College President: We Need More Guest Speakers We Don’t Need
Now is the time to indulge and pander.
New writer alert! ’s debut personal essay collection is The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin Press 2024).
“Higher education’s role is not to erase conflict but to channel it into dialogue, debate and learning. To do so, educators and students must face ideas we find offensive and speakers whose words cause pain.”
Laura Ann Rosenbury, “Barnard President: Now Is the Time for Colleges to Host Difficult Speakers,” The New York Times
Free speech is increasingly threatened by forces not beyond us but those within. For too long, our students have been educated by those who’ve waltzed in here merely through years of experience and peer-reviewed scholarship.
Now is the time to look beyond our purely decorative high-security gates. Now is the time to invite more guest speakers we don’t need.
We need guest speakers who we disagree with.
We need guest speakers whose views we find offensive.
We need guest speakers who are unbound by our standards of decorum and civility and consistency and logic.
We need guest speakers who increase the diversity of voices on campus by being a voice that opposes diversity and thus only accepts the speakership on the basis that they oppose it.
We need guest speakers who make us unafraid to say “Dear God!”
We need guest speakers who believe so much in the First Amendment that they put professors on watchlists for what they say.
We need guest speakers who spark spirited discourse amongst a multitude of student voices—be they white, Christian, cis, male, or straight.
We need speakers who make our teeth grind.
We need speakers who make our ears bleed.
We need speakers who turn heads, like really turn heads, like Exorcist-style.
We need speakers who give us period cramps.
We need speakers who pull us into difficult, labyrinthian arguments, right into the center of the labyrinth, the dark-hearted center, where all around us we hear wails of desperation from our friends and beloveds facing the gaping maw of the carnivorous minotaur knowing there is nothing we could do but wait, wait until the last cry fades into oblivion and it’s our turn to be clenched in the minotaur’s jaws, our last insignificant breath hitting the deaf and uncaring ear of the abyss…because that is free speech.
This might not be the most popular opinion. Some might question, disagree and even protest… Wait, no protests! No more campus protests! I’m not listening! LA LA LA! LA LA LA LA LA LA!
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