| The statement says "MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment." So if the nazi at the bar starts threatening or harassing people, they're out. If I were writing the statement, I probably would've added "intimidation" in that sentence. Then I'd kick the nazi out if they're using slurs, or if they self-identify as a nazi (e.g. wearing a swastika). It gets tricky though, because if you add "intimidation" then someone can say "people who disagree with me are intimidating me". (I suppose they can also say "people who disagree with me are harassing me" with the current policy.) My basic approach for dealing with this problem would be to utilize the fact/value distinction. Free expression of fact statements is much more important than free expression of value statements, because knowing the truth is important. The threshold for censoring a value statement, like "The lives of <X people> don't matter" or "<X people> should be enslaved", should generally be lower. If someone claims that such a statement intimidates or harasses them, their claim will often be credible. But for a fact statement, if someone's notion of "harassment" is so broad as to make it impossible to express a particular factual claim without engaging in "harassment", I'd say they're not complaining in good faith. It's OK to argue that a particular delivery of a factual claim constitutes harassment (e.g. if the delivery is peppered with slurs). But the complainer should always be able to re-express the factual claim in a way that makes it no longer "harassment" to them. |