As America stumbles through the early years of the 21st century, it is increasingly difficult to achieve a comfortable balance between asserting the nation’s core values and principles while respecting the divergent beliefs of our increasingly pluralistic society. Factor in the slippery concept of free speech, and the balancing act gets harder still.

Just ask Paul Grosswiler, the University of Maine associate professor who each semester challenges students in his History of Communications course to consider burning an American flag, or a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Outrageous? Shocking? Irresponsible? Exactly. And it’s at that point that Mr. Grosswiler has lured you into his rhetorical snare. Your right to express outrage at flag burning, he is demonstrating, is as important as the right to burn the flag.

A student in Mr. Grosswiler’s class was so offended by his offer of extra credit for flag desecration that she dropped the course. Through a chance meeting with a conservative advocacy group, she unwittingly – and somewhat unwillingly – became the poster child for a push for UMaine to adopt a student bill of rights. Such a document would, among other things, ban faculty from indoctrinating students with their personal political ideologies. Though that may be a worthy goal, Mr. Grosswiler appears to be not guilty on that charge. Maybe the professor could be fairly charged with leaning a bit heavily on classroom hyperbole.

Courts have rightly limited speech when it is demonstrably dangerous to health and welfare, such as in slander and in shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. But denying the Holocaust or advocating for bombing Switzerland, while ridiculous, are not dangerous in this sense.

It would be easier to embrace the concept of free speech if speech were always pretty. But it’s not. It’s downright ugly at times. For most of the past 220 years, we Americans have been able to accept the love-hate relationship we have with this basic right; that what seems to be one person’s free speech is another’s irresponsible blather.

The watershed of the 9-11 attacks added another complication, as the U.S. woke to a new patriotism that makes flag burning, to some, akin to selling enriched uranium to al-Qaida. But now, more than ever, college students need to understand the true depth of their free speech rights. The best tool for sorting out these issues is – fittingly – talk. These questions ought to be vigorously debated, as only citizens of a mature democracy are capable of doing.