Good Guys' Dilemma

Voltaire said, in essence, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"; but Mr. Justice Holmes added that the right of free speech ends when a man falsely cries "Fire!" in a crowded theater. How should good guys apply these limits to bad guys like Alabama's Governor George Wallace? Should he, for example, be given a forum at Yale?

The reply of Yale's Acting President Kingman Brewster Jr. to that question, put up to him by the school's Political Union, was no--it would insult and possibly incite New Haven Negroes. Last week the Ivy League fell all over itself to refute Brewster. The Harvard-Radcliffe Young Democrats invited Wallace to speak there, got a ruling of "no objection" from President Nathan M. Pusey. When the Brown University Daily Herald also invited Wallace, President Barnaby Keeney said that Brown is open to all speakers--"Communists, fascists, racists and bigots." Princeton's Robert Goheen sanctioned a student invitation to Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett. "Untimely and ill-considered," he said, but free inquiry is "pivotal to the very idea of a university."

The feedback got so intense at Yale that law students decided to reinvite Wallace. "Offensive and unwise," said Kingman Brewster, but nevertheless "Yale will not stand in the way." Free speech, it seems, goes for the bad guys as well as the good guys.

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