President's Statement

The University of Montana upholds freedom of speech as a core value of our university and our country. It is a principle of constitutional magnitude, enshrined in our First Amendment.

As a public university, we promote free expression and open exchange of ideas as core to an excellent education, one that thrives on the asking of difficult questions and on the coming together of challenging and diverse perspectives. The absence of free expression would compromise the quality of our students’ education and deprive the UM family of the rigorous inquiry and testing of preconceptions that characterize a healthy academic environment.

By protecting an environment of free expression, we ensure the UM family has ample opportunity to practice what lies at the heart of a UM education:  a rich exchange of diverse ideas and the rigorous collection, testing, analysis, and interpretation of varied forms of evidence. This is a way of thinking and being in the world that allows human intellect to prosper and our Griz community to continuously learn.

In practice, this means that we will sometimes encounter ideas that provoke, anger, or wound us. Protecting the right of free expression can therefore sometimes conflict with our strong commitment to foster a campus that is welcoming and inclusive. This is a challenging tension with which we grapple as a society and as a university.

The solution to this tension, however, does not lie in censorship. Once we begin to pick and choose on the basis of which speech may occur, we open the gates to having our own voices silenced—yours, mine, and all those who do not voice majority opinions.

Allowing on our campus the expression of ideas with which we disagree does not mean we endorse those views, nor does it mean we condone speech that is hateful or that targets people based on their identities. What a person says may define that individual, but it does not have to define us. It is possible for us to stand firmly in support of free speech while also standing firm in our values.

The Constitution and a long history of case law makes it clear that public universities cannot ban speech based on content or viewpoint. And when those views are offensive, we have a right to speak out strongly, clearly, and critically to challenge speech with which we disagree. In doing so, we demonstrate not just the importance of rigorous academic inquiry but also the fact that, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, the best remedy for bad ideas is good ones.