EVEN THE FOLKS AT VOX HAVE FIGURED IT OUT: Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents.
Donald Trump is a divisive figure, but does writing his name in chalk on a university sidewalk amount to the harassment of minority students? Some students at Emory University claimed as much last spring, when the then-candidate’s name, along with phrases like “Build a Wall,” appeared near the buildings where many student groups had their headquarters. . . .
Some believe the universal right to free expression should extend to all, even ideas that are deemed a threat to the public interest (as homosexuality was only a generation ago) or which are a threat to prevailing conventional wisdom and political norms (as miscegenation was in much of the country, as well). A competing viewpoint holds that free speech is just a cop-out code phrase, mostly working in the service of professional trolls or entitled jerks to abusively act out with impunity. . . .
Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang
It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill’s contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an “unfair double standard” could be considered hate speech.
To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes.
The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don’t aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts.
What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed” — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus.
As Bernie Sanders noted, response to this behavior — which is quite literally un-American — was one major reason for Trump’s win.
Plus:
The same rights that can be put “in service of a right-wing agenda” (as the Times put it, in its piece about the PEN report) are also the best tools available for marginalized voices on the left and everywhere in between. As we approach the “Trump era,” perhaps student activists will be less inclined to put their faith in rigidly defined policies executed by faceless authority figures — and more inclined to embrace free speech, in all its unwieldy, essential glory.
Yes, Trump’s already turning Democrats into Cold Warriors and federalism fanatics and he’s not even sworn in yet. So turning them into free-speech defenders is entirely possible!
