Tom Loftus: UW doesn’t need state law to ensure free speech – Madison.com

Gov. Scott Walker proposed in his budget bill a law to both ensure and restrict free speech on UW campuses. It is 500 words of contradictory and sometimes Orwellian language. "Wrongheaded" speakers get special protection and students and faculty are redefined as "members of the university community."

This is a law that is not needed.

It has been removed from the budget by the Joint Finance Committee and will now have to stand alone as a bill requiring a separate debate, which the First Amendment certainly deserves.

The UW Regents and the chancellors have performed well throughout the history of the university in protecting free speech and have fended off elected officials wanting to restrict that speech.

It was in 1894 that Wisconsin's elected state superintendent of education, Oliver E. Wells, an ex-officio member of the UW Board of Regents, charged professor Richard T. Ely with advocating socialism in his teaching. A trial was held and Ely was exonerated. The Regents' president, William Bartlett, said a "teacher who can teach only what is accepted by everybody, will be confined to a very narrow line of tuition."

The Regents used the trial as an opportunity to say more about freedom of speech, and they adopted a statement written by university President Charles Kendall Adams: "(T)he great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

Controversial faculty their speech and teaching have been a common complaint echoing through the years since Ely. The most recent was in 2011 when the Walker administration asked for the private emails of professor Bill Cronon. The chancellor and Regents were adamant in denying this request and reaffirming academic freedom in what is now known as the Platteville statement.

However, what has prompted the governor's proposal are recent incidents at Middlebury, UC-Berkeley and Texas A&M, where invited speakers were prevented from speaking by violent student protests.

But here too, in defending and protecting very controversial speakers over the decades UW chancellors and Regents have acted admirably.

At the height of the Cold War and against fierce opposition from legislators, Abner Berry, the Negro affairs editor of the Communist Party's Daily Worker, was allowed to speak. State Sen. Gordon Bubolz called for an investigation of the group that invited him. This caused a yearlong look at the rights of student organizations.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy made it through his speech in 1951 that claimed there were communist infiltrators in the State Department, even though the event devolved into chaos after he called students "braying jackasses."

In 1967, the university held fast to the right of Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm, to recruit on campus. This decision was made, of course, without knowing a melee seen around the world would result. But it is important to point out the UW could have denied Dow there was no state or federal law to consider. It was UW's choice.

I came home from the Army in 1968, returned to UW-Whitewater and then transferred to UW-Madison in 1969 as a junior. That semester the campus was occupied by the National Guard and tear gas was so common it was like the weather. The Guard was there to keep the campus open in the face of mass anti-war demonstrations and student demands to shut down the campus.

The UW president and Regents held fast and kept it open.

Gov. Walker would do well to look at a 1951 Legislative Council study of the future of the university that was directed by two future governors, state Sen. Warren Knowles and state Sen. Gaylord Nelson. They considered whether there was a need to curtail the speech of students. They concluded there was not, and their reasoning is as sound now as it was then. It is contained in one eloquent paragraph:

"We are trying to develop self-directing mature citizens capable of making their own evaluation of truth and falsehood. A more dogmatic policy might shield the individual student so much that he would be deprived of this essential educational experience. We believe in freedom of discussion and that continued emphasis on the privileges and benefits of our government and our system of free enterprise will make the youth of Wisconsin better citizens."

We have made it this far without the law the governor wants. The members of the Joint Finance Committee did the university, the Legislature and the First Amendment a service by eliminating the governor's proposed law from the budget bill.

Tom Loftus of Sun Prairie is a former member of the UW Board of Regents and speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly. He wasambassador to Norway from 1993 to 1998.

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Tom Loftus: UW doesn't need state law to ensure free speech - Madison.com