Amid the flurry of commentaries on events at the University of Missouri and Yale lamenting the dire state of free speech in academia, Brooklyn College’s Corey Robin, Salon, November 15, 2015, asserts that on the contrary current disputes demonstrate anew that free speech is alive and vibrant as these controversies cause “an explosion of conversation on the campus, in the media, on social media, throughout the country.”
Robin was responding to an op-ed by Suzanne Nossel of Pen America in the New York Times, November 12, 2015. Nossel described the many ways speech was threatened or stifled on campuses: “In recent years speakers have been disinvited, campus events disrupted and activists threatened for speaking their minds.” But she points out that the United States led the world in “fostering coexistence between individual liberty and respect for minorities…” and poses a way out, “Instead of insisting that individual rights not be subordinated to the ethic of the community, advocates need to explain how free speech can fortify that ethic. They need to tackle ways that racism and discrimination can themselves chill speech. But they also need to be vigilant when the marketplace of ideas fails: when speech crosses into threats or harassment, or is used to shut down opposing speech.”