I have some bad news, fellow liberals — this is going to be another one of those pieces about free speech on college campuses. I know, I know; you have heard it all before, that college students are fragile and scream until what they do not like goes away. What snowflakes. While this will not be a glowing review of the current status of free speech on college campuses, it will not be another one of those articles. However, with recent events at Middlebury and the Task Force on Free Expression, something needed to be said.

The marketplace of ideas — the concept that truth can most effectively come from the free exchange of ideas — has been labeled a tool of oppression, used to further marginalize the marginalized and privilege the privileged. For who in society is most often censored? Oppressed persons. Who in our society is often more able to take advantage of the right to speak? Privileged persons. As a result, we have tried to do away with the free marketplace of ideas, building tariffs to hold back or silence the speech of the powerful or the bigoted. Some believe this will allow the voices of the marginalized to finally break through.

This plan is not only wrong but dangerous. The harm that comes from enforcing an ideological orthodoxy far outweighs that of any free speech. Of course, the exception is speech that encourages individuals to commit acts of physical harm. However, no matter how hard we may try to twist that which we find offensive and wrong into such “violent speech,” such an exercise amounts to nothing more than an act of creative outrage. When we overwhelm a speaker with insults, chants and calls to violence — even if what they believe is offensive — we do not convince anyone to stand with us. In a democracy, the only way for us to win elections, to change hearts and minds, is to be accessible to the majority of people. We need not water down or pull back on issues of human rights and dignity, but we need to give people the chance to join us. We do ourselves a disservice when we become the party of shouting and intimidation, of name-calling and self-censorship, even if for righteous causes.

I understand that the work of explaining ourselves is exhausting. I want to be a Rabbi in a tradition that, until just ten years ago, would have prevented me due to my sexuality. I will need to become an expert in Jewish law regarding sexuality to properly advocate for myself and, frankly, I hate this fact. It frustrates and saddens me, so I can only try to imagine what it is like for those whose identities have not yet found strong footholds or are not as easily hidden as my own sexuality. That said, the work of calmly explaining ourselves, our views and our lives is of the utmost importance if we want to change people. Marches, sit-ins, posters and chants — these are all hallmarks of successful campaigns to raise social awareness and change policy, and I would not advocate their disuse. However, we must not forget the power that comes with calmly explaining our perspective, which has been found to have long-term positive effects on tolerance and advocacy, according to an April 8, 2016 article in Science Magazine.

While we have refused to open our ideological communities to a wider world, we have saved our most vicious discourse for each other, turning our debates inward and fighting among ourselves. To give one simplified example, this is often done while advocating for intersectionality. Obviously, it is important to advocate for the rights of all people, but playing the “no true Texan” game of advocacy has led to fracturing and isolation. There is no learning curve here! Either you advocate for everyone in a way that satisfies everyone — a near-impossibility — or you are a bigot. It is difficult to argue with persons with whom you almost entirely agree, so we move ever-leftward, becoming ever-more publicly infeasible and politically untenable. When we put ourselves in this bubble, we create an army of people who can fight their fellows, not those who need to be fought. I have not heard of a homophobe who became less homophobic because someone called him one. Monikers are only useful when people have already committed to becoming less bigoted. Our ideologically exclusive brand of progressivism has given birth to masters in the art of fighting against liberals, not for them.

We may also become the victims of this ideology’s success. Should we succeed in making speech that we find reprehensible either taboo or illegal, such techniques can easily be turned against us. As the American Civil Liberties Union says in its brief titled “Hate Speech on Campus,” “Restricting the speech of one group or individual jeopardizes everyone's rights because the same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you.” Let’s build spaces in which our peers can and are encouraged to speak, but do not for a moment think that speech is a finite resource, one that must be regulated and distributed based on class. If we make speech we find hateful worthy of physical violence or intense censorship, we place ourselves at risk of finding the tables turned on us.

We will only begin to win the power to bring forth our progressive agenda when we can anticipate the arguments of our ideological adversaries and speak to the unsure middle. I have found that through discussions with people who are pro-life, I discovered reasons why I believe what I do; I became more pro-choice from talking to people who were not. I have found that when speaking to people who were on the fence, I was much more effective at bringing them to my side when I knew what they had heard. This should not be a new idea to anyone, yet we tend to demonize rather than educate. When we drive bigotry underground, we only serve to make it harder to fight. Pulling fire alarms, injuring professors and jumping on cars, as was done at Middlebury, according to a March 3 New York Times article, is not the kind of protest that advances our cause.

I want to go to a university where students civilly attend the speeches of people they despise, where students ask incisive questions about the speaker’s positions that pull back the curtain on their bigotry. I want to go to a university where Trisk, the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, Hillel and the Men of Color Alliance hold fundraisers outside the door when backwards bigots come to speak, where Brandeis Democrats use Twitter to live fact-check a lecture from Ted Cruz. I want to go to a university where conservative students are engaged so that we do not drive potential allies into isolation with our beliefs that conservatives cannot fight for social justice. I want to go to a university where identities are celebrated and explored, not used as weapons.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis put it well in his 1927 concurring opinion in Whitney v. California: “No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”