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Free speech on campus
An Oregon State senior uses the occasion of Holocaust denier David Irving's imprisonment to make the only serious case for free speech that can be made. In so doing, she shows a far deeper understanding of what free speech is and why it matters than a great many college students and even college administrators. The classic move on today's campuses is to trumpet the value of free speech and then to qualify it by noting that hate speech is not free speech--hence students who find themselves advocating censorship in the name of defending the First Amendment, and hence, too, administrators who argue that speech codes function to protect free inquiry rather than quash it.
Elizabeth Meyer, an environmental science major who is also a columnist for the OSU Barometer, is smarter than that. "The thing about believing in freedom of speech is that you have to believe in freedom of speech. That means repugnant speech. That means speech that makes your blood boil," she writes:
Only by allowing hate speech and other objectionable expressions can we truly create an atmosphere of equality. If we simply deny the rights of those that offend us, we lose the opportunity to combat the racism, sexism, heterosexism, or other hate that creates that speech.The first problem faced by the attempt to regulate hate speech is defining it. Hate speech is not hate crimes, or other criminal conduct. The Supreme Court has ruled on several occasions that illegal conduct is illegal, even if it contains speech. Chief Justice Warren wrote that the Court did not "accept the view that an apparently limitless variety of conduct can be labeled 'speech' whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea." Harassment, trespass, vandalism, and violent crime are all still illegal, regardless of whatever message the perpetrator may be trying to spread. Hate speech, in the context of this paper, is only the act of speech itself.
Narrowing the definition of hate speech to only include speech, however, does not narrow it very much. The American Heritage Dictionary states that hate speech is "Bigoted speech attacking or disparaging a social or ethnic group or a member of such a group." Even with this seemingly straightforward definition, hate speech is anything but clear cut. For example, what is "bigoted" and what constitutes a "social or ethnic group" and what is "disparaging?" The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in its position paper on campus speech codes, argues that many college campuses have taken the definition of disparaging to the extreme, defining it as any offensive speech to a group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
This is problematic because it is so broad. Sensitivities vary. What one woman considers a good-natured joke may be seen as sexual harassment -- and thus hate speech -- by another. While neither woman is necessarily incorrect in her assessment of the comment, the speaker cannot know how the women will take the joke and may face disciplinary action.
If we look specifically to campuses, we see where hate speech, when not well defined, can be used to silence students. Universities argue that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection to all U.S. citizens, means that they must allow access to all. Hate speech on campus denies this equal protection, they argue, by creating a hostile environment toward some, thus denying them equal access. But when these two values come into conflict, the school ought to err on the side of free speech.
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This doesn't mean that hate speech must go unnoticed by universities. The universities can respond by holding forums, condemning such speech (but still allowing it) and providing support to student groups attempting to educate the campus about such issues. An atmosphere where the university just ignores it can easily be closed to minorities and women. But by simply banning it, the university pushes the problem under the rug only to have it rear its ugly head later, once the bigots are finished with school.
Supreme Court Justice Brandeis argues, "the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." Our society has decided that for a functioning democracy, we must be able to evaluate ideas on our own. Yet if a university shields its students from offensive speech, the targeted students will never learn to defend themselves and the offensive students will not have their views directly challenged.
One of the strengths of Meyer's piece is the ease with which she shows that the speech codes colleges and universities employ as part of their liberal agenda actually interfere with the very values they aim to inculcate. The case against speech codes has been labelled a conservative one, but this is a misleading misnomer that makes a partisan issue of something that concerns us all.
For more on campus speech codes, see FIRE's Spotlight. Worth noting, too, is FIRE's Speech Code of the Month, which currently features Davidson College. In its misguided effort to sanitize student and faculty expression, Davidson bans, among other things, "patronizing remarks" such as "referring to an adult as 'girl,' 'boy,' 'hunk,' 'doll,' 'honey,'" or "sweetie." Davidson also bans offensive "jokes," "teasing," "dismissive comments," "making [offensive] facial expressions," and "wearing inappropriate or sexually suggestive clothing."
Posted by acta online at March 14, 2006 09:28 AM
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