By Jimmy Quinn
The first year student representative campaign started on Friday morning, and the world of Sciences Po Facebook was soon flooded with candidate letters, graphics, and campaign pages. Over the next few days one issue first year voters should ask the candidates about is what they think about free expression at Sciences Po.
While we only spend two years at the campus of Reims, these two years come at a time of unprecedented growth and change for the university as it seeks an internationally-renowned reputation.
In curriculum changes, international partnerships and public relations campaigns, Sciences Po has chosen a path of internationalization, and on the campus of Reims, Americanization. Just take the medical team hired in response to student demand, an oddity by French university standards, which typically separate the personal and the academic. Features of student life have evolved, too: Association activity is marked by a Franco-cosmopolitan melange that includes French essentials like the bureau des eléves (BDE) and relative newcomers like Black Lives Matter, an American export, and Model United Nations.
At Sciences Po we receive an international education and hold the university to international standards. We should apply this expectation to free expression, too.
The education we seek here is a normative defense of liberal democracy through the pursuit of truth—at least, this is the essence of what we’re told at the rentrée solennelle ceremony. We are expected to hold opinions and defend them in conversation, on paper, in front of a group—we are expected to be active participants in a lively exchange of ideas, the hallmark of any free society.
Understanding the centrality of intellectual discussion to the university’s mission, it’s strange that Sciences Po doesn’t have a codified policy protecting the freedom of expression. In a recent meeting with members of the administration I was told that our school doesn’t have one and likely never will, that such a policy is germane to the United States but not to France.
This explains why when protesting students blocked nationalist politician Florian Philippot from speaking at Sciences Po’s Paris campus last year the university was forced to cancel the appearance due to security concerns. Sciences Po didn’t have a contingency plan in place to ensure that the event would go on and left its commitment to fostering a free exchange of ideas at the altar, despite university president Frédéric Mion’s admirable condemnation of the blockage.
It also casts light upon the cancellation of journalist David Satter’s lecture last January. After the anti-Putin author was abruptly disinvited from speaking at Sciences Po’s center for international research (CERI), Le Monde reported on leaked emails indicating that the cancellation was due to the fear the talk would harm relations with partner universities in Russia. Thankfully, though this is no substitute for the cancelled talk, pro-dissent factions within CERI organized a conference with Chinese dissidents a few months later. Good on them.
While Sciences Po’s commitment to free expression is generally strong, it is too capricious for comfort. As an incident involving the Cambridge University Press and the Chinese Government demonstrated this summer, even a single act of capitulation to those who oppose free expression causes damage to an institution’s reputation and enables those with authoritarian tendencies.
On the Reims campus, we have been asked to take the word of administrators that they want to ensure the most open intellectual environment possible—and they have kept this vow so far. However, students and their elected representatives must hold the university to account.
The administration should affirm the Chicago Statement on Free Expression, a document released by the University of Chicago (a third year exchange partner) that discusses the freedom of expression in the university environment. One excerpt states, “Fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.”
The Chicago Statement offers a refreshing defense of discussion and debate. Dozens of American universities have adopted the principles articulated in the statement, among them Princeton University (a third year exchange partner) and Columbia University (another third year partner, which shares a couple of dual degree programs with Sciences Po). Adopting it is not a question of the American first amendment—many of the universities that have incorporated these principles are private and not bound by it—but instead a question of being taken seriously as an internationally-renowned institution where rigorous intellectual dialogue is defended from creeping illiberalism.
We are a community of students, and we will often be wrong about things. We will sometimes voice half-baked opinions or sentiments that others see as impolitic. Discourse is rarely pretty and quite often ugly, but it gives us room to discover what we previously didn’t know about ourselves and the people with whom we interact. In choosing Sciences Po we embraced the grotesque beauty of difficult conversations and new ideas over the rigid dogma of what we already know, and we expect the university to go to the farthest lengths to make this possible.
Campaign week is a special celebration of this ideal; candidates and voters, stand up for its preservation.
Jimmy Quinn is a second year student at Sciences Po Campus of Reims. He is a student representative and editor in chief of The Sundial Press.
Photo: Simone Richler//The Sundial Press
