Thoughts On Tolerance, Virtue, and Failure

What we can learn from Lee Bollinger's words -- and actions.

[This is an essay that will appear in The New Criterion, but it’s published here for paid subscribers with their permission. I hope you enjoy it.]

We’ve heard a lot about campus free-speech – and the lack thereof – lately.  From federal judges heckled at Stanford Law, to speakers shut down at Yale Law, to various other controversies at campuses all over America the dominant trend on campus seems to be to treat any opposing ideas or speech as essentially acts of violence.  Ideas with which one disagrees are treated as dangerous, even threatening.  (Though as a friend observes, anyone who thinks words are violence has never been punched in the mouth.)

This is wrong, and we are beginning to see some positive responses from administrators at some schools. After the Stanford debacle, its Law Dean published a strong and lengthy defense of free speech, and is requiring all students to be trained in free expression, and Cornell’s President and Provost recently shot down an effort by the Student Assembly to require “trigger warnings”in all classes.  The President and Provost wrote:  “Academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it, provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence, and do not introduce controversial matters unrelated to the subject of their course.”

But far too often, university administrators are supine, and even complicit, in student hostility toward disagreeable ideas.  The notion that hearing unwelcome ideas is somehow harmful to students seems to be taken as a given in many cases.  But in fact it shouldn’t be, and to see why it’s worth revisiting a 1986 book by then-law professor Lee Bollinger.  (Bollinger is now the president of Columbia University, and will retire at the end of this academic year.)

That book is The Tolerant Society:  Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America.  In it, Bollinger lays out a case for free speech that seems especially applicable on campus, and especially now.

The centerpiece of Bollinger’s book is the  planned (but never actually executed) 1977 Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois.  Skokie was a heavily Jewish suburb whose inhabitants included a substantial number of Holocaust survivors.    Unsurprisingly, many were upset, offended, and even frightened by the planned march, and many legal efforts were made to stop it.  Yet the Nazis, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, prevailed in the courts, successfully arguing that those legal efforts, which included three different ordinances specifically intended to frustrate their ability to march, violated their free speech rights under the United States Constitution, as they surely did.  (After winning in Skokie, the Nazis, who I suppose figured they had made their point, marched elsewhere.)

Noting that the societal value of Nazi speech is low, Bollinger wonders why we permit such things.  Finding existing First Amendment theories incomplete, he posits another reason:  We allow objectionable speech because having to tolerate such speech exercises the muscles of tolerance, and helps us to build what he calls a “tolerant mind.”

By getting used to tolerating even the most extreme speech, we form the habit and the ability to tolerate less-extreme but still objectionable (at least to us) speech.  Bollinger writes:

To see free speech as concerned not just with protecting the activity of speech but with the reaction to that activity, and to the personal values reflected in those reactions, changes considerably our idea of the ends served by the principle.  We have already seen the range of importance to the community of learning to exercise self-restraint toward behavior found offensive or threatening.  It seeks to induce a way of thinking that is relevant to a variety of social interactions, from the political to the professional.  Significantly, this perspective sees the social benefits of free speech as involving not simply the acquisition of the truth but the development of intellectual attitudes, which are important to the operation of a variety of social institutions – the spirit of compromise basic to our politics and the capacity to distance ourselves from our beliefs, which is so important to various disciplines and professional roles

It also promises a benefit we can all feel, individually as well as collectively, of avoiding the burdens that the impulse to intolerance can impose on us, or that through it we impose on ourselves.  To escape its demands or, more accurately, to reduce the power of its grip, to become the master of the fears and doubts that drive us to slay the specter of bad thoughts, is an achievement of the first magnitude. 

Allowing space for ideas we hate, and ideas propounded by people we are inclined to hate, not only trains our mind not to reflexively lash out at unwelcome arguments, it frees us from the compulsion to do so.  And freedom from that compulsion is not only good for free speech, it is good for the soul.  Bollinger quotes Justice Louis Brandeis’ dissent in Whitney v. California:

  “Men feared witches and burned women, and it is the function of [free] speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” 

Thus, he says, “under the general tolerance function, free speech is not concerned exclusively with the preservation of a freedom to do whatever we wish, or with the advancement of truth or democracy as those terms are generally used, but with the development of a capacity of mind, with a way of thinking.”  A spirit of tolerance means that others can’t yank your chain simply by propounding ideas you don’t like.

It’s worth adding that emotions and actions are self-reinforcing with habit.  Get consumed with anger at “wrong” ideas once and you will probably be consumed more easily the next time, and the time after that.  Practice self-restraint and you will likely become more capable over time.  (It’s called “practicing” self-restraint for a reason.)

This is a wonderful theory, and I think it offers useful guidance not only for colleges and law schools, but for society at large.  And the as-of-this-writing top comment to the New York Times story on the Stanford Law School debacle, noted by retired Wisconsin Law Professor Ann Althouse,  captures this perfectly:

In 1969 I was a student at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland.  Members of the American Nazi Party were allowed to visit the school and present their point of view that the Holocaust had not happened.  The event was held after school in the cafeteria, and expectations for students who chose to attend were made absolutely clear to us by the principal.  We were to be respectful at all times; we were not to interrupt the speakers; anything we had to say could be said in the Q & A afterwards.