In her critique of a perceived lack of substantive pluralism on campus, H*yas for Choice President Abby Grace (SFS ’16) appealed to the university, “Please don’t bestow a degree completely willingly upon someone who takes positions that we feel to be rather controversial and offensive.”
This plea concluded her attempt to defend free speech and the diversity of ideas on Georgetown’s campus following the controversial removal of HFC protesters from the front gates during Donald Cardinal Wuerl’s honorary degree ceremony. In Grace’s view, the university should not endorse moral claims that might give offense or start controversy.
In fact, this request to deny validation to “controversial and offensive” positions constitutes an insidious threat to the very free speech and public discourse that Grace was trying to defend. For students invested in a robust free speech policy, it is important to recognize the dangers posed by avoiding making moral claims for the sake of avoiding offense.
This suppression of morally positive claims often appears under the guise of “political correctness,” which claims to be morally neutral but in fact cannot escape making moral assertions.
Take, for instance, an institution that embraces environmentalism but claims this position is purely secular and amoral. Such a group might want to claim that its views are not charged with the kind of metaphysical angst that populates religious or moral ideas; it presents its views as purely scientific. However, no matter how conclusive scientific evidence of climate change is, there can be no “environmentalism” without the moral judgment that humans have a duty to be good stewards of the environment.
This pretension to moral neutrality is precisely what breeds intolerance, for when a group denies the moral quality of its principles, it removes them from the realm of intellectually tenable moral dissent. If the environmentalist claims that environmentalism is amoral, then it can enforce its views on others without guilt of coercion.
As such, the rise of this illiberal “liberalism” has the potential to destroy the classical liberal conception of freedom of speech. Only patently obvious moral or religious claims, such as the freedom to worship, will be protected, while secular claims that obscure their own moral groundings, such as environmentalism, sexism or LGBT rights, will be enforced without possibility of dissent.
This “error has no rights” outlook flattens discourse and establishes a superficial consensus. Thus, universities that do not recognize that their own policies constitute a moral judgment do more violence to students’ free speech than those who are aware of the moral character of their positions.
As a Catholic university, Georgetown does not pretend to be neutral on moral positions. It makes positive claims to some very controversial and potentially offensive positions, positions held as true by the Church based on the teachings of scripture and tradition. However, the refusal to claim neutrality on these positions does not hinder discourse; rather, it opens dialogue by presenting one view.
It is precisely Georgetown’s Catholic identity that both allows Georgetown to invite Cardinal Wuerl to receive an honorary degree and encourages students to discuss openly his beliefs.
Importantly, by asserting the existence of truth, Georgetown’s moral claims endow the process of intelligently seeking truth through dialogue with a high degree of dignity. On other campuses, freedom of speech may exist merely for the sake of letting students express opinions; at Georgetown, freedom of speech is necessarily endowed with the weight of the search for truth. It is a freedom for inquiry into the truth of things.
GUPD has since apologized for removing HFC from a public sidewalk, and I defer to university policy on this particular issue. But there is a much more pernicious threat to free speech than the issue of when and where students are allowed to table.
Denying the university the ability to affirm positive moral claims has the unintended consequence of limiting the free speech of students. Rather, in taking a clear position on moral claims, Georgetown invites discourse about the morality that necessarily underpins the many positions of its students.
Evelyn Flashner is a senior in the College.