“One’s voice grows stronger in encounters with opposing views. My first year after leaving Smith, I had to insist that Brown permit a speaker whose every assertion was dangerous and deeply offensive to me on a personal level. Indeed, he maintained that blacks were better off having been enslaved. Attending his talk and hearing his perspective was personally challenging, but not in the least challenging to my convictions about the absolute necessity of permitting others to hear him say these heinous things. I could have avoided the talk, as his ideas were known to me, but to have done so would have been to choose personal comfort over a freedom whose value is so great that hearing his unwelcome message could hardly be assessed as too great a cost. Universities have a special obligation to protect free speech, open discourse and the value of protest. The collision of views and ideologies is in the DNA of the academic enterprise.”
“通过与对立观点的碰撞,一个人的声音会越来越强大。在离开史密斯学院后的第一年里,我不得不坚持要求布朗大学同意邀请这样一个讲者,虽然这个人的每一个主张都是危险的,让我个人感到是一种极大的侵犯。事实上他至今仍认为黑人继续被奴役下去处境会更好。出席他的演讲会并聆听他的观点,对我个人而言是一件很有挑战性的事情,但它丝毫不会动摇我怀抱的一个信念——容许他人听到他阐述的这些令人发指的观点,是绝对必要的。我本可以避免这场演讲,因为我早就知道他的观点,但这样做无异于把个人的舒适感凌驾于一种自由之上,而这自由的价值是如此之大,以至于聆听他那些不受欢迎的讯息,算不上是多么大的牺牲。保护言论自由、公开演说和抗议的价值是大学的一项特殊职责。观点和意识形态的碰撞乃学术机构天性使然。”
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