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The Daily Signal
Justice Department Weighs In to Protect Free
Speech on Campus
Hans von Spakovsky & Christopher Baldacci
July 25, 2018
In the face of Orwellian speech codes on campus—and with the help of
advocacy groups like Speech First Inc.—college students have been
fighting to defend their First Amendment right to free speech.
Now, they can count the Justice Department as one of their strongest
allies.
Earlier this year, the University of Michigan passed a policy that
could punish students for making their peers feel offended. The Justice
Department decided to weigh in, showing just how different the Trump
administration is from the one that preceded it.
As Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently told students at the Turning
Point USA High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., the
University of Michigan has set an improper “limitation on the right of
Michigan students to be able to speak.” So last month, the Justice
Department filed a “Statement of Interest” in a lawsuit that seeks to
invalidate Michigan’s speech code. It’s the fourth such document it has
filed in the last 12 months in an effort to aggressively defend college
students’ free speech rights.
For example, the Justice Department filed a Statement of Interest in a
case last year involving Pierce College in Los Angeles. There, free
expression is confined to a 616-square-foot “free speech area” (just
0.003 percent of the campus), and even then, students are still
required to get prior authorization from campus administrators to enter
it.
The Justice Department also criticized Georgia Gwinnett College for
permitting speech only in zones that covered just 0.0015 percent of the
campus. Even then, no speech is allowed in that “free speech zone” that
“disturbs the … comfort of person(s).” In eight years, the Obama
Justice Department never once challenged such restrictions.
Hopefully, with the Justice Department now intervening, the courts will
finally start striking critical blows to insidious university policies
that impose a political orthodoxy on students, and limit their basic
First Amendment rights to engage in vigorous debates on contentious
issues.
As Sessions noted, “State universities need to be objective and fair.
They need to let both people, both sides of an issue, have an
opportunity to speak.”
It is not news to most Americans that colleges have been restricting
the speech—especially conservative speech—of students, staff, and
speakers. Sometimes this suppression comes at the hands of students,
such as the rioters at the University of California, Berkeley, who
prevented conservatives from giving lectures.
In these instances, school administrators have been disappointingly
complicit in condoning such misbehavior and refusing to punish students
and faculty who disrupt other speakers.
In other instances, the schools themselves have restricted speech on
social and political issues. According to Sessions, the fact that
university administrators are supporting “groups who go in deliberately
to intimidate, threaten, and block a person’s right to freely discuss
an issue is a threat to our freedom, and it’s contrary to the
Constitution.
The University of Michigan’s speech code prohibits any speech that a
listener considers “bothersome” or “hurtful.” A violation of the code
can result in school punishment, including suspension or expulsion. So
the most sensitive student on campus effectively can dictate the terms
under which other students can speak or, as the case may be, not speak.
If that wasn’t enough, the university has organized so-called “bias
response teams” made up of administrators and law enforcement to
investigate any student accused of violating the speech code, whether
on or off campus—and complaints can be filed anonymously.
Picture that: a team of campus officials and law enforcement officers
patroling a college campus to punish speakers who have been accused of
offending some student’s sensibilities. That sounds like something out
of a TV show about a despotic future society.
Basically, bias response teams are the University of Michigan’s version
of the thought police in George Orwell’s “1984.” It’s no wonder
students claim they are afraid to speak out about controversial topics
like abortion, immigration, or racial politics.
These speech restrictions continue to be implemented because a powerful
group of college administrators and leftist elites have a growing
contempt for the First Amendment. They simply want to silence anyone
who disagrees with their views on politics and culture. They consider
all speech they disagree with to be bigoted speech that constitutes
real harm—just like physical violence—and should therefore be banned.
Many on the left believe that those who disagree with them on
substantive issues have genuinely evil motivations and, therefore, are
not entitled to the First Amendment right to disagree.
Speech codes like the one imposed by the University of Michigan, which
allow a listener to determine if the speech “feels” offensive, will
inevitably be weaponized against those who express disfavored political
views.
Indeed, this is exactly why the Justice Department felt the need to
intervene. It wrote that Michigan’s law “invites arbitrary,
discriminatory, and overzealous enforcement.” It also “does precisely
what the First Amendment forbids—it punishes speech merely because of
the ‘listeners’ reaction.’”
It’s easier to be indifferent about these speech codes when your own
views are the ones being protected. But liberal administrators should
ask themselves: What if a pro-life student claimed to be distressed by
Planned Parenthood passing out flyers on a campus quad? What if a
Christian student felt persecuted by a public debate about the
existence of God? Would these students get the same support from the
university? Even if they did, it would only prove that a feelings-based
approach to free speech creates an endless mess in which no one’s
speech is ever fully protected.
Americans of all creeds and political views should fight to oppose
these restrictions. They are truly Orwellian and un-American. The
university of all places—especially the public university—should be a
place where free speech is defended, where open dialogue and
intellectual debate ought to be the modus operandi.
This is why the Justice Department said that it could not “stand idly
by while public universities violate students’ constitutional rights.”
Sessions and the Justice Department should be commended for their
readiness to defend our fundamental liberties.
The First Amendment doesn’t lose its power when speech becomes
offensive. It was actually written to protect speech that could be
perceived as offensive. After all, why do popular speakers need the
protection of law? No one threatens their ability to speak.
The Bill of Rights exists to protect the weak from the strong, the
minority from the majority, and the unpopular from the popular. The
right of the 49 percent to speak out against the 51 percent is what
makes us a free country.
When a state school can punish speakers for nothing more than hurting
someone’s feelings, the First Amendment has been utterly gutted—and
students who are citizens protected by the Constitution have been
robbed of their fundamental right to disagree.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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