Assembly LX: Free Speech, Free Expression and Free Inquiry at Yale
Friday, April 26 through Saturday, April 27, 2002
First Assembly Session

Of Values and Priorities: History and Practice of Free Speech at Yale

Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead '68, '72 PhD, A. Barlett Giamatti Professor of English, opened his reflections by agreeing with Smith regarding Yale's origins, noting that Yale's founders hoped the college would be an answer to the loose living and free thinking taking place at Harvard. In the 1740's it was a punishable crime to call a professor a hypocrite and the university outlawed many specific aspects of student speech. The link between the university and free speech came about only relatively late in the development of the modern academic institution.

Yale University was founded on the idea that absolute truths existed and were known. Moreover, the founders believed that the work of education was to hand down such truths from teacher to student, one generation to the next. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the modern research university was created in Germany. Wilhelm von Humboldt helped found the New University at Berlin, an institution whose mission was based on a different understanding of truth and the university's relationship to truth. Humboldt believed that knowledge is never completely to be discovered. The mission of the university was no longer the passing on of truth from generation to generation but a labor from generation to generation to come closer to the truth.

Humboldt put into circulation two ideas. The first was lehrfreiheit, "teaching freedom," which allowed faculty free inquiry and presentation of materials and to become agents of discovery. The complimentary idea was lernfreiheit, the freedom of students in their learning, which allowed them to be partners with their teachers in the search for knowledge. The spread of these ideas through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created the cultural presumption that there is a deep and intrinsic link between free speech and the purpose of a university. However, from the time that free speech became a central value of the university, it has been contested both outside and inside the academy.

Although everyone supports free speech, we are intolerant of those who transgress our own values. We therefore have a deep inclination to constrain the speech of others who have ideas that do not concur with our own. With this always in mind, it seems that the current state of free speech at Yale is healthy, meaning that the environment is one in which people generally feel comfortable speaking their minds. Yale is a place where free speech is valued and individuals are willing to concede rights to others in hopes that others will later concede the same rights in return.

Dean Brodhead then considered specific cases from the past year in which free speech issues were engaged, including formal discussions held on campus in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and informal, but particularly pointed expressions, of views or belief.

In discussing these incidents, Dean Brodhead pointed out that in addition to coping with difficult and complex matters of specific policies, precedents and administrative judgments, a Dean should not lose sight of the fact that on a university campus occasions on which free speech issues come into play constitute an opportunity for education and for further reflection. Free speech tends to be taken as an absolute value when considered in the abstract, but specific instances of free speech sometimes put it in competition with other values in such a way that faculty, administrators and students must think carefully about its importance and its relation to those other values.

In short, students learn about many things, including free speech, not just through their formal classes, but through particular experiences in which they are challenged by peers, faculty and administrators. Free speech is not a matter on which a Dean or any other authority figure may simply dispense judgments based on fixed and permanent rules; it is a community responsibility in which all members participate in setting expectations and discerning outcomes. Like Smith, Brodhead concluded that particular cases and circumstances would always test both the university policies and individual understandings of free speech and expression.