Protecting free speech

OPINION: Spurred on I think by comments from Dame Susan Devoy, Professor Paul Moon of Auckland University has written an open letter defending the right of free speech even in regard to the most obnoxious of public remarks.  His focus for this is the universities who have a free speech tradition and his letter is supported by the signatures of an interesting mix of luminaries of various sorts.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I think there should be free speech in the universities. And there is an interesting history of people in the past having preached all sorts of heretical views, many of which turned out to be correct, that supports this approach.

Open letter’s history in New Zealand

Public letters like this have a varied history in New Zealand.  The most well-known example is the letter signed up to by the Rowling for Prime Minister campaign by very well-known New Zealanders such as Ed Hillary I recall.  The aim was to prevent Rob Muldoon becoming Prime Minister.  The letter was a failure as Rob Muldoon’s government promptly got elected.  I suspect there were a couple of factors at work here – the first is that Rob Muldoon was deeply popular with “his people” and the second was just a dislike of being “lectured to” by people who “think they know better than us” – a sort of rebellion against big names.

I think New Zealand has matured a lot since then and I doubt if the Moon letter will have quite the same response.

Free Speech

But free speech is indeed a tricky area.  In principle, it is hard not to agree entirely with the sentiment but an interesting question is whether it should apply only to the hallowed walls of academia, or should apply more broadly.  In these days of the social media being wide open to young people, that is not an easy question.

In a University environment, I think there is some merit in the argument that people who preach dodgy messages will be called out as it were, by others who disagree with the message and have better alternatives to put forward.  The kind of debate that engenders is good for human progress.  The problem with leaving the social media open to any and all messages is that the people receiving them are young, impressionable and simply not equipped to make mature judgements about many things.

Under those circumstances, I think some kind of control – call it censorship if you must – seems to me to be essential.  And I think it should be exercised at two levels – at the level of those who control the social media, i.e. putting limits on what can and cannot be displayed, and at the level of parents behaving responsibly in monitoring the access if their children to obnoxious messages.

Where to draw the line

An equally difficult issue is where you draw the dividing line and how to make it stick.  It is all very well to have freedom of speech at University but it the message gets promptly strewn around the social media, it is no longer just a University issue.  And I can see no practical way of enforcing the borders on this.  The genie is so far out of the bottle he/she will never get within cooee of getting back in again.  In other words, the universities can no longer stand in isolation on issues such as free speech, but need to engage in solving the wider problems free speech engenders in the digital age.

By Bas Walker

This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.