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The university rector has announced a “moratorium on the use of university space for events related to the Middle East conflict,” including “public speeches, rallies, exhibits, and information tables.” This mindless moratorium focuses on the content of speech rather than the violent acts of a mob. Furthermore, instead of drawing a clear line between intense protest and violence, between words and fists, instead of condemning the hooligans who attacked people peacefully attempting to enter a lecture hall, the rector and many others have simply deemed the Middle East issue itself too “provocative.”

Even Gazette columnists, who usually defend free speech as a prerequisite to a free press, criticized the students who invited Benjamin Netanyahu, arguing that they should have known such violence would erupt – and thus seemed to be as guilty as the rioters. In the United States, should the response to protesters who attack abortion clinics be to ban discussion of abortion?

Four centuries of Anglo-American tradition make it clear what free speech is – and what it is not. Freedom of speech is not a truncheon with which one side beats the other. Freedom of speech is not a convenience used when it suits your group but discarded when it does not. Rather, freedom of speech is a doctrine emphasizing openness to hearing all ideas, even, or especially, the ones we hate.

The philosophers and fighters who forged our democratic tradition understood that the free, vigorous, but non-violent, exchange of opinions was essential to our growth, our strength, both as individuals and as communities.

In his classic 1644 defense of freedom, Areopagitica, John Milton said that “our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise,” just like “our limbs and complexion.” Those who hold good ideas must have confidence in them. Let truth and falsehood grapple, Milton proclaimed, “who ever knew Truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?”

In fact, a vigorous exchange of contrary views helps perfect ideas. Two centuries later, in 1859, John Stuart Mill published his classic On Liberty. Mill understood how much we can learn from our opponents in the free marketplace of ideas. Silencing expression is “robbing the human race,” Mill insisted. “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.” Underlying this openness was a progressive faith that humans are “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”

But these realistic progressives tempered their idealism with humility and skepticism. Mill, even more than Milton, acknowledged his fallibility, his own limitations as a human being. Both Mill and Milton were skeptical about orthodoxy and about the imperfect authorities who imposed that orthodoxy.

“Popular opinions… are often true,” Mill warned, “but seldom or never the whole truth.” Conflict helps opinions “share the truth between them, and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part.”

This humility, this healthy awareness of the fallibility of both authorities and individuals, is why speech codes so often fail, why the move to impose politically correct speech which began in the 1980s was so obnoxious, and so unsuccessful. In championing the free marketplace of ideas, in doubting both orthodoxy and authorities, democrats accept a little bit of chaos to avoid too much conformity. A free society is not necessarily an orderly one, and the challenge of freedom is to accept some disorder, to make room for disagreement, to invite discomfort, especially for those so convinced of their righteousness.

But democrats have always distinguished the hurly-burly of the intellectual marketplace from the violence of the mob, words from actions. “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited,” Mill insisted; “he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” What Mill charmingly called “a nuisance” we would call a menace.

There is, of course, a peculiarly Canadian twist on this tradition which puts a premium on civility, on mutual respect as an essential precondition for “peace, order and good government.” Alas, these last few weeks have been marked more by tumult, disorder and governmental failure – among the municipal authorities and, most dramatically, in the university administration. Universities are not governments. And the Concordia moratorium does not prevent private discussion on university premises – or certainly anywhere else in Canada.

Still, a moratorium on public debates over any issue is particularly galling on campus. Universities are supposed to be centers of free inquiry, self-reflection and provocative thought. Any student who graduates from university with the same political preconceptions and opinions with which he or she began has wasted an education. Most teachers’ greatest moments occur when we see our students confront a new idea, and view the world in a new light.

Therefore, the response to Netanyahu’s invitation to speak should have been more speech not less. Responding to the violence that forced the cancellation of his lecture by canceling Norman Finkelstein’s pro-Palestinian lecture was fighting fire with fire and confused controversial content with unacceptable actions.

The Concordia administration and faculty have to draw a clear line between passionate protest and violence regardless of the issue, from abortion to Zimbabwe. They must retake the public spaces of the university and reassert the university’s mission as a free but safe marketplace of ideas.

Netanyahu should be invited back – not by the Jewish students but by the university. He should be escorted into the lecture hall by a phalanx of professors, clad in their colorful academic regalia, asserting their role as free thinkers. At the head of the procession should be well-known critics of Israel, sending out the essential and eternal message that Milton and Mill articulated so many years ago, a message of faith tempered by humility, of idealism coexisting with skepticism, a message that says: “I may not agree with anything you say – but I will passionately defend your right to say it.” What a gift that would be in a university committed to free thought and a country confident in the democratic process.

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University.