I suspect with a wink of her eye in Tim Burke's direction, Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass took a swing yesterday at Arthur Schlesinger's appeal to free speech rights in an address at Swarthmore. She posed the question:"if an argument for free speech is made on a campus that does not itself enjoy free speech, is there anyone there to hear it?" There were some 700 people in the audience, but of course that wasn't O'Connor's point. Her point was that Swarthmore itself has a code constraining freedom of speech. Today at Easily Distracted, Tim takes up O'Connor's challenge in"Thanks for Playing," a defense of his institution's limited constraints on speech. Its carefully crafted codes protect both institutional liability and individual rights, he argues. Noting FIRE's designation of Swarthmore as a"red light" district, Erin replies that Burke makes his defense of speech constraints at his institution sound like a defense of free speech.

Where were such people when I left graduate school, expecting to participate in tough, high-minded debate with faculty colleagues about the great issues of the day? Instead, I recall a French department chairperson rather much too loudly passing gas while a Religious Studies professor ranted on at nauseating length about not having an opinion about the matter under discussion. Fleeing that faculty meeting, I returned to my office, only to find the Biology department's alcoholic chairperson passed out in the stairwell. My wife didn't even object when I brought him in through the back of the house and stretched him out on the livingroom floor to dry out before taking him to the hospital.

My point is that this is a fairly rare opportunity to hear two keen intellects engaged in tough, respectful debate about a central issue in contemporary American academic life. It is too rare an opportunity to miss.

Update: Burke on"The Argument Clinic"; and O'Connor on"More and More Speech About Speech".
Further Update: And the debate continues at Critical Mass and Easily Distracted.