In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, conversations are springing up all over the Internet about freedom of speech. In a climate where, more often than not, the term “free speech” is bastardized into the battle cry of online trolls banned for harassment and employees who lose their jobs over unsavoury social media posts, this tragedy is a rare western example of the real thing.
If you need a refresher on the issue, here it is: the right to free expression means not being fined, arrested, imprisoned, or killed by the state for making your views known. It does not mean protection from being kicked out of organizations, being fired, or having your work boycotted. It does not mean you have the right to wear “Fuck Safe Space” shirts and expect to keep your gig as a frosh leader, the right to make sexually violent comments about your student president and expect to keep your position as a student representative, or the right to express desire to chloroform and rape women and expect to still become a dentist.
That’s right—it’s been argued, in the name of free speech, that the male dentistry students who posted online about wanting to “hate fuck” their female colleagues should not face punishment for their actions. Mark Mercer, head of the philosophy department at Saint Mary’s University, told the CBC recently he believes that any kind of restriction on speech, “no matter how vile,” in a university setting erodes the climate of intellectual freedom.
Whatever your views on Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, they didn’t deserve the violent response they received. This is not to say that the magazine staff were saints. On the contrary—the magazine’s “satirical” cartoons were often blatantly racist. I’m referring especially to the now-infamous cartoon of “the sex slaves of Boko Haram” yelling, “Don’t touch our child benefits!”
The writers and artists killed at Charlie Hebdo were well within their rights to publish their work, just as many offended readers were well within their rights to take their outrage to social media, to local papers, and to the streets. They did so, peacefully, in droves. As a private organization, the magazine can print what it wants, and the public has a right to respond. The right to press freedom is important—but a professional school isn’t the press.
Why defend Charlie Hebdo’s right to print Islamophobic satire, and not the Dalhousie dentistry students’ right to Facebook about which classmates to chloroform?
Simple: censorship isn’t the same as social consequence, and Kalashnikovs are not the same thing as career setbacks. If intellectual freedom is somehow hampered (in that great hub of controversial and edgy ideas, dentistry school) by women having the right not to study alongside men who voted on which of them to sexually assault, that’s a very clear illustration of whose rights Mercer thinks matter more. Never mind that a professional school which welcomes men like this isn’t very conducive to an open and productive learning environment either.
Freedom of the press works in our society because we have the ability to respond with our voices and our wallets. If a magazine is too offensive, customers can boycott it. Stores can refuse to carry it. Printers and online hosts can refuse to publish it. But the state can’t restrain the press, and it has a duty to protect artists and writers from violent responses to their work.
Dalhousie University is not the state. It has no obligation to protect the “DDS Gentlemen” from the consequences of their actions. The school has a chance to respond, and to show that it values the safety and well-being of its students more than the tuition dollars of online misogynists and a bunch of lazy misconceptions about “free speech.” If Dalhousie continues to squander this chance, you can bet that other would-be students will be responding in kind by studying someplace else.
