Free speech and the First Amendment

The first amendment to the Constitution, one of ten original amendments called The Bill Of Rights, was passed by Congress in 1791 and says the following:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Constitution and its attendant amendments have often been criticized for its lack of specificity in spelling out what the law accepted and forbade and this amendment, too, lacks that specificity except for the phrase which alludes to this week’s column title. The Constitution prohibits abridging the freedom of speech.

This has been debated throughout this country’s relatively short history with the debate generally being about whether the amendment allows ALL speech or just SOME speech. Generally, the courts in general and the Supreme Court, in particular, have ruled in favor of the amendment protecting ALL speech.

The purpose of this background is to set the stage for a discussion about the abridgment of free speech at colleges and universities across the country today. Most of the controversy has centered around alt-right speakers being banned from speaking at liberal universities. This flies in the face of the first amendment to the Constitution and it flies in the face of everything I was ever taught as a student myself.

The university was seen as a place to grow and learn because of all the new ideas a student would be exposed to and there was a wonder to that experience. To hear ideas, theories and postulates you had never heard before was a liberating experience because most of us came from homes with only one political philosophy as do children today. How is a child ever to become an educated child if they aren’t exposed to all sides of a situation? That used to be the crux of becoming an educated person. You listened to ALL sides and then made up your own mind, based on the evidence presented to you.

Recently, a right wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was barred from speaking at Cal-Berkeley after anti-fascist activists stormed police barricades, causing $100,000 worth of damage. Two months later, the same school said it couldn’t guarantee the safety of an event involving conservative commentator Ann Coulter, leading to its cancellation. At a talk at Middlebury, a liberal arts college in Vermont, the controversial social scientist Charles Murray was shouted down by students and chased out of town. The purpose for all these affronts is a belief that bigoted speech is a form of oppression and thus shouldn’t be tolerated. One protester at Berkeley said, “We won’t put up with the violent rhetoric of Milo, Trump, or the fascist alt-right and we are willing to resist by any means necessary.”

All that statement shows to me is a basic ignorance of how the educational process works and what a student’s role in it is. When professors feel the need to provide ‘trigger warnings’ about material to be discussed in class that might offend some student’s sensibilities, that’s going too far. Providing ‘safe spaces’ designed to be free of any speech that might be considered racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or offensive in any way has no connection with the reality of the world at all. We are catering to the insecurities and frailties of an entire class of young people who want to face a world that offers no threat or even challenge to them and that simply isn’t possible.

Colleges and universities are a place to expand horizons, to ‘explode circles’ as a favorite philosophy professor of mine at the University of Oklahoma once said. It’s not to protect or shield us from the realities of the world; in fact, it's designed to do just the opposite. We’re supposed to use the knowledge we’ve gained in college to defend and protect our turf, not apologize for it. If I had gone all the way through the Ph.D. program at Oklahoma State University without being exposed to conservatism, how would I know that liberalism is the best option for me? I had to be exposed to all sides of both perspectives, plus any other political perspectives out there before I could choose one that felt right for me. And even then, I continue to shift and alter my political convictions as I’m exposed to the daily politics of the world.

Personhood and a political perspective aren’t etched in stone in any fully thinking, functioning human being. As time and things change, we change, if we’re paying attention to the world at all. Those students and professors at liberal universities who don’t want to hear anything said by conservatives are standing still in a time of change, just like many conservatives are too and the problems of the world aren’t going to be solved until we get ourselves in motion again.