Response to Rick re Tutu, St. Thomas, and Free Speech

Rick raises fair questions about the letter written by a number of St. Thomas law faculty concerning Archbishop Tutu.  By their nature, jointly written documents tend not to get into all the nuances of issues and anticipate all possible objections.  For now, let me respond only to Rick's first question: "how offensive is too offensive?"

He agrees that "the worry that statements-in-pursuit-of-truth might hurt or offend should not be enough to trigger the exclusion of an otherwise worthy speaker" -- but that, unfortunately, is pretty much exactly the rationale that was articulated for vetoing the Tutu invitation.  Read the rationale articulated here: it includes no argument or conclusion that Tutu's statements were (in Rick's words) so "objectively" offensive and "offensively false" to warrant exclusion.  The fact of hurt is the ground.  For that reason, the law faculty who signed the letter disagreed "especially [with] the rationale . . . publicly asserted" for the decision (para. 2 of the letter).

To answer Rick's question directly: I think at least a major criterion is a judgment whether the speaker is engaged in a good-faith expression of a moral or intellectual position or simply a malicious attack on a person or group.  That judgment requires inferences from the speaker's record as a whole; and Tutu's record of promoting nonviolence, together with the fact that he regularly states that Israel has a right to security, means that his views cannot fairly be reduced to mere malice.  His views may be way off-base; I tend to think he is overly harsh in his criticisms and naive about the capacity of nonviolence to handle the threats to Israel's security.  But I think that we have to say that someone with Tutu's record -- at the very least, someone with his record -- has, through years of powerful speech and action, developed sufficient credibility to be heard even if you think he's horribly wrong on an issue.  Especially when his error is on some other issue: He was not invited to speak specifically on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- I can certainly imagine passing him up as a keynote speaker for a Middle-East conference based on an academic judgment that his views will shed more heat than light.  Rather he was invited to speak to youth on his longtime work, nonviolent social change, the very work that won him the Nobel Peace Prize and inspired people around the world.

Finally, erring on the side of open debate makes sense because you usually can't avoid offense or hurt by vetoing an otherwise esteemed speaker -- as the reactions to the St. Thomas decision show.

For now, I'll leave Rick's abortion-related question to another post or another person.

Tom