January 2013
Pretty nearly all the students in my second-year
philosophy class agreed that the Saint Mary’s University Students’ Association (SMUSA)
should not have banned the gaming society’s poster. The poster featured a
Nintendo Zapper and was intended to advertise a night at the pub.
I told the class that Michael MacDonell, a SMUSA
Vice-President, had justified the decision by explaining that “a picture
depicting or making light of gun violence is something that we as an association
are not willing to endorse.”
The gun, my students replied, was obviously a
plastic toy, and couldn’t possibly be taken by anyone to be depicting or making
light of gun violence.
I told them MacDonell also explained that SMUSA has to ensure that postings
don’t damage the reputation of Saint Mary’s. To this, some of my students
responded that it should have been obvious that banning the poster would do far
greater damage to our reputation, as indeed it has.
Yet when I asked whether SMUSA should have the
power to vet and reject posters, many of my students, maybe the majority,
indicated that they thought it should. SMUSA should be able to say no to
posters, according to many of them—it just shouldn’t say no without a good
reason.
The idea my students expressed is not just that
people shouldn’t put up posters that depict or make light of gun violence, or
celebrate sexist attitudes or mock a religion, or question a woman’s right to an
abortion, or damage the reputation of the university. The idea my students
offered is that people shouldn’t be allowed to
put up offensive posters because the
campus needs to be a pleasant, hospitable place to everyone. A photograph of a
dismembered fetus might upset a young woman who just had an abortion. A drawing
of Mohammed will hurt Muslims. Being upset or hurt will affect their studies.
The university won’t, for them, be a place at which to learn.
Students and professors at Saint Mary’s belong
to all sorts of cultures, said these students, and they all deserve a respectful
atmosphere in which to learn. In order to ensure that they can learn well and
take their place in their careers and in society, someone has to oversee campus
goings-on, someone with the authority to intervene to prevent students from
suffering harm to their sense of self-worth. Otherwise, the university is not
equally their university.
I think this view is fundamentally wrong headed.
But before I explain why, I want to voice a criticism of it that I think should
resonate even with those sympathetic to the pro-censorship view.
The criticism is that we cannot trust that our
overseer will use her powers well. In fact, we can be fairly confident that she
won’t. Give a person who wants it the power to censor things, and she will use
it. Soon enough, for no good reason, and in the face of ridicule, the censor
will ban Nintendo Zappers from posters. Soon enough, she will censor anything
any group on campus doesn’t like—out of conviction, out of a desire to be
even-handed, or out of cowardice. Soon enough, she will come after your own
sincere expressions of opinion or emotion.
This argument has much to recommend it, but I
think there’s a much stronger one to consider.
The pro-censorship argument notes that
people on campus come from all sorts of cultures. That’s true. But it’s a
mistake to infer from that truth that a university campus is a multicultural
place. It isn’t. A university is as monocultural as any institution could be.
University culture is that of intellectuals—of researchers and scholars,
interpreters of literature and life, of teachers and learners. Our culture is
that of free and fearless inquiry into the ways things are. University culture
is welcoming to people of all sorts of backgrounds, yes, but it has its own
strong and particular identity.
Central to the identity of intellectuals is the
desire not to be swayed, and not to sway others, by anything other than evidence
and cogent argument. Not only do we want to have true beliefs and sound values,
we want to come to those beliefs and values for our own good reasons, and not as
a result of ignorance or pressure.
One of a professor’s tasks as a teacher is to
help her students to become dispassionate inquirers, to live, that is, as
intellectuals. Campus censorship undermines their work. It reinforces in a
professor’s students the idea that there are some things better not confronted
intellectually. Campus censorship prevents them from using their own judgement
and reacting with criticism, and thereby prevents them from acquiring judgement
and the habit of criticism.
Campus censorship is inconsistent with
university culture, with the intellectual’s way of encountering the world.
Not many of my students much like this argument,
I’m sad to say. I suspect that that is because they do not think of themselves
as aspiring intellectuals. They come to university for training and credentials
so that they can embark on careers. They don’t actually have a taste for
intellectual community.
Then again, neither do many professors or
administrators, at least at Saint Mary’s. Much more troubling than my students’
easy acceptance of censorship in their lives is the indifference of deans,
vice-presidents, and presidents to this acceptance, for their indifference will
ensure that my students remain uneducated, whatever degrees they win.
Canadian Centre
for Ethics in Public Affairs, ADMIN, October 14, 2012.
Help us maintain freedom in teaching, research and scholarship by joining SAFS or making a donation.
