Free to hate
What does “free speech” mean? Recent campus events have shown that campus is split: columnist Newby Parton writes without qualification that “silencing offensive speech... solves nothing that can’t be solved by growing thicker skin,” while students protest the chapel meeting with signs lambasting the administration’s weak response to Urban Congo and claiming that President Eisgruber wrote, “[Racism] may not be suppressed.” These events, as well as the mixed responses to the University’s new statement on academic freedom, demonstrate that students have very different conceptions of free speech.The two sides of this campus debate basically fall in line with the two competing theories of free speech on the world stage.