WaPo 1962: Ideas and Students

In May 1962, the Washington Post Editorial Board published a strong defense of intellectual freedom on campus:

Ideas and Students

Some students on the Riverside campus of the University of California have gone to court to force University authorities to rescind a ban on Communist Party speakers. They had scheduled a debate on the question: “Should the Communist Party in the United States be outlawed?” Permission for the debate was denied in conformity with a policy adopted by the University trustees in 1951, because two members of the proposed debating panel were officials of the Communist Party in California.

Whether the free speech provisions of the United States Constitution forbid such a ban is a difficult issue with which we are content to let the courts wrestle. It is worth noting, however, that a similar ban imposed by the City University of New York was rescinded last fall after protests from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

In any event, it seems to us an unwise ban, at variance with the intellectual freedom which is the essential characteristic of a university. Are the Communist speakers so eloquent that their voices must be silenced? Are their ideas so persuasive that free men are incapable of refuting them? Are the students at the University of California so ill-educated that they cannot be trusted to choose for themselves between communism and democracy?

A university is pre-eminently a forum for the conflict of ideas, a place where preconceptions are tested in the crucible of controversy. It is committed to the doctrine that intellectual growth and maturity come about through intellectual nourishment. This has rarely been said better than it was said no more than a year ago by Clark Kerr, the distinguished president of the University of California, in opposition to a proposal at that time to limit discussion on the campus:

Members of the university community, faculty members and students alike, deserve the same right to freedom of thought and expression which every citizen enjoys outside the campus boundaries. The university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students. lt is engaged in making studenis safe for ideas.

The way to make students safe for ideas is to expose them, not shield them. The only reliable antitoxin against poisonous ideas lies in healthy ideas brought to bear through the therapy of free discussion.