1. You sort of joined two separate things here, so i'll split them: > Repercussions for harmful or bigoted speech, as well as escalation of responses. For ex

1. You sort of joined two separate things here, so i'll split them: > Repercussions for harmful or bigoted speech, as well as escalation of responses. For example what if a person or group is being bullied but it’s claimed under free expression? People are mostly capable of distinguishing bullying from legitimate expression. There are a few edge cases (e.g. misgendering), but they are not imo sufficiently important to throw out the basic principle of free expression. > What happens when things escalate between parties beyond just words but physical harm? I don't really understand why this is even a question? Physical assault is not only contrary to MIT's rules, it is a crime. This statement and principle is totally orthogonal to the principle of free expression. EDIT: I suppose you could mean something more like incitement/inducement to physical harm. But, of course, that is also a crime. > 2. Similarly how do they stop majority dominance and snowballing into group think? E.g if there are way more men or women in a program and they use their larger numbers to amplify their freedom of expression in a way that affects the others. That then risks reducing the number of the minority demographic as they slowly get pushed out, leading to largely heterogeneous programs. This is a strange view to me. Is the underlying premise here that there are things that the majority believes, but that would be harmful to say? If so, how did we come to this conclusion and what strange things could be believed by the majority of students/faculty but are too dangerous to speak? Certainly we could point to historical examples of things people in say, the 1950s, believed that we might consider dangerous or harmful to say today. But people from the 1950s would never have chosen to ban those ideas. In other words, nearly by definition, it is never the preferred expressions of the majority that are getting regulated. If it were a majority view, it wouldn't be considered harmful by the regulators. The viewpoints having their speech regulated are always going to be in the minority and unpopular. If it's not a majority that believes these things, then there should be no reason to be concerned about majority dominance. The power to regulate expression is just that - power. If you are truly concerned about concentration of power and the protection of minority interests, there is no greater threat to that than the regulation of expression. Tautologically, it will always be those in power that write the speech codes.