You're not going to shut me up

Adventures in public speaking

Hello friends! To me, being a writer and activist means speaking truth to power, even if people don't want to hear it. With fall semester beginning at many universities and colleges, they are having numerous events and activities on campus. On September 14, 2023, I gave a virtual talk at Boston University’s School of Public Health about my anthology Disability Visibility since the school selected my book as their 2023 School of Public Health Read. I had an unexpected medical procedure so I recorded the responses to the questions and submitted them to the host in advance. I don’t give too many talks anymore due to my hospitalization last year. Since I lost the ability to speak, I wondered if anyone would be interested in having me especially as society assumes the pandemic is over resulting in possibly fewer hybrid or virtual events. In my access rider I request questions ahead of time so I can type my responses so they are ready to paste into my text-to-speech app. I also send a copy to the host so the ASL interpreters and captioners have the spelling of specific terms and names. This was my way to create an accessible environment for myself, the audience, and for the event organizers. It requires a lot of labor, planning, and forethought on my part as it is much easier to speak for an hour versus preparing 20+ pages of text for a conversation.

Well, the school sent me a message asking me to remove two specific names and revise a sentence. Never ever did I think my access needs would be used to have me modify my remarks which would never happen at a live event unless they cut off my microphone or pulled me off the stage.

You can read all the dirty details here and check out a statement by PEN America on what happened to me.

...the official free speech policy of the university does not include such civility clauses, but a blog from the dean of the Public Health School, which does not constitute official school policy, does. There, he explains his philosophy, which includes the idea that “We are under no obligation to provide a platform for speech which is not open to reasoned reply.”

We disagree.

While such guidelines may seem reasonable on their face, they are nearly impossible to enforce in practice. And in a university context, where campuses have long upheld principles of free expression and supported the exchange of ideas, everyone must be free to speak — especially on contentious political issues and public figures.

Free speech takes us to new, uncomfortable, and occasionally uncivil places, and universities must celebrate this fact if they wish to remain laboratories for democratic discourse. They must also celebrate that free speech is for everyone; using accessibility tools to screen speech that could otherwise not be pre-reviewed flies in the face of this principle.

In her blog, Wong said she changed her remarks out of fear of being disinvited. While the email from the school official did not include an explicit threat of disinvitation, the chilling effect of the request was nonetheless felt.

...At the event itself, a school official prefaced Wong’s speech with the following: “Alice has kindly edited some elements of her presentation, and in others she calls us out and disagrees with our guidelines. That’s fair enough.” The dean thanked her for challenging their ideas, and said in an email to PEN America that “she made us better as a community.” Such reflection from BU is instructive to how all administrations ought to respond to free speech skirmishes, and one can hope that it results in a more equitable and open culture of expression.

In the words of Angela Davis, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

FIGHT THE POWER, EVERYONE!!