To the Editor:
For any institution, even a university, it’s tempting to find ways to make challenging or controversial voices disappear. As a university in the Catholic and Jesuit tradition, it is not surprising that an event involving gay and lesbian relationships should be disquieting. It should be. We are an institution that barely recognizes the existence of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual; much less are we a community that is genuinely welcoming and inclusive. But that is not grounds for intervening with the academic freedom of students to invite speakers. Nor is it grounds for the arbitrary and inconsistent invocation of legal concerns or “balance.” Faculty and student groups have often co-sponsored campus events with outside groups. In events I’ve organized, outside groups have often sent out invitations or publicized the event on their own. On our campus, we have also often had presentations of only one viewpoint-critics of the death penalty such as Sister Helen Prejean, opponents of the war in Iraq, speakers on civil rights-without also having an alternate view. In eight years here, I have never seen an event canceled by the administration on any of these grounds. This is a shameful precedent. Under the First Amendment, as well as a long tradition in philosophy, what we see again and again is the idea that open discourse is crucial for any human progress, and that suppressing expression is destructive and infantilizing. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant writes that “dogmas and formulas…are the ball and chain of [man’s] permanent immaturity.” For enlightenment, he says, there must be freedom-“the freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.” John Stuart Mill writes that “the peculiar evil of silencing opinion”-whether the opinion is right or wrong-is that it robs the human race. If the opinion is right, he says, then the community is deprived of the opportunity of trading truth for error. If it is wrong, then we lose almost as great a benefit-that we will see the truth even more clearly because of its “collision with error.” Fairfield University needs a clear policy that spells out our commitment to academic freedom; requires consistency and fairness in application; supports and encourages students’ intellectual, political, and cultural interests; clearly limits the intervention of the administration in academic activities and that clearly holds that expression and academic activities on campus cannot be required to comply with Catholic doctrine.
Sincerely, Joy Gordon Professor of Philosophy
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