At the MSE Symposium on Tuesday night, Karl Rove, former adviser to President George W. Bush and current Fox News commentator, faced a slew of verbal interruptions to his speech from members of the Occupy Baltimore movement. The protesters decried Rove's influence on White House foreign policy, rebuking him as the driving force behind "Occupy Iraq" and "Occupy Afghanistan." Rove quickly shot back: "if you believe in free speech . . . then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q and A session." After almost incessant heckling and what a University official called "organized disruption," Rove finally finished his speech.
This page, while sympathetic to Occupy Baltimore, emphatically disapproves of these actions.
Interrupting Mr. Rove's speech at the Symposium is a gross trespass upon the Constitutional right to freely voice one's opinion. To truly support free speech is to support all speech, especially that which is disliked. This fundamental doctrine is summed up best by the famed description of Voltaire's conception of freedom of speech: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
This is absolutely integral to the functioning of our democracy. This nation was founded on the ideal that government can only function with the consent of the governed. And for such a type of self-government to truly prosper, the people must be knowledgeable about the ideals to which they are consenting. If the populace is only privy to the speech with which it agrees, however, then the civil discourse necessary to educate is stifled. Democracy, in sum, simply cannot last. What is born instead are the principles of tyranny, despotism, and autocracy — a government out of touch and unconcerned with the ideas of the body politic.
Furthermore, this type of disruption not only injures democracy, but it also hurts the Occupy movement and our chance for civil discourse as well. If it continues to ignore the ideas of its opposition, the Occupy movement risks the chance of falling from an organization of intellectual reform to one of intractable idealism, losing any credibility once afforded it. If the Occupy movement becomes just another hyper-polarized and unswerving radical group, constructive reform and compromise in this country's politics simply fall by the wayside.
Finally, we must keep in mind that Mr. Rove came to Hopkins to take part in an academic endeavor, which according to MSE's site, intends to "present and analyze issues of national importance to thousands of students." The theme of this year's speaker series is "America's Boundless Possibilities: Innovate, Advance, Transform." Students have had the opportunity to hear ideas presented from such Democratic powerhouses as Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Senior Advisor to the President David Axelrod.
If Mr. Rove's conflicting opinions aren't allowed a position in the "marketplace of ideas" that is the University, then we as students pay the price. The values of the University and the fundamentals of academia require the perseverance of a crucible of conflicting discourse from which students can formulate opinions of their own. Occupy Baltimore's attempt to preclude both sides from giving their version of the story, in effect, is to rob students of the opportunity to attain a knowledgeable opinion on the most pressing issues of our time.
