaten those present with discipline or physical harm if they continued criticizing the invited speaker, or to punish everyone who participated in the protests.
But the students whom CMC sanctioned were not engaged in mere peaceful protest. They blockaded the venue with the express purpose of stripping from Mac Donald her right to speak and denying her audience their right to listen. They sought not to criticize Mac Donald and her ideas, but to prevent their communication in the first place. They wielded power as a weapon to crush the rights of others, rather than as a shield to protect them.
Our rights cease to be rights when we treat them as a mere means. The value and purpose of rights lies in their neutrality—in the fact that all people, regardless of their politics, values, or stations in life, may enjoy the benefits that their rights entail. By seeking the destruction of the rights of others, these students undermined this essential guarantee and in so doing undermined the rights themselves.
Writing in defense of Claremont McKenna, the editors note that “it is convenient to surrender to the mob. It takes courage, however, to protect and preserve the liberties they threaten.”
Read the whole editorial here.
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