3.

SILENCED SPEECH ON THE AMERICAN COLLEGE CAMPUS

No matter how the First Amendment is viewed by the general public, freedom of speech is symbolically dead in the one place where it was once most alive.

UNSTATED THOUGH IT may be, never before have Americans been this confused, or profoundly conflicted, over the abuses of free speech. A cultural shift has already occurred. There are many examples in recent years of Americans expressing ambivalence about the excesses of speech. And there is hypocrisy in professing to be in favor of free speech while at the same time silencing or condemning the politically incorrect speech of another. Free speech is being tested. The right, left, and center of the political spectrum are having trouble distinguishing their right from their left on the free speech divide.

In September 2017, the Brookings Institution released a survey entitled, “Views among college students regarding the First Amendment.” Historically, free speech has been at its most vibrant on university campuses. Institutions of higher learning are presumed to offer platforms where ideas are vigorously debated and discussed. The whole point of a liberal arts education is to teach students to be open to conflicting points of view and challenged by different ways of thinking. And public universities, as state institutions, are strictly bound by the Constitution and its free speech guarantees. Private universities are no less obligated to maintain intellectually open places of learning.

Yet, the survey revealed that a plurality of college students today—fully 44 percent—do not believe the First Amendment protects “hate speech”—even though courts have unequivocally ruled that it does. And these findings were consistent among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Female students, however, were particularly insistent that the First Amendment did not protect those who resorted to hate speech, by a margin of 49 percent to 38 percent. Even more surprisingly, a majority of students—51 percent—were of the mindset that a student group should be allowed to shout down a speaker simply because they disagreed with his or her views. Apparently, according to a younger group of our citizens, the First Amendment protects those who disrupt debates. The debaters are left to fend for themselves, rendered speechless.

It gets worse. An astonishing 19 percent agree that, rather than just drowning out the speaker by making noise, opposing student groups also have the right to resort to violence to prevent the speaker from possibly ever speaking again.²⁶ Surveys conducted independently by the Knight Foundation and Gallup revealed that 69 percent of college students believe that their colleges should impose restrictions on “slurs and other language on campus that is intentionally offensive to certain groups.” More than half said that the climate on their campus “prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.”²⁷ And the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”) conducted a survey of colleges and universities in 2015 and discovered that 55 percent of these institutions maintain speech codes that control what can be said in a university setting.²⁸

So much for free speech on college campuses and respect for the First Amendment.

Anyone paying much attention to life in the ivory tower and on the campus square must have noticed that students have been demonstrating their misapprehensions about the First Amendment for several years now. The answers to these survey questions are symptomatic of real-world attitudes straight out of collegiate playbooks. Invited speakers have been heckled into silence, forced to take their seats, ushered into hasty exists, escorted by armed guards—all because students refused to hear what the speakers were expected to say and attended the lecture precisely to sabotage it.

“Shut it down!” has replaced the polite applause or silent treatment and become the new rage on campus.

All across the United States, a majority of students no longer believe in the free speech rights of invited, outside speakers. Worse still, the right of their fellow, more open-minded students to hear the speaker is of little interest to them, too. Such was the experience of Israel’s former ambassador to the United States Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine, in 2010. There was nothing diplomatic about the hostile reception the ambassador received. The hecklers prevailed, and he never got a word in edgewise. The irony is that the ambassador was prepared to take questions from members of the audience who opposed his government’s views; that simply was not good enough for the “no free speech for you” crowd, exercising their combative hecklers’ veto.

Matters were even worse at the University of California in Berkeley in 2017, when rioting broke out before a scheduled protest against right-wing ideologue Milo Yiannopoulos. Both his speech, and another from conservative provocateur Ann Coulter, were cancelled.²⁹ Ironically, Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, which galvanized the counterculture of the 1960s and defined the progressive politics of the era. Today’s version of progressive politics, however, resembles a movement far more interested in selective speech than in free speech.³⁰

Even more recently, in January 2018, at the University of Chicago—where only a year earlier the dean of students, John Ellison, penned a letter to incoming freshmen informing them that creating “intellectual safe spaces” and providing “trigger warnings” were anathema to university life, and that Chicago would not cancel the appearance of invited speakers—students and faculty rallied together to rescind an invitation made to former White House advisor Stephen Bannon to speak at a town hall debate on campus. Over one hundred faculty members signed a petition objecting to Bannon’s appearance, stating, “The defense of freedom of expression cannot be taken to mean that white supremacy, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Catholicism, and Islamophobia must be afforded the rights and opportunity to be aired on a university campus.”³¹ This from one of the few universities that truly values academic freedom and where the premises of “intersectionality” and the suffocations of political correctness have not been allowed to dominate campus culture. If the University of Chicago is rescinding invitations made to controversial speakers, then the First Amendment is truly undergoing a profound rethinking of constitutional priorities.

We are seeing more and more examples of speech being silenced and genuine confusion as to how free speech actually works in a society that is showing little tolerance for opposing points of view. Discussions are brought to an end before they even begin. The First Amendment, with all its free speech fanfare, sometimes appears to be nothing but a paper tiger.

Berkeley may still be the epicenter of New Left nostalgia—but not in ways that would be familiar to the leaders of the students who, in the 1960s and 1970s rallied against the Vietnam War through the exercise of free speech. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on security measures to make it safe for conservative politico Ben Shapiro to deliver a speech on campus. Bomb-sniffing dogs had to be deployed.

Some college speakers never even make it to the podium to experience the indignity of being denounced. Some are fortunate enough just to make it out of campus alive. This is what happened in 2017 in separate incidents involving two very different types of speakers: conservative commentator Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College; and libertarian political scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury College. Neither got a chance to speak. Both were secreted off campus to ensure their safety. Allison Stanger, a professor who was scheduled to moderate the conversation with Murray, and who did not share many of his views, was attacked by an angry mob of students and ended up in the hospital—all because it was she who helped whisk Murray out of the auditorium.³²

There is a disturbing 2015 video of a Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, shouted down and condemned by students for calmly attempting to defend his wife, Erika, who was the subject of angry criticism for believing that students who were offended by certain Halloween costumes were taking the matter too seriously. Neither husband nor wife are at Yale any longer.³³

And it is not always students caught up in a censorial mood. University presidents may also need a refresher course on old-school free speech guidelines. Two members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity were expelled by the president of the University of Oklahoma in 2015 for leading a racist chant that referred to the lynching of African-Americans. The incident was odious and reprehensible, for sure, but what happened to the First Amendment rights of those two students? It is one thing to have them morally shunned on campus—called out for their un-collegial, racist behavior. But expulsion for exercising a constitutional right would seem to some as positively un-American. And they were expelled from a publicly financed, state university, where the speech guarantees of the First Amendment clearly applied. The fraternity itself could have been banned for racial discrimination because they were, apparently, disallowing African-Americans from joining.³⁴ But merely boasting about such exclusion is not unlawful. And neither is a racist chant in support of lynching—not in America, at least. After all, what makes their racist chant any less worthy of First Amendment protection than burning a cross on an African-American’s lawn? Both are utterly despicable. To an African-American, cross-burning and a song celebrating lynching are internalized in equally devastating ways. Neither should receive First Amendment protection, and at least one president of a public university agrees. But in the process, he might have violated the First Amendment guarantees of those two former students. But why then did no free speech absolutists rise to their defense?

Sometimes universities have engaged in self-censorship, restricting their own ability to speak, instead of standing firm on First Amendment principles. Yale University Press, for instance, published a book in 2009, The Cartoons that Shook the World, which surveyed the global mayhem that arose from the twelve cartoons appearing in a Danish newspaper in 2005, depicting, and in some cases mocking, the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and Africa found these cartoons to be blasphemous. And they made their displeasure known. The outcry over the cartoons resulted in rioting in the streets and the vandalizing of foreign embassies. In the end, about two hundred people were killed, and the Western world was placed on notice that its belief in freedom of expression—artistic or otherwise—was not shared by much of the world’s Muslim population. The publication of such insulting caricatures was greeted not with counter-cartoons in a robust debate of inky aesthetics, but with the terrorism of Islamic extremism.³⁵

Worldwide anger over the incident did not die down. In fact, it formed a link within the chain of events that led to the mass killings at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in early 2015, where a different group of cartoonists lost their lives for the Sharia crime of blasphemy against Mohammad. Yale, obviously, got the message. It went ahead with its plans to publish a book about the affair in the face of this known risk. But it capitulated to the threat of terrorism by relinquishing its academic mission to pursue truth. Nowhere in the published book could the offending cartoons actually be found. The book came with a provocative title promising cartoons, but one would have to look elsewhere to view the pictures that ignited all of this Islamic rage. Perhaps Yale’s publishing arm decided to show sensitivity to the feelings of Muslims, which is why a book about a controversy over cartoons contained lots of words but no cartoons. More likely, however, they had a reasonable fear that terrorism would visit the university, and neither academic freedom nor truth-telling was worth losing life and limb.³⁶

Yale should either have published the book with the cartoons or not published it without them. Cowardice in the defense of liberty weakens democracy and enables the opponents of free speech to shut down debate through violence—a tactic that worked for King George III until he lost the American Colonies. This nation was built on the very lesson Yale failed to learn.

Elsewhere on the campus scene, several commencement speakers slated to receive honorary degrees were unceremoniously told that the university had changed its mind on account of words spoken or actions taken that some students would find to be unacceptably offensive. Exercising their freedom of speech had bizarrely disqualified them as graduation-day speakers. Distinguished, but nonetheless disinvited because students and faculty objected to the content of a message delivered in the past. Silencing and wholesale condemnation has become the new ethic at the academy. Holding two conflicting arguments at the same time has become a disfavored intellectual exercise. Feminist and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a known critic of the misogynistic treatment of women in Islamic societies, was told by Brandeis University that her commencement address and the receipt of her honorary degree were both cancelled. Similar snubs occurred with former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde at Smith College, and former University of California, Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau at Haverford. The list of withdrawn invitations to speakers includes: former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will, liberal Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Anna Quindlen, and comedian and talk show host Bill Maher.³⁷

This is a group of people who would not agree on very much if you shoved them all into one room. And, yet, none of them was acceptable to college students who show such seething contempt for anything outside of their comfort zone. Whether a speaker is on the right, left, or in the center, many students and faculty do not want to hear it, will not allow anyone else to hear it, and just might decide to shout it down. It is as if discourse has been replaced by discord.

And to prove that this is no joke, comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy have forsworn performing at colleges altogether. These professional joke tellers, whose job description demands that they occasionally wade into politically incorrect territory to get a laugh, believe that their kind is no longer welcome on such severe ivy-covered places where speech is less free and more scrutinized than ever.³⁸

So much for free speech and artistic liberty for visitors to universities and colleges. What is happening inside the classrooms is far worse. What is being taught is often dictated not by what students should know but by what will not offend them. Professors anxiously modify their lectures, making sure to issue “trigger warnings,” not committing “microaggressions,” and ensuring that “safe spaces” are available to their students—places where upsetting ideas cannot hurt them. In many cases, academic freedom no longer applies to a course syllabus, and professors are afraid of their students. At the University of Illinois, a professor was fired for teaching the Roman Catholic perspective on homosexuality, and a University of Kansas professor was suspended for an unflattering tweet about the National Rifle Association (NRA).³⁹

Has the American mind become officially closed? When it comes to the classroom, self-censorship has become an unspoken campus crusade. No matter how the First Amendment is viewed by the general public, freedom of speech is symbolically dead in the one place where it was once most alive. And even avowed liberals are having difficulty accepting the lack of independent critical thought. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote of how, even in his own household dedicated to progressive politics, he and his daughter were at odds about the absence of ideological diversity on campus.⁴⁰