The greatest civil rights leaders have been gifted speakers and writers: think of Dr. King, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcom X, and President Obama. It was DuBois in the early 20th century who made the then controversial argument that an urgent educational priority of African-Americans should be not just vocational training but high literacy and the kind of ethically-infused liberal arts training that Dickinson seeks to provide. As a journeyman teacher in rural Tennessee, DuBois attempted, as he recalled fondly in The Souls of Black Folk, to teach the lessons of Rome’s greatest orator Cicero to poorest of the black poor. Today this seems quaint and Quixotic, and yet, the Ciceronian principle that DuBois was trying to teach—that all social change begins with rhetoric and persuasion, and that the arts, literature, and especially oratory have an important role to play in a moral society—continues to be a vital one. Change requires speech: free speech, and powerful speech.

I was pleased to see on the website of the Popel Shaw Center that among the services they provide are “Invitations to educational sessions addressing topics like … public speaking.” But, like many faculty I have spoken with since late summer, I have deep reservations about another more central function of the Center that seems to inhibit free dialogue, namely the BERT program. BERT catalogues bias incidents, which, according to a poster put up around campus late this summer, include such offenses as “telling jokes based on stereotype” or “using ‘gay’ as an insult,” or “telling a man that he needs to wear pants or a woman that she needs to wear a skirt.” Records of such reported unacceptable speech are kept, and members of the BERT team speak with those involved, though names of “target witnesses and perpetrator(s)” are excluded from the records. Not simply a matter of disciplining those who hurl racial slurs or deface faith symbols, the focus is evidently on stopping people from using stereotypes. One of the pillars of MANdatory, the website informs us is, “Developing an awareness of stereotype threat.” Stereotypes are bad and sometimes hurtful. But this official chastening the speech of others and enforcing speech codes seems to me inconsistent with free and open discourse that is the life blood of an excellent educational institution and the soul of a liberal arts training. It will be objected that the real intent is to deal with incidents of the outrageous use of racial slurs, as discussed in last week’s Dickinsonian article. But this is not what the website or the center’s publicity says.

It used to be an article of faith that protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. That principle still holds, but it does not go nearly far enough for an institution such as ours. Our duty, the liberal arts duty (Latin līber, “free,” ars, “skills,” skills of the free), is not just to permit free speech, even possibly offensive speech, but to cultivate it, to make it better, more effective. Students should be encouraged to say unpopular things, whatever ideas are on their minds, even if they are stereotypical—and then to make the arguments for them as best they can and follow the debate to its end.

Public speaking, once the core, even the goal, of the liberal arts training, is now nowhere explicitly taught in the Dickinson curriculum. Rich Lewis used to teach a class in it and run the popular speech contest every spring (I used to help judge), but no longer. My suggestion is that the Popel Shaw Center abandon its language-policing functions and re-orient itself around the liberal arts as DuBois and Cicero defined it: the development of powerful, ethical public speakers actively devoted to the public good. I would urge that they take up the mantle of teaching public speaking, run the speech content, and open their sessions to all students, not just members of underrepresented groups. It is surely the case that all students have a stake in improving race, class, and gender relations and fostering progress through powerful, open, and free speech and debate on these issues. I and other faculty would be glad to collaborate in this important endeavor.