As both a senior and a GDS lifer, my departure from a community that has nurtured me for 14 years looms large. At GDS, I learned to read, count, write and argue; I learned to illustrate and entertain. I credit the school with instilling in me, as school leaders often quote from GDS’ mission statement, “a lifelong love of learning.”
Yet the school has also had its fair share of failures in my time as well. Particularly in how it has instructed students to interact with divisive and contentious topics. Most particularly those that run contrary to left-wing, Democratic and Beltway conventions.
Middle school is a confusing time for anyone, but when it suddenly becomes taboo to discuss certain topics because of your identity, the classroom transforms, turning from a safe place to something suddenly foreign and strange. When teachers imply, or explicitly state, that a topic should not be discussed by certain members of a community due to their identity, for fear of “harming” others as a result of their ignorance, our pursuit of knowledge dies alongside classroom conversation.
As a white, straight male, I felt unable to honestly engage in discussions on past and current racial inequities, sex discrimination and other contentious topics such as abortion and transgender people in sports, because I was unsure whether what I would say, out of ignorance or opinion, would spark blowback.
As a GDS middle-schooler, living in an environment unfriendly to free speech, I learned its importance. When students are surrounded by dialogic trip wires, or, as my teachers might have referred to them, “triggers,” they are unequipped to discuss matters of great or even little contention at an intellectual level. While this negative attitude towards dialogue is less pervasive in the high school, it’s still the case that certain viewpoints remain suppressed within our halls. One of my friends holds right-wing views, and he told me that he feels unable to express many of his opinions in class for fear of backlash.
As a member of a community, it is one’s civic duty to address a problem when you see one. Over the past four years, I have been involved with numerous speech initiatives on our campus, such as working to host inter–affinity group dialogues on the war in Gaza between the Jewish Student Coalition, Muslim Student Association and Middle Eastern and Arab Affinity. We hoped to replace any mutual ignorance with humanity and compassion.
In the spring of last year, I helped host a city-wide summit for political dialogue, bringing GDS students into conversation with peers in public schools about foreign policy issues. There, we prefaced conversations with brief presentations and established norms that said all opinions were to be met with respect and civility. I engaged in some of the most stimulating conversations of my life during that summit.
GDS students should continue promoting free speech once they obtain a cap, gown and diploma. As a student in American government class, I have learned that one of the gravest problems facing American democracy is threats to First Amendment expression, particularly in higher education. As forces inside and outside academic institutions erode protections for campus discourse, expression and academic freedom, the speech climates that my fellow seniors and I encounter in college will likely be stifled.
The Trump administration, in tandem with state legislatures, is employing legal and political tactics to control dialogue and instruction on college campuses. Primarily, Trump’s Department of Justice has sought to enforce ideological compliance through a clause in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which allows the government to freeze funds to institutions that it finds are intentionally discriminating against a certain subset of students.
The administration has conflated political criticism of Israel with antisemitic discrimination, in an attempt to police syllabi. This policy is grotesque in its appropriation of the Jewish community’s pain and invasion of the universities’ abilities to conduct their own affairs.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), one of the country’s preeminent civil liberties interest groups, has long sounded the alarm that a rot has taken hold over wood- paneled university halls across the nation. FIRE denounces an unholy alliance between speech -ambivalent students and safetyist administrators that has long worked to suppress discourse on campus. These two groups have collaborated to blur the line between speech and violence, allowing for policies that restrict expression for fear that it could make a minority group uncomfortable.
For example, a free speech group sued the University of Michigan in 2019 for its implementation of a bias response team, on the grounds that its vague definition of the word “harm” resulted in an over-broad policy and an illegal suppression of speech. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals largely concurred, saying in its opinion that the bias team’s ability to refer students to the police and university disciplinary committees “objectively chills speech.”
Consequently, FIRE recently marked 166 of the 257 institutions it polled on campus free speech with a grade of “F,” revealing a systemic failure in college students’ abilities to effectively express disagreement with one another and their administrations. FIRE also found that large proportions of students report self-censoring and avoiding certain topics, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion and the outcome of the 2024 election, largely out of fear of blowback from their peers and disciplinary action from their administrations.
Luckily, despite these threats, the courts appear to be holding fast. As determined almost 70 years ago by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, it is an “essential freedom” of the academy to decide what is taught within its own classrooms. The current jurisprudence also largely protects American citizens’ abilities to express themselves on campus, in and out of direct academic contexts.
In the litigation that followed the Department of Education’s threats to strip funding from schools with DEI programs, a district court issued an injunction to the policy and the DOJ dropped its appeal last January. Furthermore, Sweezy continues to be the legal standard for classroom freedom. In 2023, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Florida’s attempts to censor classroom discussion about race and gender were illegal.
As the lucky, informed and compassionate future graduates of GDS, it is our duty to our country and world that as we move into the next chapter of our life, we seek out disagreement. We must engage with people different from ourselves and change the climate of speech in higher education for the better. Once you step out of the Davenport Street doors for the last time, attend events in college where you expect to be in an ideological minority. Debate your peers, try to change their minds and have your own mind changed. The more that we can hold on to not only civil discourse but civil discord, the more assured seems the future of our republic.