FIRE Executive VP Perrino Visits Cornell

On February 2nd, Nico Perrino, the executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), spoke at Cornell University.

Perrino was invited to give a talk on “Why Should We Defend Speech We Hate?” in Landis Auditorium at the Cornell Law School. The event was co-sponsored by the Cornell Political Union, Cornell Undergraduate Veterans Association (CUVA), the College Republicans at Cornell, and this very publication.

Perrino graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history. He served as an editor-in-chief for the Indiana Standard and as a reporter/columnist for the Indiana Daily Student.

During the event, Perrino explained that he grew up in an Italian Catholic family that went to church every week. Eventually, around his freshman and sophomore years of high school, Perrino started to have “second thoughts about [his] faith” and came across the works of the four horsemen: Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins. 

Continuing about the four horsemen, Perrino related how he became interested in the ideas they were espousing: not just the atheist perspective, but soon the actively anti-religious one as well. He found the debates between the  anti-religious Christopher Hitchens and fundamentalist pastor Douglas Wilson a rewarding experience for both debaters and their audiences. 

“And I remember just how much they learned from each other. Christopher Hitchens would throw out from memory, one line of Scripture, and Douglas Wilson would throw out another line, seemingly to refute Hitchens and then Hitchens would come with another. And I just remember how much smarter I felt, after watching [Wilson and Hitchens] debate.”

Perrino reiterated the effect these open conversations had on him, and how fundamental they were in shaping his free speech absolutist philosophy. Correspondingly, he laid out John Stuart Mill’s argument for allowing free expression: 

“[When speaking] we can be right, we can be wrong, or we can be partially right. But in all of those cases, it argues towards free expression. If you’re right, then you have a greater conception of your truth through its confrontation with error. If you’re wrong, then you trade your error for truth. And if you’re partially right, you might get a greater conception of the truth through confrontation with someone else who might be partially right.” 

For Perrino, it was important for one to be able to hear these conversations, even if one feels that they are correct in their beliefs. He told attendees that he realized that these open debates and conversations might be prevented by individuals who felt that a speaker was ‘wrong’. 

As a student at Indiana University, he attended a talk by fundamentalist preacher Douglas Wilson and was eager to challenge him in the Q and A. However, substantial student protests forced the event to be shut down before Perrino had the opportunity to have his own “Hitchens moment.”

“There were other students, unfortunately, my peers, who decided that I wasn’t going to have that opportunity that they had decided for themselves that what Douglas Wilson said was wrong, and there was nothing to be learned from it,” Perrino lamented.

Despite disagreeing with Wilson on everything he would have said at his talk that night, Perrino learned something important from the pastor: that a college experience should facilitate open expression and the ability to interact freely with differing ideologies. 

“We come into college, oftentimes with strong convictions, but we hold them loosely, we take seriously the possibility that we might be wrong. We have epistemic humility,” he said.

Perrino then referenced the Ann Coulter event of last November. In a similar fashion to Wilson, Coulter was shouted down by students who disagreed with her. Perrino highlighted one important moment:

“One thing that struck me about that incident was the one protester, one heckler, who stood up and said, ‘We don’t want you to speak here. Your words are violence.’”

Perrino went on:

“This is an argument that’s been around for a long time, that words are violence. Although it seems to have gained greater cachet today. You didn’t hear it as much back when I was in college as you do today, though it existed. And to me, this is one of the more dangerous arguments that exists. Because in societies and our communities, there are two ways to solve our disputes. You can do it the way we did for millennia, which is through violence, right?

“Or you can do it with our words, which is the fundamental premise on which democracy is based, that we have it out that we debate our issues, and we ultimately come to a conclusion on how to move forward. Sigmund Freud once said that ‘civilization was founded the first time a man cast a word instead of a stone.’ If we start to conflate words with violence, logic dictates that we can then use violence in response to words.”

At the close of his talk, Perrino outlined several steps Cornell and other universities could take to advance free speech on college campuses. He suggested college pre-commit to freedom of expression, through a mission statement. However, Perrino argued that this commitment must be present throughout the educational experience, from campus-wide communications to orientation programming and campus reads.

Perrino had the opportunity to engage with questions from the audience, both online and in-person. Notably, no protesters showed up to disrupt the event.

The watch the full event, please click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llKm0Unq_q8