FREE SPEECH

The United States has a constitutional provision guaranteeing to its citizens the right of free speech. It is supposed to be one of the most sacred heritages of the English speaking races. It is nevertheless true that since 1917 so many limitations have been placed on this right that it is in imminent danger of ceasing to be a right and be coming a rare privilege.

Not only laws, state and national, have infringed liberty of expression. Much worse, a marked and very serious tendency has developed in our schools and colleges seriously to limit the free and frank statement of one's opinions and the reasons for holding them. This spirit is epitomized in the recent statement issued by the Board of Superintendents of the Department of Education of New York City, which definitely sets forth the theory that "a teacher is no longer at liberty to freely write, speak, or publish his opinions. We cannot concede that intellectual freedom is synonymous with insolence or vulgarity, or with the right to sneer at our institutions." This is at once the article of faith and the justification of a philosophy of administration which has found its way to greater or less degree into every institution of learning in the United States. Because it confines intellectual curiosity within the bounds of dogma and so limits educational progress, it is a vicious doctrine, made more so by its apparent plausibility. Harvard herself, supposedly the very centre of the opposite theory, has not unhappily, been entirely free from its insidious influence. It must be fought vigorously if education is to continue to be evolutionary and not remain in stationary dogma.