San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
It’s not just free speech at stake
I am teaching a course on free speech to college students. Some might say that the panoply of trigger warnings, protests, safe spaces, censorship and Millennial coddling on campus these days makes this course an oxymoron. In reality, if this class proves similar to ones I’ve taught for the past 10 years at one of the most liberal colleges in the world (home to both Angela Davis and the Grateful Dead archives), there will be some spirited debate, complaints about the midterm being too difficult, and then the students will leave for winter break no worse for wear.
As in past years, my students will spend their first week reading assigned articles about how they are coddled and thus are betraying the free exchange of ideas on which this country was founded. In subsequent discussions, a majority of students will agree that they are coddled, but that they never asked to be. They note that it is their parents, teachers and administrators who chose to helicopter over them since birth.
Conservative students will talk about how they’ve been censored or had to self-censor. Liberal students will respond that while their conservative ideas are fundamentally wrong and dangerous, so too is censorship. It will be an exchange that would make Thomas Jefferson proud.
Then, one student will note that it’s ironic that these adults are so worried about the coddling of Millennial minds, while these same adults have created policies that have left this generation very uncoddled economically: saddled with debt, dim wages and no benefits. The class will rise up in agreement and anger, also citing the environment, endless wars, and half a dozen other catastrophes that they are supposed to solve while deep in debt and while older generations wring every last drop out of the system on their way to retirement and death.
This anger and sense of betrayal has, according to a poll by Pew Charitable Trusts, left this generation significantly less trusting than other generations. After teaching for more than a dozen years, this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my students. There is no institution or governance system that these students trust, including, as a Harvard study found last year, democracy. There is no leader who isn’t a hypocrite. No ideals that can’t be picked apart with counterfactuals. And, it is this dynamic that animates their lack of faith in democracy and free expression.
To a generation formed during financial crisis, influenced by social media and witnessing a failing political system, laws are just instruments to be leveraged or ignored for the purpose of the day. In this way, there are shocking similarities between them and President Trump. They both believe that institutions have already failed and will continue to do so. Each scandal proves their point. Cynicism breeds cynicism, and the failure of law is self-evident.
In general, my students believe in free expression but want to shape the edges of controversial speech as other generations have done in the past. There is almost nothing they would censor as obscene (thanks, internet). They would do more to limit hate speech. This is not unreasonable. Free expression, as we now know it, did not exist for the first 130 years of this country, and each generation has redefined incitement, obscenity and commercial speech.
What makes this generation different is not their lack of support of free speech, it is that they simply don’t believe in law or politics as a means to protect it.
To believe in law is to believe the maxim carved above the entry to the U.S. Supreme Court, “Equal Justice Under Law.” A reciprocity that means that if they, as Voltaire’s axiom demands, fight to the death for speech they abhor that the other side would do the same for them. And then, that the legal system would treat both claims to the marketplace of ideas equally.
Of course, the law has never been equal, nor has it been applied equally. And to a generation of students who are more diverse, in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status, the incidents of inequality are more painful and personal.
Ten years ago, my students would cite the same failures of justice, but would believe that the system was getting better. They would accept the concepts of precedent and the political process as a means of governance. In short, they would believe in law or, at least, the aspirations of law.
This year, in between the reading of cases, midterms, papers and finals, I will be searching for not just their views on free speech, but which institutions they will trust to protect it. I will ask if, at the very least, they are willing to trust each other to freely express how they can believe in anything again.
Ryan Coonerty teaches law and politics at UC Santa Cruz. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/ letters.