At The Tufts Tribune, we believe unequivocally in the freedom of speech. Our goals are twofold: to provide the Tufts community with diverse viewpoints on important issues and to cover news at the university in an unbiased, factual manner. The Tufts Tribune takes no institutional positions besides our support of free speech and commitment to unbiased reporting.
Everything we publish aligns with Tufts’ statement on Free Expression, which guarantees students “a right to express their views on campus, local, national, and international topics” even “if that may create discomfort at times. ” We seek to platform our community’s diverse viewpoints and conduct our reporting in a thorough and fair manner.
Tufts was founded with a strong belief in the value of viewpoint diversity. The Tufts Tribune embodies that belief. We seek to revive Tufts’ rich history as a campus that values debate and civil discourse. In the spirit of investigative journalism and free speech, we launched a short investigation into a particularly interesting episode in Tufts’ history.
In 1989, a Tufts student group called the “Free Speech Movement” (FSM) joined in protest over a new policy that confined free speech to designated areas on campus (similar to the “free speech zones” found at many colleges today). To learn more, the Tribune reached out to James Ellman, one of the founding members of the FSM.
According to Ellman, who was a writer for the former Tufts conservative newspaper, The Primary Source, the Dean of Students implemented “a free speech policy which divided the school into three different zones of free speech: the most-free area, the less-free area, and the most-restricted area. ”
As part of their protest, FSM students outlined and labeled each of these “free speech zones” with chalk, erecting a sign at the point where the zones converged and naming it “Checkpoint Jumbo,” a reference to the Checkpoint Charlie crossing point that divided East and West Berlin.
The Primary Source wasn’t the only group participating in these protests; they were joined by members of the Tufts Democratic Socialists. Despite their political differences, the most conservative and liberal members of the Tufts community united to defend their shared right to free expression. Ellman explained that the two groups “didn’t agree on very much, but they actually were willing to agree that we probably shouldn’t have different free speech zones. ”
Tufts’ President at the time, Jean Mayer, was traveling abroad and initially unaware of the policy’s implementation. The bipartisan protest, however, was powerful enough to attract the attention of the New York Times, which published an article about the controversy. The day after they published the article, Mayer repealed the policy. According to Ellman, President Mayer, a veteran of the Free French Forces who fought against Vichy rule during World War II, said, “I didn’t fight the Nazis to run a no free-speech campus.”
This brief anecdote encapsulates the Tufts Tribune’s mission: to restore a culture of free speech and open dialogue at Tufts. We believe agreement and disagreement have value. We envision a campus where everyone, irrespective of individual ideological leanings, understands and realizes the benefits of the freedom of expression. As John Stuart Mill writes, “If the opinion is right, [we] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, [we] lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”
Sincerely,
Samuel Ben-Ur, Editor-in-Chief