Permissible But Bad Speech

Roger Berkowitz

Danielle Allen makes the important distinction between impossible speech and speech that is permissible and yet bad. She writes:

Permissible but bad speech is like peeing in the swimming pool — it doesn’t break the law, but it violates the norm of respect for others. On college campuses, impermissible speech is met with formal adjudication and sanctions. But how should we respond to permissible but bad speech? At some level we would all like simply to banish what’s offensive, and accepting that we cannot is painful. But this does not mean bad speech needs to go unaddressed.

To understand how we ought to respond to permissible but bad speech, we’ll need one more distinction: between administrators, who are responsible for enforcing campus rules, and faculty and staff, who hold pastoral roles and are responsible for students’ learning and well-being. The province of the former is to address impermissible speech; of the latter, to manage permissible but bad speech….

The biggest mistake of all, though, is when we assume that speech protections mean there is nothing we can do about permissible but bad speech, and thereby forget the most important thing we need to do: teach.

We should not abandon our students when they err, for if we do, we will have abandoned our mission. And there is so much to teach right now. Students are hungry for lessons about history, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Israel, Palestine, two-state solutions, diverse religious traditions, diverse ideologies, peace-making, conflict transformation, human rights, pluralism, and so on. In fact, because we have neglected to teach our students in these areas, many students are forced to teach themselves.