We recently reported that the Stanford University Graduate Student Council denied a request from a student group, the Stanford Anscombe Society , for $600 to bring speakers to a conference on marriage and family issues.  Students cited that the event would support “hate speech”.

Jennifer S. Bryson, Ph.D., has a BA from Stanford University (1989), and is Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ.   She shares her thoughts about the controversy,  highlighting the need for full debate to be heard on campus.

She recounts an event during her senior year, at which a pro-life activist slated to give a speech was heckled  and his microphone taken.  Bryson was pleased when Stanford took security steps to prevent such an incident from recurring.

Her thoughts today, as a pro-life woman who attended Stanford (hat-tip, The College Fix):

… I loved Stanford not because it was easy and comfortable. I loved Stanford because it was an environment filled with challenges and opportunities to learn, filled with people very different from me from whom I learned perhaps more outside the classroom than I did inside.

…Had Stanford silenced those who opposed me, because those who opposed me were “unfriendly” to me (and some of them were literally unfriendly to me), the university would have failed in its role as a university. I think the protestors who silenced Randall Terry, rather than listening to what he had to say, failed in this instance in their role as students.

Today, as the Anscombe Society’s conference approaches, Stanford risks a rerun of this twenty-five year-old debacle. The stakes are high, implicating not only this one university, but also our society as a whole, in which tensions over issues of marriage and sex run very high.

The Anscombe Society has invited speakers who seek to address these issues in a thoughtful, civil manner. Listening in a correspondingly thoughtful and civil manner, regardless of one’s views, will accomplish far more to build a culture in which we can live peacefully together than would any effort to silence the Anscombe Society and their invited guests. Mutual understanding is not the same thing as mutual agreement. Agreement is an unlikely outcome of the conference, but let us at least seek to understand each other. Only on a foundation of understanding can we seek a way to move forward, learning to live peacefully and respectfully with our differences.

Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university. Instead, let the winds of freedom blow.