UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The intricate balance between promoting free speech and diverse viewpoints while still ensuring campus is a welcoming place for all was the cornerstone of a Penn State panel discussion on Thursday (Oct. 27) that held the attention of hundreds in the audience and hundreds more online.
To help frame the night’s conversation, the discussion was preceded by a trio of skits that illustrated the complex intersection between diversity and First Amendment rights on college campuses — issues such as racially charged speech from one student to another, student activism and protests, and derogatory or offensive language by faculty members in the classroom.
Penn State President Eric Barron, who hosted the discussion along with Vice Provost for Educational Equity Marcus Whitehurst, kicked off the panel talk by posing the question, “How can a university be inclusive, and make students, faculty and staff feel welcome, in the face of tremendously toxic language?"
“We value speech, and discussion, and the expression of ideas — otherwise we wouldn’t be a great university,” Barron said, speaking before a crowd of more than 300 in Freeman Auditorium on the University Park campus. “At the same time, we’ve come to live in a world of rather toxic political language, toxic racial language, and you could make a very long list of putting ‘toxic’ and then the word ‘language’ at the end of it.
“It’s an incredible tension — a tension between a legal obligation, a constitutional right of free speech that, if restricted, you end up with countries that look like dictatorships for which you begin to question who gets to restrict whose speech. And the tension is with a moral obligation to be inclusive and educate the people of our Commonwealth and the nation.”