Threats and Sensibilities: Presidents Kim, Lynton and Mason

December 20 and 22, 2014, 10:00 a.m. The University of Iowa should consider developing a course for entering undergraduates first semester that exposes them to the values underlying the First Amendment, the history of protest movements in this country and on this very campus.

-- Nicholas Johnson

So it is with free speech its a good idea, and also the law. With two distinctions from the law of gravity.

(1) The law doesnt always apply.

Although the First Amendment to our Constitution merely forbids Congress to make a law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, the courts interpret congress to mean all government action things done by city councils, school boards, and yes, state universities like the University of Iowa. But that means the First Amendment gives you no protection from restrictions on your speech at the family dinner table, or in the corporate workplace.

Courts also permit governments to restrict freedom of speech in a variety of contexts how companies can advertise and label their products and new stock offerings, restrictions on sound trucks blasting messages throughout suburban neighborhoods after midnight, and a prohibition on airline passengers telling jokes as they pass through TSA security.

(2) And even when free speech is legally protected, its not free.

Speech is free like food is free in a Michelin four-star Paris restaurant. You tell the waitperson what you want, its presented before you, and you eat it. Only after the final cup of coffee, when youre preparing to leave, do you pay the price.

This speak-now-pay-later quality of free speech made the news recently from Iowa and California.

Serhat Tanyolacar, a visiting assistant professor in the University of Iowa art department, declaring that he was displaying the horrifying truth, the fact of racism, put a seven-foot sculpture of a klan robe on the universitys central campus. It was covered with prints from newspapers stories of our countrys racist past. The artists intent not that its necessarily relevant appears to have been one of encouraging more serious discussion of what has long been an American problem, to trigger awareness by putting in historical context the current demonstrations and other reactions to a number of police shootings of unarmed African American males.

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Threats and Sensibilities: Presidents Kim, Lynton and Mason