Back in the early 1960s, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill defied a law passed by the General Assembly that prohibited speakers on university campuses who espoused communist or anti-American views. The student body president invited banned speakers to the university and set up a court challenge to the law. The courts found the Speaker Ban Law violated the First Amendment and the university became known as a leading protector of free speech.
For decades, liberals cited the story as an example of standing up for unpopular views. Today, though, we’re seeing young people on the left shut down free speech on college campuses. Former Breitbart writer and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was chased from the University of California-Berkley campus by protestors lighting fires and throwing rocks. A month later, students a liberal Middlebury College in Vermont prevented conservative political scientist Charles Murray from speaking. Shutting down speakers is unacceptable in a free society.
At a time when the institutions that support and are supported by liberal democracies are under attack, people of all political persuasions need to stand up for free speech. The best way to defeat a Milo Yiannopoulos is to expose him and counter his arguments, not shout him down with mob intimidation. Universities, in particular, should welcome diverse ideas so students can learn the critical thinking skills necessary to win important arguments.
In this environment, Republican legislators supported by Lt. Governor Dan Forest have introduced legislation to protect freedom of speech on campus. According to an editorial in the Wilson Times, “The legislation would override campus speech codes, guarantee academic freedom, ensure due process in disciplinary cases involving expressive conduct, require free-speech education during freshman orientation and establish a Committee on Free Expression to meet regularly and report to the UNC Board of Governors.”
It seems like a good idea, as long as it applies to ideas and concepts that Forest and his fellow conservatives don’t like, too. For instance, students might be confronted with speech that some people consider pornographic as well as speech that others might consider racist. Free speech is not always pleasant but lack of it is always oppressive. Let’s protect people’s right to express it whether we agree with it or not.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Milo is not a thinker, not subject to rational debate. He’s a performer, a provocateur. Murray is funded by billionaires, not a true academically based scholar. Everyone has access to them on media. Koch funds also underwrote Ann Coulter’s proposed visit. This simply isn’t about scholarship or a marketplace of ideas. These speakers aren’t engaged in debate or trained review of facts and frameworks.
I am a strong defender of free speech. I am also completely opposed to forced or coerced speech imposed by the government or anyone in power. So let us see just what kind of bill Mr. Forest presents.
Unfortunately the Republicans have a track record of trying to force universities — in the name of free speech — to support speech they (the GOP) want students to hear, whether it’s academically sound or not. Last year Western Carolina accepted a huge endowment from the Koch Brothers to teach a kind of right-wing, unbridled, survival-of-the-fittest, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, under which the corporation has no responsibility to anyone other than its shareholders to maximize profit: none to the community, its employees, the state, the environment it operates in, the future, or the debris it leaves behind. Under the endowment terms, the university has virtually no say over the chosen teacher or his (I doubt it will ever be a woman) philosophy, and as a result this public university will be coerced into espousing economic theories that have been discredited by empirical studies and real-world experience. But WCU, built and supported by me and millions of other North Carolina taxpayers over the past century, will no longer be able to bring real academic freedom to bear by challenging that forced speech, because of the terms of the endowment. That is the antithesis of free speech, and exactly what Republicans invariably aim to establish.
This is not an unexpected or new phenomenon. Our state government, run by the GOP for its corporate benefactors, cuts funding for universities, then bemoans the lack of money for our wonderful education system, and then invites private industry to replace that money — on their terms. The corporate billionaires do so, offering big bucks in exchange for unfettered access to influence or control the education of young people despite a complete lack of academic credentials or intellectual soundness.
Thus, so-called president Trump invites the anti-public-education billionaire and privatization activist Betsy DeVos to destroy the national public school system; similarly, he asks anti-EPA activist Tom Pruitt to come in and destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, and the avowed racist Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General, including overseeing its Civil Rights division. And in NC, the legislature fired the UNC Chairman in favor of Dubya Bush’s anti-intellectual former “education” secretary, and more recently invited the Kochs to take over business education at Western.
So in looking at the “free speech” rights of speakers invited to campus, one should consider whether they have the credentials, intellect, importance, and academic depth to contribute to a debate or a subject of interest, and whether or not their presence and speeches will contribute to the students’ education. Yes, invite Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos or any other representative of the intellectually challenged right wing to debate a counterpart from the left (is there a well-connected Bernie bro out there?); or let them come to address their followers at the College Republicans’ expense; but don’t force universities to invite people who have nothing to offer to the debate on issues of the day. Let the academic institutions choose for themselves whom they want to hear from on campus, just as they choose their own professors and deans.
When we see the proposed legislation, we can quickly discern whether that last will be its intent, or not.
Frankly if they want to control the speakers then just do away with state tax funding. No more public money. They the students pay for all of their education period. Bet they bitch about that because they want someone else to pay for them to control the speech.
Doesn’t anybody get this?
Pass a law to regulate free speech in order to have more free speech?
1984 revisited.
To my skeptical mind, the quote from the Wilson Times describing the bill sounds like a bunch of buzzwords of the “who could possibly be against this?” sort. The actual legislation could indeed be in the spirit of that quote, which would be great. But it could also be a twisted interpretation of the wording in that quote in much the same way that HB2 was described as “a common sense solution” that “protects students’ privacy”. Given the General Assembly’s track record I find it hard to feel any confidence that the actual language of the bill will be anything other than a blatant attempt to stifle speech on the left and/or skew the “marketplace of ideas” in favor of the far right.
I very much agree with this blog. This is not going to be popular among some college students I know, but so be it. The notion of “triggering,’ which is the idea that some speech triggers trauma-related memories in oppressed groups. is being misused to justify speaking bans. It needs to stop. It is one thing to endorse the confederate flag by flying it over a public university campus and another to shut down debate about its place in history.