highlights \ Vol. 57 \ March 2017 \ Pg. 17
college campuses
poulos’ event at UC Berkeley, it is currently iscourse or limit inflammatory perspectives Commentary by Nicolas Burniske STAFF WRITER
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REEDOM OF EXPRESSION is under fire on the campus of the modern university. The same institutions that claim to prioritize free speech deliberately undermine their noble efforts by supporting, and often times participating in, the censorship of perspectives that brush against the narrative of the administration in the name of “safety” and “tolerance.” No one should want to attend a university to reside passively in a “safe space.” The idea that we are doing people a favor by keeping them “safe” is the very proposition that Sigmund Freud spent his whole life fighting against. His point is illustrated in the archetypical narrative of the Oedipal mother who beckons her children to come closer and closer, only to rob them of the abilities they need to succeed in the world. A mother who acts with the best of intentions, trying to protect her children forever, actually does them a disservice. The world is a dangerous place, and shielding students from the reality of criticism and controversy is destructive. Children, and by logical extension
people, should not be coddled. Instead, we require bouts of intellectual battle and tension, growing strong through the antifragile properties that make us great. This is a cautionary tale for our time, as the modern university, and the now dissident opinion in support of the first amendment, is losing its footing to the onslaught of political correctness. Many popular conservative speakers are held in contempt by universities across the nation. Recently, in response to a would-be Milo Yiannopoulos speech at the University of California, Berkeley, violent riots were sparked in protest of the propagation of “hateful” rhetoric. Freedom of speech is universal, because it has to be. If any publicly funded bureaucracy gets to dictate who is allowed to express their opinion or what opinions constitute “hate speech,” even in the name of safety, then we are one step closer to tyranny. What if the practice of Islam or Christianity were outlawed at UC Berkeley in the name of safety and union? Would anyone buy into that? Nic ola s is rn Bu
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s to Republicans among US ading universities, by field:
College is a time to grow as people. If we pick and choose what opinions we would like to hear, we will never know what is around us.
- Caterina Viscito, senior
The spread of intolerance by the censorious political left is more than a trivial moral concern— it is obstructing the very process of intellectual evolution. In Darwinian terms, the best practical solution to survival is to generate random genetic variance among a given population, have most organisms die because they are faulty, thus allowing the ones that are correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process repeats. The surviving organism is not an ideal solution to the environment, rather it is a very bad partial solution to an impossible problem. By the same token, the only way to ensure progression to the narrative of the human condition is to allow for the free exchange of ideas and to permit maladapted ideas to wane and die off. With such importance on intellectual variance for progress, and most universities’ self proclaimed desire for myriad perspectives, it is perplexing to find that academia is as monolithic in thought and political persuasion as it once was for gender. More importantly, freedom of expression is a Darwinian means for humans to strive towards the ideal “truth.” Truth is a process of approximation, requiring the constant correction of others. People must be allowed to say what they feel compelled to say, even if it be in the form of mutually incomprehensible noise. Intellectual sparring is critical, because without it, people will bubble, boil and burst, ultimately resolving disputes through the use of physical violence. Freedom of expression is the lifeblood to a robust civilization, the mechanism by which people with different opinions settle their differences in a civil society. Just as too many antibiotics will create a weak immune system and super bugs, so too repressed thoughts will create a morally fragile society with super ignorance. h