Steven Hayward, the conservative scholar recently appointed to be a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, has made it clear that he thinks his presence will shake things up at this good ol’ bastion of liberalism. And if that’s the extent of his goal, his tenure here surely will be as unproductive as it is fraught with contention.

Just because people have the constitutional right to say what they want doesn’t mean they should — a principle Hayward should already know as a law lecturer. Yes, he has freedom of speech, but open conversations regarding appropriate kinds of speech are an essential part of that right.

When Hayward makes bigoted claims against the LGBTQ community on his personal blog, it merits severe and immediate backlash. If that’s the way Hayward chooses to present himself, as someone whose beliefs are rooted in intolerance rather than academia, it will alienate the students on this campus and reinforce many students’ preconceived notions of conservatives as out-of-touch, old-fashioned, bigoted white men.

UC Berkeley is already home to plenty of conservative students and scholars who openly thrive on this campus. The campus houses one of the nation’s largest college Republican clubs, for instance, so dismissing the entire student body as exceptionally progressive paints UC Berkeley with an overly general brush.

That isn’t to say hyperliberalism and progressivism aren’t prevalent on the Berkeley campus. Protests and fights over language abound, and in many cases, students challenge and curb hateful rhetoric. But they’re only able to do that by entering into detailed and well-argued discussions — those that rely on open minds and thought-out responses.

So when Hayward writes that he’s excited to come to UC Berkeley because “it’s so easy to torment liberals,” it implies that his goals are to upset students at this predominantly liberal campus rather than to enter into productive and inspiring conversations.

Hopefully there’s a difference between how Hayward conducts himself in a classroom and how he conducts himself on his PowerLine blog, where most of his callow tirades are published. After all, Hayward was most likely hired for his scholarly resume, not his sensationalist articles.

But the line between Hayward the educator and Hayward the blogger thins as the Internet and social media become ever more an extension of one’s persona.

Coming onto the Berkeley campus and using language that gets a rise out of the student body is not a nuanced or especially difficult undertaking. If Hayward really wants to be a force of conservatism that productively challenges the student body, he needs to understand that hateful speech has no place in the conversation.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Senior Editorial Board as written by the opinion editor.