Turning College Into a No-Thought Zone
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A number of other universities have also abandoned similar policies. The biggest step is probably the state of Virginia passing legislation designating all outdoor areas of public colleges as public forums: http://www.thefire.org/virginia-bans-unconstitutional-campus....
An organization called FIRE has a great tool that lists speech-restrictive policies at various universities: http://www.thefire.org/spotlight/
Now, public universities are clearly state actors, and the First Amendment applies. For such organizations, free speech zones are based on the principle that certain "time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech in public areas are Constitutional: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/timepla.... It probably wouldn't have been considered a violation of the First Amendment, even in the founder's day, to charge someone with disturbing the peace for protesting in a residential area in the dead of night, even if they were standing on a public sidewalk.
Universities justify their regulations on "time, place, and manner" grounds, but often stretch that category too far: http://www.thefire.org/misunderstanding-time-place-and-manne... It will be interesting to see further developments in this area. The Supreme Court recently struck down Massachusetts' law banning protests in a 35-foot "buffer zone" around abortion clinics: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/26/325806464/sta....
[1] On the flip side there are other people who argue that university grounds are not public forums per se, but are rather private property that happens to be owned by the government. They argue that university campuses are more like a government office building than a public street in that regard. See: http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar....
As it notes, people have tried stretching the notion that time, place & manner restrictions are okay into all sorts of impermissible things, like placing unequal burdens on disapproved speech, requiring preapproval to protest, or using the restrictions to stifle speech rather than justifying them as the least restrictive means to fulfill a legitimate purpose.
(Though is leaves out Frisby v. Schultz, the case that held that laws regulating protests can be content neutral, among many other things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisby_v._Schultz)
Note also that it is not particularly relevant that an organization receives public funds. On the one hand, any school (or other organization) operated by a state is also subject to the federal constitution including the First Amendment (of course, this does not cover private schools). And on the other hand, I think your logic stretches too far: I reserve the right to kick you out of my dinner party because I don't like what you're saying. I receive "federal funds" in the form of various tax breaks. If I do actually kick you out, have I violated the First Amendment? I hope not.
The usual rule is that only the government itself (at any level -- or its agents, under certain circumstances) can violate the First Amendment (and almost all of the other amendments, with the notable exception of the 13th). I think it's probably better this way.
Restrictions on political speech in a place and time you can gather with other students to talk about the newest boy band or the unappealing nature of the cafeteria food don't pass constitutional muster for a public institution.
Stifling the speech of someone you categorize as 'crazy' is exactly why the first amendment exists. If everybody wanted to waste their free speech on how cute puppies were, we wouldn't need it.
That was the purpose of the Constitution, to make the entire country a free-speech zone.
The Orwellian term "Free-speech zone"'s meaning is not in defining where people can speak. It defines where people can't speak.
The school is giving them a civics lesson, fortunately not the one the administrators who evidently opposed free speech intended. Instead it's showing what happens when a school breaks the law.
> “Isn’t an institution of higher education’s primary function ... the education/learning and safety of its students?"
Whoever thinks free speech impinges on safety is confused. The danger of free speech is nothing compared to the danger of its suppression.
without disrupting the other fundamental functions of the institutions
IMO this is the key part. You have a constitutional right to say what you want. You don't have a constitutional right to shout it from the front of a lecture hall in front of my professor. (Just as a random example)
Really? I imagine you'd be rather annoyed if I forced my way into your home to express my views to the contrary, or even serenaded you with my opinions from beneath your bedroom window.
Whoever thinks free speech impinges on safety is confused.
Again, it depends. Suppose that I and a crowd of my friends are dead against spodek, and wish to run all the spodeks out out of town? It's easy to be absolutist about free speech if you don't anticipate being the object's of a mob's hatred.
Now, I'm not endorsing the colleges' position here, which I think has become absurdly restrictive in many cases. But I've seen many absolutist 'defenders of free speech' tip over into shouting down their opponents, and I don't care for ochlocracy any more than I care for institutional authoritarianism.
If you did, the crime wouldn't be you speaking your mind... it'd be the breaking and entering.
And if you want to serenade me without trespassing, as annoying as that might be I don't see how I could stop you. By that, I mean I don't see how I could ethically petition the government to make you stop (even if they'd do this).
> It's easy to be absolutist about free speech if you don't anticipate being the object's of a mob's hatred.
It's not the speech that would bother me, but the pitchforks.
People who say things like you have just said seem to be implying some sort of sociological theory that remains unspoken:
That (some) speech is capable of manipulating other people to do things they might not otherwise do.
Now, this isn't particularly controversial, and I don't think I'd dispute it (I might remain skeptical, but silently so).
If that theory is true, then is the person who manipulates through communication the criminal, or is it the people who are manipulated into crime? I contend that the latter are wholly culpable.
People who say things like you have just said seem to be implying some sort of sociological theory that remains unspoken: [...] If that theory is true, then is the person who manipulates through communication the criminal, or is it the people who are manipulated into crime? I contend that the latter are wholly culpable.
I think both. If you're exhorting people to commit an act and they do it, you're not morally blameless; the manipulation is itself an activity notwithstanding the fact of its intangibility. This is why we have laws against 'incitement to riot,' as it's a fact that that most people behave differently in crowds and some people make a specialty out of leveraging that to destructive ends.
There's a clear time vs risk component. If you don't have time to evaluate the speaker, and the risk is high, very few people will not believe the speaker.
For regular old speech like "this flavor of ice cream is better" i agree with you.
Thankfully, sometimes you can still speak quasi-freely on some places on the internet even if free speech in meatspace is dead. Doesn't sound too "free" when I put it that way.
Underlying free speech: Does the society value the interchange of ideas, or does everyone just value their own ideas?
None of us is immune to the tendency. Each of us must eternally watch ourselves too. Political maturity comes when we can check our decisions by seeing both sides of an issue and carefully weighing the costs.
[0]: http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/01/eternal-vigilance-is-...
In the actual 1960s ... the Free Speech Movement of 1964-1965 that you point to was a response to the fact that denial of free speech was the status quo.
> I thought this fight had already been won.
Sure, there was ground gained, at least temporarily, by the Free Speech Movement, but victory wasn't durable. Otherwise, we wouldn't have seen the violent suppression of non-violent on-campus free speech in 1970. [1]
> Free speech seems to be one of those things that institutions and governments need to be repeatedly compelled to respect.
Yeah, there's a reason that it is said that "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
In the name of convenience, "anti-disruption", security, etc we are essentially selling one of America's greatest founding principles down the river.
While this might be a controversial comparison What we really need is a NRA style rabidly pro-free-speech (First amendment- freedom of speech or press clause) organization. This group will fight EVERY single "free speech zone" crap on every public place - colleges, Borders, Govt buildings, what not.
The need for the parenthetical is telling - various groups fight vehemently against some restrictions while accepting or promoting others. Some progressives advocate restriction on offensive or "hate" speech, while some conservatives, as mentioned in the article, advocate restrictions on speech perceived as threatening to national security or social mores (explicit lyrics or imagery, for example).
A part of the problem is the stridency of "speech." There are too many activists that seem to think they know everything, and figure they only need to be louder to get to social justice. The groups that actually produce social justice, however, are the organizations that are good at listening and reacting to that information.
I've noticed a pattern in people I've met in the Bay Area. There seems to be a pattern of using tribal affiliation as a substitute for actually listening to people and thinking. You can put people into cubby-holes, and then you are excused from having to listen to what they say or can even dismiss them as some sort non-sentient subhuman.
Basically some people seem to engage in stereotyping, but tell themselves that in doing so, they're being progressive intellectuals making the world a better place. Some even go so far as to defend the stereotyping because the signals are chosen and not innate, "So it's not like racism."
Hooray for judging books by their covers.
If activists were better at listening and getting disparate people to work together, the conditions that caused the backlash would improve. But many people aren't interested in a diverse multicultural society anymore. Instead, it's about saving "us" from the horrible villainous "them" and forcing the others to do what we want through political and legal means or public bullying.
Take climate change for instance. The only arguments that come up are that either (a) it's not happening, so go fuck yourself; or (b) WE'RE ALL GOING TO CATCH ON FIRE THEN DROWN AND IT'S THE APOCALYPSE. It's never; the world is headed in a direction that we may have control over, but even if we don't, we should probably try to do a better job than we've been doing.
I don't know when it started, but it seems that anytime an even remotely controversial issue comes up, we never see a rational explanation, it's always hyperbole and ridiculous nonsense. It's like people believe that every other human is mentally incompetent, and need to be shown the most extreme example that could possibly exist for an argument to be effective.
For good examples see global warming, immigration, and my recent favorite source of 'the sky is falling' hyperbole - CISPA.
Please note, I am neither endorsing, attacking, nor am I any other verb-ing the items I listed. I am simply saying that a majority of the arguments about those items come across as ham-fisted and ridiculous.
A statement is either true or false. If you can't decide on one of those two extremes, it means either your statement is ill-formed or your axioms aren't consistent.
Better than an argument, how about a nuanced discussion of reality? How about we get people away from the marketing caricature of reality, and we have them discussing reality?
A statement is either true or false. If you can't decide on one of those two extremes, it means either your statement is ill-formed or your axioms aren't consistent.
Human language and human models of the world are ill-formed and inconsistent. This is why honest nuanced discussions that aren't arguments are the best.
We should strive to overcome the limits of language. Mathematics is, in general, neither ill-formed nor inconsistent, and we should try to imitate it in our arguments in other fields.
I'm 100% on board with this.
We should strive to overcome the limits of language. Mathematics is, in general, neither ill-formed nor inconsistent, and we should try to imitate it in our arguments in other fields.
Uh, maybe not so much. Trying to apply the logic of sets to geology and geography could result in arguing if a particular rock is in North America or South America or if a particular grain of sand is in the Cambrian or afterwards. These are nonsense arguments.
Furthermore, when you're discussing reality with humans, you're always doing it through the lens of an imprecisely constructed social model of reality that's been passed down and modified by everyone over time. Avoiding this model and its distortions entirely is going to be near impossible. You're going to have to buy an island and declare that everyone speaks in Lojban and engage in social engineering that makes The Great Leap Forward look like a meeting icebreaker.
That said, I love the precision of math and programming languages. But trying to get human society to run on it is going to be epically hard.
Only if our definitions of geographical locations are ill-defined.
>Furthermore, when you're discussing reality with humans, you're always doing it through the lens of an imprecisely constructed social model of reality that's been passed down and modified by everyone over time
Maybe we should try our hardest to avoid doing that.
That way, we must explicitly state our axioms re. messy stuff like biology and morality.
They are. They were invented by non mathematicians to facilitate communication about objects in the real world through human language -- in a non-mathematical field.
we must explicitly state our axioms re. messy stuff like biology and morality.
Sounds good, but it's kind of hard to do perfectly. Lots of geniuses have been at least peripherally aware of and have been wrestling with precisely this problem for millennia! But if you have it solved, please blog about it and show us the way! Also, don't be surprised when people start poking holes in what you write.
1. The sun will rise tomorrow. 2. This statement is false.
I'd agree with you the validity of a statement is not dependent on the palatability of its consequences.
1. The sun will rise tomorrow. 2. This statement is false.
Note that this is not the kind of information which is controversial in our society and germane to decision making. (Other than that we will assume the sun will rise tomorrow as a given, but we can't stop with that.)
If they are neither true nor false, they are ill-defined.
>The sun will rise tomorrow.
Definitionally ill defined.
>This statement is false.
Inconsistent statement.
> 1. The sun will rise tomorrow.
This is either true or false -- it may not be knowable which of those it is, but that's different than it neither being true nor false.
(context: after some occupy wall street protests were met with police violence, an armed Arizona militia watched over a local occupy movement to prevent police violence)
I attend the College of William and Mary in Virginia. In 2009, the College dropped its speech codes and became one of the most free-speech-friendly schools in the US. This has its ups and downs (in my opinion, mostly ups).
We have a fairly diverse studentry, but I haven't seen that many people with incredibly strong opinions. Most people (myself included) don't really regularly say or do things that would fall under PC speech codes. That said, I do know a few activist types, and they relish the freedom they have at the College. I've known people who go to DC to participate in protests on the weekends, people who write articles on why the "government has failed its mandate to protect our right to privacy" or "how the liberal media uses misleading language to paint climate change as something that's actually happening" (obviously different people). We've got EFF activists, marijuana legalization activists, sexual health activists, hard-line family-values conservatives -- basically, what should be the regular college gamut. It's a shame that appears to be contingent on a free-speech policy that is relatively extreme.
Free speech also has its downsides. Earlier this year, we made state and national news when a fraternity member distributed this extremely misogynistic letter, that various headlines describe as "The most hideous thing I've ever read"[1] and "vomit-inducing"[2]. We drew censures from practically everyone, and many people I talked to around that time wanted the College to boot the offending fraternity. The College, of course, did no such thing, and the fraternity voluntarily suspended operations (there could have been some under-the-table coercion there, but I doubt it).
Anyway, the point is, if colleges allow free speech, they must also stand by while some vile, vile things get published. All communities result in emergent standards of discourse and systems of self-governance when those standards are violated (after all, the backlash from that letter was strongest in the student community), and these systems dull the effects of those vile things, but they affect the community regardless. I personally think the benefits outweigh the costs.
[1] http://www.bustle.com/articles/14437-sigma-chi-frat-brothers...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/fraternity-brother-...
But I think it only applied to people not associated with the University. Student organizations weren't required to use this space, and could set up nearly anywhere outdoors, collect signatures, recruit, and generally do whatever they like as long as they weren't disturbing classes.
Really, the only people who used it were the crazy itinerant preachers who would come through campus a couple times a semester preaching hellfire and brimstone. It always made for good fireworks when the new freshman would get into yelling matches with them.
This was 10+ years ago, though, and that area now has a building right in the middle of it, so I wonder what the current policy is.
being a person that works on campus, when walking down the walk during certain times of the year its a gauntlet. people lined up from one end to another screaming over each other and stepping on front of you to offer you a pamphlet.
thank god its only for certain times of day/days of the year.
you have the choice to walk around them and avoid this "gauntlet".
"Oh, you need to protest at this location 20 miles away where no one relevant will hear your message."
you disagree? why dont you go into the local police station and start screaming some cause while trying to give people pamphlets. see where you end up, heck, try it any government building. and thats 'public' property. universities are private property, and they do have the right to make decisions on how they see fit for creating the best environment for the campus.
guess what? guns are legal, its legal to be registered and to carry a concealed weapon. but you are NOT allowed to carry them on most college campuses.
I didn't assume that you were in a union, but I was trying to paint a picture that might be more relevant to you. Just because it's not directly relevant to you doesn't mean that the general idea isn't sound though.
> #2 you'd call the police if someone followed you around and screamed in your face and kept trying to give you pamphlets. obviously theres a line somewhere in between.
Someone following you around screaming at you is harassment, not protest / free-speech. We already laws against that. There's no need form a designated 'protest zone' where no one is allowed to protest / express non-status quo ideas outside of this 'zone.'
At the same time, there is no 'right to not be annoyed' either. So there is that.
> you disagree? why dont you go into the local police station and start screaming some cause while trying to give people pamphlets.
You keep repeating "there is something in the middle," yet you assume the worst of me and use it as a strawman to proclaim victory over in the furtherance of 'proving' your point.
> guess what? guns are legal, its legal to be registered and to carry a concealed weapon. but you are NOT allowed to carry them on most college campuses.
So... free speech is analogous to concealed weapons?
and yes, exactly yes. Free speech is exactly analogous with the right to bear arms, its why its in the bill of rights. No right in the bill of rights is less important than any of the others.
Formal education is mainly about obedience, so this idea of a free speech zone is just an expression of that.
Colleges (and most other educational places) aren't really concerned about your thinking and growing. They are about making sure you obey and do what they say.
The number one thing we learn from formal education is: do what we say, when we say it.
No wonder most young, well educated people struggle with life outside the bubble.