Politics can be a funny business. Just ask Will Durst. Or Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. The cancellation of Colbert’s TV show and the suspension of Kimmel’s probably bring as much schadenfreude to some as they bring fear to others. But if free speech and a free press are worth preserving — and Americans on the left and the right say it is — then it’s worth thinking more about what free speech really is and how its antagonists aren’t all located on one end of the political spectrum.
Following a national outcry, Disney announced that Kimmel’s show will return tonight. But it’s a bit disconcerting when Senator Ted Cruz wields the free-speech flag against moves by the Trump administration to target opponents based on speech. This mess could probably have been avoided if my college newspaper owned Disney. Back then, we knew how to deal with controversy.
In college, my student newspaper had a popular columnist (the only columnist we gave two columns a week) who was also a professional stand-up comedian. When Steve had a gig outside the city, he would often bring a friend or two along to help keep him awake on the drive back. As a result, I got to visit such beautiful locales as some city in Iowa whose name I forgot, as well as several small towns in southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois with forgotten names.
As a comedian, a columnist, and student body copresident, Steve managed to amuse, inform, and annoy thousands of people on a regular basis. He wasn’t a boundary pusher in terms of taste, but he attracted a lot of criticism because the people who often came in for criticism in his columns were on the campus left, which was as full of wacky ideas as it was lacking in a sense of humor.
But — and this is the point — Steve wasn’t a conservative; wasn’t then, isn’t now. He was just dedicated to the conviction that everything deserves a critical eye; otherwise, stupid ideas become policy and action because no one questioned them.
This was taking place in the late 1980s, when speech codes were the rage on college campuses, at least among the left-leaning faculty and administrators. This was part of a movement to confront offensive speech not by meeting it on the battlefield of ideas but by silencing it and removing the offenders from the shared realm. Think of it as an early attempt at cancel culture.
In October 1990, the Chicago Sun-Times came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus to see how students there felt about the new speech code, which could lead to suspension of students for “creating a hostile environment” by making remarks about another person’s sex, race, class, religion, or sexual orientation. Years later, the UW’s then-Chancellor Donna Shalala would tell The New Yorker that she pushed for the speech codes because the students wanted it.
Democracy is noisy, occasionally rude, and it requires its participants to be informed citizens.
But the Sun-Times headline told the truth: “Students cool to hostile-speech ban.” As board chair and former editor of The Badger Herald student newspaper, I was interviewed for the article and tried to make the point that the speech bans were self-defeating. I told the Sun-Times, “To shut off racial speech you’re actually feeding it. The whole point of a university is to educate the person to be a better person, and here’s the university saying, ‘Here’s a problem, we can’t handle it, send them [offending students] back to the farm.”
I’ve always thought that was ironic. The UW could educate people to become nuclear scientists and Pulitzer Prize winners, but it didn’t feel up to the task of educating them to be decent people?
Later in the Sun-Times article, I noted that “it’s easier to stay radical at a smaller school. . . . Madison has 43,000 students, and you can’t have all of these students controlled by any one group.”
All I was really making was a defense of a big, boisterous liberal democracy. Democracy is noisy, occasionally rude, and it requires its participants to be informed citizens.
I thought it was interesting and impressive that not only was the speech code unpopular at my Badger Herald — we with the conservative editorial page — but also at the Daily Cardinal, our left-wing competitors.
A federal court struck down the UW’s speech code in 1991, noting “The problems of bigotry and discrimination sought to be addressed here are real and truly corrosive of the educational environment. But freedom of speech is almost absolute in our land and the only restriction the fighting words doctrine can abide is that based on the fear of violent reaction. Content-based prohibitions . . . , however well intended, simply cannot survive the screening which our Constitution demands.”
I forget who said it, but it’s worth noting here: When you ban offensive speech from official circles, it goes underground, which is where such speech and ideas really thrive. Much better, then, to let someone air their bigoted ideas and be argued with by better people with better ideas.
Offensive speech and critical speech aren’t necessarily the same thing. (They can be, but let’s tackle that another time.) My college comedian-columnist friend wasn’t making racist or other inflammatory comments; he was just annoying people who didn’t want their statements and actions to be questioned. But to combat offensive speech, they should have realized their best ally was Steve, who was (and is) smart enough to match wits with the racists and other bigots.
Liberals and conservatives alike need to embrace the marketplace of ideas and stop trying to silence the other side. Engaging in real back-and-forth, give-and-take will sharpen the ideas on both sides. To survive, democracy needs people willing to speak up with unpopular opinions, weather the criticism, and confront the folks threatening democracy — and a little joke now and then isn’t a bad idea.
