Colleges, student groups help feed campus intolerance
Respect for free speech is withering on campus.
At Claremont McKenna College in California, protesters blocked the doors to a lecture hall preventing conservative author Heather Mac Donald from speaking. At Middlebury College in Vermont, a professor accompanying libertarian author Charles Murray was injured by an angry mob. At the University of California-Berkeley, protests against speakers have turned ugly.
In just the place where the clash of ideas is most valuable, students are shutting themselves off to points of view they don’t agree with. At the moment when young minds are supposed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, they are answering challenges to their beliefs with anger and violence instead of facts and reason.
As much as university administrators lament student-led intolerance, they played a role in their creation. For decades, colleges and universities have been fighting in court to maintain ridiculous restrictions on expression. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education catalogs them exhaustively. Last month, Fairmont State University in West Virginia finally accepted that students have a right to gather signatures on a petition without a school permit. In March at Regis University in Colorado, the school shut down a student sale that charged different prices for baked goods based on the buyers’ race, gender, religion or sexuality to protest affirmative action. That’s the same month the University of South Alabama tried to force a student to take down a Trump sign from his dorm room.
Student government likes to get in the act, too. Last month, Wichita State University student government backed down from its decision to deny recognition to a student group, not because the group engaged in “hate speech,” but because the student group argued that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
More often than not, cases where universities or student governments restrict student speech like those in Kansas, Alabama, Colorado and West Virginia are overshadowed by the celebrity speech fights that draw national headlines. Ann Coulter, the author and pundit, has been relishing the attention she has gotten from her on-again, offagain appearance at Berkeley. Not only did the pointless battle help her sell books and get booked onto television shows, it also made her seem more like a First Amendment heroine and less like a partisan bloviater.
Campus administrators and student groups, who defend the growing intolerance for unpopular ideas on campus, see themselves as protecting what New York University Vice Provost Ulrich Baer calls “the rights, both legal and cultural, of minorities to participate in public discourse” in a unique moment when Donald Trump and the “alt-right” are on the rise. But those who’d restrict freedom of speech always have an important excuse for their actions. The grave threat of global communism abroad was no excuse for McCarthyism.
Campus protesters are right that President Trump’s Americafirst nationalism is a grave threat to many Americans. But unfettered speech rights are the answer to the threat, not the cause.