Stifling free speech promotes polarization, not conversation – Washington Examiner

Last week, we saw first-hand that for some legislators, ignorance is bliss. During the Senate Judiciary Committee's free-speech hearing last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., remained blissfully unaware as she claimed, "I know of no effort at Berkeley, at the University of California, to stifle student efforts to speech." I guess the Democratic Party is more out-of-touch than we thought.

This hearing came less than 24 hours after the Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision protecting all speech, even offensive speech. Yet, on college campuses across the country, students have increasingly begun lashing out against speakers and students groups whose message they deem distressing. The university response often protects these perpetrators by hindering the ability for dissenting opinions to flourish.

As university censorship has risen, so too has the polarization of their campuses. The most blatant example of this environment can be seen at Berkeley. This past February, 1,500 protesters stormed the campus with posters reading, "This is war," in response to Milo Yiannopoulos' speaking engagement. By the end of the night, the event was canceled, and the campus suffered $100,000 in damages. No arrests were made. Just a few months later, Berkeley officials stood by and watched as violent protests continued to erupt again, this time due to Ann Coulter's scheduled appearance.

If universities continue to allow students to violently protest against speakers they disagree with, they will be conditioned to believe this behavior is acceptable, and even noble. This was the exact point Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who participated in the panel before the Senate Judiciary Committee, made throughout his testimony last week.

"Administrators are not going to pay attention to what's legally right unless they are forced to do so," commented Isaac Smith, a former student of Ohio University also testifying at the hearing. Isaac, who shared his story of facing censorship from his campus for a message written on a t-shirt, didn't have his First Amendment rights reinstated until after partnering with Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and successfully winning a lawsuit against his school.

Unfortunately, Isaac's experience with administrative censorship is not unique. At Bunker Hill Community College, members of the campus Young Americans for Liberty chapter were forced to present their IDs to campus police, who then filed a disciplinary report against the students for distributing pocket-sized copies of the Constitution. Campus police justified their actions because the students had failed to obtain administrative approval beforehand. The very document the institution is bound by was not acceptable for distribution. On some public campuses, your rights come with terms and conditions.

While campus bureaucrats remain attached to their restrictive codes, communities are taking action. At YAL, our Fight for Free Speech campaign has mobilized students to successfully overturn 25 of these speech codes, restoring rights to 544,452 students. Increasingly, state legislatures have begun introducing legislation that places additional pressure on campus administrators to educate students on their free speech rights and require colleges to take disciplinary action against students who attempt to interfere with their peers' speech.

But free speech does not always have to be a fight. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, YAL chapter president Savannah Soto approached her administration with potential reforms for the current restrictive codes. Soto stressed the importance of free expression in higher education and presented a petition with 800 student signatures supporting these reforms. Within a few weeks, the campus revised their codes. Rather than forcefully clutching to these campus speech regulations that cast a wide net for censorship, her campus listened to its student body and protected its students' rights.

When campuses force students into suppression, resentments grow between the silencers and the silenced, and the results, as we've seen at Berkeley, are chaotic. As Justice Louise Brandeis put it in Whitney v. California, "The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

Cliff Maloney (@LibertyCliff) is president of Young Americans for Liberty.

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Stifling free speech promotes polarization, not conversation - Washington Examiner