Free speech includes the ability to have a conversation and to discuss ideas openly, a Hillsdale College professor wrote recently.
Professor Wilfred McClay described the difference between “free speech” and “free expression” in an essay for City Journal.
McClay criticizes universities and school officials who miss the point about free speech. It is not merely the ability to say anything, but rather to engage with fellow human beings.
Drawing on the sad state of free speech on college campus, and citing the murder of Charlie Kirk, McClay says “[i]t will take more than eloquent declarations to restore free speech on our campuses.”
“What is required is a renewed commitment, especially from academic leaders, to the habits of mutuality on which free speech depends but which it cannot, by itself, sustain,” he wrote.
McClay draws on the work of Michael Oakeshott, a Cambridge political theorist who wrote about the value of having a conversation:
What is a conversation? Oakeshott called it “an unrehearsed intellectual adventure”—a setting in which “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another,” without an arbiter, “not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials.” Most strikingly, he contends that “it is the ability to participate in conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.” From this perspective, the central task of education is to initiate students into “the skill and partnership of this conversation.”
Yet as McClay points out, many people have lost the ability to have a conversation. Instead, such a request “is little more than a courteous prelude to a sermon explaining why you are right and I am wrong.”
Oft-cited university proclamations on speech, however, often miss the value of a conversation, the Hillsdale professor writes.
Expression, as cited in the University of Chicago Principles statement and Yale University’s Woodward Report, miss the point.
“Through words, we engage in rational deliberation: we work things out together, solve problems, and articulate and apply moral and practical principles,” McClay argues.
“Speech is what allows us to function as ‘political animals,’ in Aristotle’s sense—not merely creatures who coexist, but beings capable of deliberating together about the common good.
