For years, as Americans—and even as Boston College students—it has felt increasingly difficult to find something that unites us. But we often overlook a unifying cause foundational to the United States: freedom of expression.
As a former columnist for The Heights, I wrote a column in 2023 titled “Navigating Political Discourse and Encouraging Constructive Conversations,” addressing some of the problems in discourse at BC. A recent story from The Heights about BC’s administration’s heavy restriction on student protest, however, reminded me that these issues are still alive.
This piece will highlight BC’s failure to protect free expression and foster open discourse. Free speech and open discourse environments are not about defending and encouraging what we agree with, but about defending our neighbor’s right to speak their mind freely—even when we disagree with them.
As reported by The Heights, BC forced pro-Palestinian protestors to resubmit and alter their proposed itinerary and speeches four times before being approved to protest. Obtaining this approval required an 80-day process that began on Nov. 18, 2024.
This extensive delay was not an isolated bureaucratic mistake. It reflects BC’s broader failure to uphold free expression. BC’s student demonstration policy requires students to get administrative approval to protest, stating, “Boston College reserves the right to condition the time, place, and manner of proposed demonstrations, and to withhold approval of proposed demonstrations …”
This policy leads to delays and issues regarding the right to protest.
“If breaking news happens on a Friday, that means you’re waiting well into the next week in order to be able to get out and speak about that on campus,” said Laura Beltz, a lawyer and director of policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),
I spoke with Beltz before the Palestine protest incident. Nonetheless, she predicted that the slow, bureaucratic approval outlined in BC’s policy would hinder student demonstration efforts. Her mistake was in thinking it would take a few days. Instead, it took almost 12 weeks.
The student demonstration policy may allow the administration to wait as long as they wish, but it also says, “Boston College has a long-standing commitment to protecting the right to free expression, including the right to protest.”
The keyword here? The right to protest. Taking 80 days to approve a student demonstration treats protesting as a privilege. At the time of the protest’s request for approval, the Israel-Gaza conflict was materially different. Students are now protesting a cause that changed from when they requested approval.
FIRE—a leading First Amendment legal advocacy group—criticized BC’s policy in an open letter, calling for faster approval, removing vague language, and less red tape.
Boston College’s unclear and poorly upheld speech code is not an unimportant issue of semantics. A poor speech code puts the university at risk of swaying with the political wind rather than steadfastly committing to protecting its community’s speech and expressive rights.
As students, we must look at ourselves in the mirror to ensure that we, too, are doing our part to foster a flourishing discourse environment. And there is room to grow. Boston College placed 189th out of 251 colleges in FIRE’s 2024 free speech rankings. We ranked 239th in students’ openness to discuss controversial ideas and 209th in self-censorship.
Let me give an example of how self-censorship plays out on campus.
There was a class-wide speaker event during the Class of 2026’s first week on campus. He asked students to stand if they were liberal. Around half of the class stood up. He then asked conservative students to stand. Approximately 5 percent of the class stood up.
Knowing our class, it is clear that more than 5 percent are conservative. Fear of being targeted by the majority, not administrative policies, kept many conservatives silent. This should concern everyone. If students on the right fear speaking up, the left loses the opportunity to engage, challenge, and persuade them through reasoned discussion. The right loses the opportunity to articulate and strengthen their convictions.
Well-intentioned students on the left who claim that right-wing viewpoints are hateful and should not be given credence in campus discourse are a part of the problem. Even if people with conservative beliefs were inherently bigoted or hateful, which most are not, silencing “hateful” views fails to change anyone’s mind and will instead drive people toward more extreme echo chambers where their ideas won’t be challenged.
If we care about freedom of speech, we must stand up for speech we disagree with. The examples in this op-ed—pro-Palestinian protest restrictions and conservative self-censorship—show us that a commitment to freedom of speech and open discourse can unite us across partisan divides.
So, how should we improve?
We must remember that our opinions are like muscles. The university is like a gym where we exercise our judgements and viewpoints. Disagreements are the weights we lift to make our opinions stronger. As Van Jones, a former environmental advisor to Barack Obama, said, “I’m not going to take the weights out of the gym. That’s the whole point of the gym.”
BC should invest in its discussion environment as it does in physical fitness—training everyone from freshmen to faculty in civil discourse. Mental health challenges and social media toxicity may make BC hesitant to advocate for open debate and expression. But by seeking to protect us from ideas rather than teaching us how to engage with them, BC will inadvertently produce more mentally fragile and intellectually weak students.
The University should also respond to FIRE’s letter and clarify its speech code.
As students, we must uphold our end. We must have the courage to speak our minds. In disagreement, we should channel our emotions toward refuting the idea, not attacking the person we disagree with.
Interacting with ideas we disagree with can be scary, uncomfortable, offensive, and challenging for students, faculty, and administrators alike.
But if we seek to “set the world aflame,” we cannot fear the heat.
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