“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” — John Stuart Mill

The student body of Brown University embarrassed itself yesterday in a truly flagrant display of ideological intolerance.

The occasion was a speech—or at least a planned speech—by New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who was to address a group of undergraduates on the virtues of Stop and Frisk.

Before he could begin, a group of dozens of protestors, supported by hundreds outside the lecture hall, stood up and chanted anti-Kelly slogans in unison, refusing to yield the floor. Brown Vice President of Student Life Margaret Klawunn and Vice President for Public Affairs Marisa Quinn asked the protestors to cease shouting, so that Kelly’s views might be heard and questioned by the students present. Ultimately, their appeals were unsuccessful, the lecture was cancelled, and the Brown University Police Department was called upon to clear the premises. Video and photographic coverage is available via the Daily Herald.

If there’s anything that can be learned from this failed attempt at dialogue, it’s that a large chunk of university students—at least at Brown—believe that the only opinions worthy of articulation are the ideas they agree with. Those ideas with which they disagree are to be shunned and silenced, as if their campus were a hermetically sealed ideological habitat for establishment liberals and no one else.

Let me be clear. I oppose Stop and Frisk and “indirect racial profiling” of most kinds, and I dislike Kelly. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care what he has to say. When the HPR interviewed National Review Washington editor Robert Costa the other day, our core of largely liberal staff writers didn’t rush to the Institute of Politics on JFK Street, call him down, accuse him of racism, and force him to leave Cambridge, all while yelling catchy, ad hominem phrases.

There’s an implicit belief among many of us that listening to opinions with which we disagree can add nuance to our own opinions, that reasoned dialogue can add nuance to the opinions of our ideological foes as well. We don’t purport to have the answers in their absolute finality; apparently, a few hundred students at Brown do.

To be fair, this mass of protestors likely does not reflect Brown’s student body at large.  On October 28, the Daily Herald‘s editorial board called upon students to let Kelly speak. While the board conceded that “Stop and Frisk created a culture of fear in New York for certain … marginalized groups,” it proffered that students “who challenge Kelly on factual grounds will meet greater success than those who focus on trying to keep the event from taking place.”

Insofar as the battle over Stop and Frisk is a war of opinion, these statements are incontrovertibly true. Those Brown students decided to silence Kelly because of his heavy-handed treatment of minorities, but at the end of the day, it was the students themselves who came off as the totalitarians.

Brown students interrupt Kelly, refusing to let him speak.

Photo Credit: Brown Daily Herald