Editorial: Campuses should be home to all voices

At different ends of the country, two stories are raising questions about free speech on college campuses.

The first sings a familiar refrain. Cultural conservatives within the Texas A&M Student Senate are seeking the ability to opt out of paying for an LGBTQ center that opened on campus several years ago. The student leaders allege that by being forced to fund a center opposed to “traditional values,” students are being coerced out of their right to free speech, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The amount of each student’s tuition that goes toward actually supporting the center, which provides counseling and support for students in the LGBTQ community, is only about $2. Thus, there is no fiscal austerity argument. The effort, in the eyes of supporters, solely concerns allowing each student to see that every dollar is being spent in a way that is morally satisfying.

In far more liberal Maryland, however, a similar conflagration is occurring at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This past March, the Johns Hopkins Student Government Association — the equivalent of Pitt’s Student Government Board — rejected a pro-life student group’s application to be formally recognized by the university, according to The Washington Times.

The reasoning? According to the SGA, the group, called Voice for Life — which coordinated sidewalk protests and rallies around abortion clinics — was offensive and, therefore, not appropriate for Johns Hopkins University. SGA members felt students had a right to not be subjected to offensive language on their way to classes in the morning and, thus, saw the decision to not formally recognize the group as one that merely served to foster a more welcoming, warm campus community.

If you can see anything different between these situations, please notify us immediately.

Sure, Johns Hopkins, as a private university, might have more legal grounding in some distant legal sense. Each student likely has very different reactions to anti-abortion activists and anti-gay activists.

But in both cases, school officials, either professional or student, are seeking to stifle self-determined offensive language and behavior in hopes of creating a more pleasant campus: one rooted in either more traditional values or in less-disruptive protests.

The behavior at both schools, whether you agree with the personal motivations in play at either one, is completely antithetical to the nature of American public life and college campuses.

Since neither the anti-abortion activists nor the LGBTQ clinic are acting in a hateful way toward any group, their behavior can’t be condoned on grounds of racism. Nor does recognition or payment of a paltry $2 lead to any student committing a grave moral sin.

Inclusion of these additional voices only adds to the active dialogue at both schools. It helps to foster the greater understanding (or, even, possibly repulsion) that is necessary for society to move forward. Self-imposed offensiveness-protection bubbles do nothing.

There are two takeaways from these cases. One, restrictive decisions can inflict even a college campus. Just because you assume an activist group or a club will be allowed on a campus that is supposed to be open to infinite perspectives does not mean it will be protected.

Second, student government boards and university senates can actually make some pretty drastic decisions. Pay attention.