Adjunct Professor Joel Cohen wrote a piece for Law.com that looks at how John Sexton, President Emeritus of New York University, has approached offensive campus speech while protecting academic freedom and open dialogue.
Sexton, as he tells us, made a choice when he was named NYU’s president—rather than opine on every issue he was asked to publicly comment about (from Iraq to ARod to the Washington Square Park dog run), he chose, instead, to publicly opine on nothing, unless it was specifically related to the mission of the university. He even refused to join other law school deans in signing an open letter opposing then-Mayor Giuliani’s dramatic budget cuts to Legal Aid, notwithstanding his fervent belief that the cuts were dead wrong. To opine, he believed would have compromised his ability to “protect the capacity for dialogue on campus.” To Sexton, there is little more important than dialogue—or, rather, dialogic dialogue where people seek to learn from each other. The idea is premised in Sexton’s Jesuit training and the belief that one can only get to the truth through constructive dialogue. And what better place to do that than in our schools of higher education?