Free Speech Is Essential. Universities Must Do Everything They Can To Preserve It.

In February 2020, two professors participated in a debate hosted by Harvard on the subject of hate speech and whether it constitutes “violence.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, argued that, yes, hate speech can be violence based on the stress responses in the brain when confronted with speech one finds offensive. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, called Barrett’s argument a “huge disservice to what we are trying to do at universities” and warned that opening up this concept to a room full of students will lead to them equating speech and ideas they don’t like to violence. And when violence is the perception, the only recourse is more violence.