I hate this notion that universities need to let literally anyone speak or else you’re stifling knowledge. Here’s something that stifles knowledge: having to explain very basic things over and over. If you let someone barge into a medical laboratory and yell “everyone stop what you’re doing and prove to me that germs exist”, that’s stifling knowledge. Shutting everything down so that a neo-nazi can calmly ask whether black people are people does not enrich a learning environment in any way, It drags everything down and exhausts everyone. Free speech absolutism is crude and unsophisticated, we need to acknowledge that sometimes speech has deleterious effects on the free speech of others.
