Anyone who equates silence -- or even speech -- with violence needs to get out more.

Beyond that simple observation, there's a pattern here at Persuasion: People argue for free speech and individual rights... up to a point. There's always a question -- often asked explicitly -- of "where do you draw the line?"

At that point, as the saying goes, "We've already established what you are; now we're just haggling over price." You've put yourself in the position of deciding what people should be allowed to say and/or what opinions they should be allowed to hold.

So let me counter that explicitly by saying that it's worse to be cruel than to be, say, racist. Professor Seller may have been racist (she wasn't, but let's posit it for the example); the people who got her fired were cruel. Having the opinion that other races are inferior is racist, but it's just an opinion. If it's wrong, it just joins all the other wrong opinions the typical person has -- it doesn't somehow pollute the noosphere. Cruelty has real, and pernicious, effects.

And because this is the Internet, where people typically can't, or won't, understand simple prose: Burning a cross on someone's lawn or refusing to serve him is both racist *and* cruel, and it's the cruel side that's the problem. And we had simple and effective fire-in-a-crowded-theater rules for speech, too, before we started policing people's opinions.