Category Archives: Free Speech

Documentary filmmaker Rob Montz produced a short last year which focused on free speech at Brown University.

Now, Montz has created a sequel which focuses on Yale and the incident at Silliman College which we covered extensively,Yale SJW Student to Professor: I want your job to be taken from you:

Last fall at Yale University, an administrator and professor named Nicholas Christakis, Master of Silliman College at Yale was confronted by a mob of angry students over a nontroversy regarding Halloween costumes and cultural appropriation. Christakis and his wife, who also worked at the school, ultimately resigned over this.

We covered the story, see here and here.

New videos of the confrontation have been posted online by Tablet Magazine which shed new light on the situation. It was much worse than anyone knew.

Although Montz focuses on Yale, he makes a broader point which applies to campuses across the country. He acknowledges this in the description of the film on YouTube:

This documentary focuses on Yale, but it has implications for colleges nationwide. With incidents from Brown to Middlebury to Berkeley, universities are grappling with issues of free speech and free expression amidst student demands for inclusive environments as well as students and administrators who are afraid to say anything controversial or interesting for fear it will negatively affect their job prospects. With numerous concerned students too afraid to speak on record in the documentary, the silence is deafening.

Montz suggests that the entire point of the university has been corrupted by this social justice warrior culture and that schools are expanding their administrations in order to cater to it.

Intellectual Takeout describes the video this way:

Documentary on Yale Reveals How Scary U.S. Campuses Have Become

We have written a lot about the suppression of free speech on campuses and touched on some of the things that have gone on at Yale.

But I have seen nothing better on this front than the 12-minute YouTube video I watched this morning, We the Internet TVs short documentary Silence U Part 2: What has Yale Become? Its the follow-up to its 2016 viral hit Silence U: Is the University Killing Free Speech and Open Debate?

The new documentary explores Yales infamous attempt to tell students what types of Halloween costumes were appropriate for students, and the fallout that ensued when one faculty member asked if such a policy was really necessary.

This is a little over 12 minutes long and worth watching in full:

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Featured image via YouTube.

See the article here:
VIDEO: Yale SJWs gone wild against free speech - legal Insurrection (blog)

By SherAli Tareen || Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

The controversy over the recent Flemming Rose lecture at F&M highlights certain vexing conundrums over the problem of free speech on campus, especially as they intersect with questions of religion, race, and minority sensibilities. In an opinion piece published in this paper, Professor Matt Hoffman (the primary organizer of the event) sought to shed light on the question: why is it that of all people he could have invited to talk about free speech, he chose in particular Flemming Rose, a central figure of the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy. Remember, this question did not originate with Professor Hoffman; it was raised to him in anguish and pain by a female Muslim student protesting at the door of an event that to her represented an affront to her religious sensibilities. It is debatable whether Professor Hoffman addressed this question adequately. But his explanation does offer a useful opportunity for reflecting on some of the conceptual shortcomings with dominant strands of the free speech discourse at F&M.

At the heart of the problem in much of the conversation surrounding free speech on campus (as exemplified by Professor Hoffmans response) is a failure and refusal to think through questions of context and power. Free speech is not an ideal that hangs suspended in the sky. It is exercised, negotiated, and at times imposed in specific contexts and under particular relations of power. Who has the power and authority to decide what forms of speech and offence are permissible and what forms are not? Whose desires, experiences, and normative viewpoints inform that decision? Whose logics and views are privileged? A careful consideration of these questions is critical to nuancing the conversation on free speech in a manner that is not imprisoned to the facile binary of ban speech/celebrate free speech through offense. The point is not to ban any speaker or viewpoint and neither is it to stifle difficult or uncomfortable conversations. The larger point is this: there is no universal consensus on what constitutes offence and moral injury. And the free speech principle of say what you wish so long as you dont break the law by its nature privileges majoritarian priorities and sensibilities. The law, with its foremost concern for maintaining public order, cannot help but prioritize the normative expectations and pressures of the majority population. Back to Rose, it is precisely this haughty indifference towards any attempt to entertain a different logic of offense and pain that does not fit a dominant liberal secular narrative that is at the crux of the issue.

The final paragraph of Professor Hoffmans letter captures this point to great effect. In the course of apologizing to students who may have been hurt by the lecture, Professor Hoffman proceeded to suggest that only if these students had not let their emotions primarily guide them and had they read Roses book, they would have been better able to grapple with his [Roses] words, ideas, and arguments. A rather peculiar apology this is. The exhortation to jettison emotion in favor of dispassionate reading has all the trappings of the colonizers demand that the native abandon her irrational attachment to emotion and embrace the light of reason and civilization. This patronizing gesture is both conceptually clumsy and deeply condescending. Only if these emotionally overpowered Muslims read Roses writings, they would realize that their rage is misplaced; it may even dawn on them that Rose is in fact an advocate of their rights and freedoms. This seems to be the suggestion here.

Lurking in this suggestion is a dismissal of the legitimacy of the pain and injury felt by Muslim and other minority students who protested on the evening of the lecture. By diagnosing their pain as a symptom of emotional excess, Professor Hoffman attributes that pain to a condition of false judgment that can (must?) be treated with the proper dosage of liberal knowledge and reason. This kind of a framing hinges on an equally problematic binary between the virtue of secular reason enshrined in the right to satire and offend and religious emotion that supposedly prevents unlettered souls from enjoying the fruits of that virtue. The inadequacy of such a framing also explains Professor Hoffmans bafflement at the sight of protesting Muslim students who were unprepared to eagerly embrace the protocols of liberal discipline.

A blind faith in free speech precludes one from considering the secular theology operative in the expectation that Muslims should after all not be so offended by caricatures or cartoons of the Prophet. As anthropologist Saba Mahmood has best argued, at work in this demand is a secular ideology of language. According to this secular language ideology, as she explains it, since signs are only arbitrarily connected to what they represent, a rational person should be able to distinguish images and icons from the actual figures they represent. Hence, since an image of Muhammad is not really Muhammad just like an image of Jesus is not really Jesus; a rational believer ought to be able to distinguish images of these sacred figures from their actual personhood. This seemingly secular position is in fact deeply embedded in and indebted to quintessential modern Protestant/colonial assumptions regarding authentic religion that continue to inspire varied strands of secular humanist thought. The suggestion that Muslims ought not take cartoons of Muhammad too seriously rests on the assumption that since the true locus of religion is in the interior of a person and because religion is ultimately a matter of choice, a properly modern subject must have the capacity to separate inner belief from the external world of objects, images, and materiality.

This impoverished understanding of religion can only show bemusement towards alternative logics of life whereby venerating a figure like Muhammad is not just a matter of choice consigned to the privacy of inner belief. For many Muslims, Muhammad represents the most intimate moral exemplar and model for inhabiting the world: bodily, ethically, and materially. Venerating Muhammad above all represents a quest for cohabiting the body of the Prophet. This means striving to cultivate a pious and virtuous self through a rigorous regime of imitating intimate details of Muhammads life and example, as if by cohabiting his body. The cohabitation of the Prophets body does not follow the modern liberal imperative of distinguishing between the inner essence of religion (belief) that is protected by law and its external manifestations that are entirely available for offense and injury.

In no way unique to Islam or Muslims, this idea of cohabitation might help us better appreciate the forms of reasoning that animate the pain and moral injury caused by satirical cartoons of Muhammad. To be clear, my point here is not to explain or demystify Muslim responses to satirical representations of Muhammad or to homogenize such responses. Readers who reacted to all this with the objection but not all Muslims were offended by the cartoons or but there were Muslims who did not protest that evening and happily listened to the speaker will have missed the entire point. The point is this: framing this issue in terms of a standoff between liberal free speech and religious taboo/sensitivity is singularly unhelpful. This is so because the principle of free speech is enwrapped in a set of deeply problematic normative assumptions regarding the proper place and form of religion in the modern world. And it is precisely the refusal to interrogate or to critically evaluate these assumptions that generate diagnoses of pain and moral injury as the product of misplaced emotional outburst, as in Professor Hoffmans apology of sorry not sorry.

The broader context in which this lecture took place is also critically important to consider. To begin with, just how thoughtful is Flemming Rose is wholly debatable. The evidence of his writings reveals at best a tabloid thinker with a rather unsophisticated and yawningly repetitive insistence on a classic liberal conception of offense as a pillar of free speech. There is little in his work to suggest any sustained theoretical reflection on or engagement with questions of power, histories of colonialism, race, religion, or any attempt to even hint at let alone address, his white privilege. We do the intellectual standards of this college no favor with such speakers whose underlying attraction is tethered to their provocateur shock value. There are many other scholars, from a range of ideological backgrounds, who have written about free speech and about the Danish cartoon controversy more specifically, in far more thoughtful and nuanced ways. But to give the podium to Flemming Rose, who rose to fame precisely through insulting Islam and Muslims, during a moment when the Muslim community in this country confronts an incessant barrage of vitriol, bigotry, and violence, is, to put it mildly, astonishing. The irony involved in the fact that in an event on free speech, student protestors were not allowed to display signs inside the auditorium, as non-uniformed (likely armed) security officers monitored their movement, cannot be more telling.

There was one beautiful aspect to this event: the way in which some members of the Black Student Union came together with Muslim students in solidarity to speak some truth to power. These students made us proud but I am not sure whether their voices were adequately heard. Indeed, while some both within and outside the college may celebrate the Flemming Rose lecture as a shining example of F&Ms commitment to free speech, for many others, including those among the most vulnerable in our community, this event was but a painful reminder of the marginality of their voices.

SherAli Tareen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. His email is sherali.tareen@fandm.edu.

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Op-Ed: Complicating the free speech discourse at F&M and beyond - The College Reporter

BLOOMINGTON Legislation co-sponsored by state Rep. Dan Brady would create a Campus Free Speech Act requiring public colleges and universities in Illinois to adopt policies on free expression to protect the free speech rights of invited speakers.

The measure, House Bill 2939, was introduced last month by state Rep. Peter Breen, R-Lombard, and is based on but not identical to a model bill developed by a conservative research organization, the Goldwater Institute. About a half dozen other states are considering similar bills.

A hearing on the bill is scheduled for 4 p.m. Wednesday before the House Higher Education Committee.

Brady, a Bloomington Republican, said he became chief co-sponsor because he agrees with the intent of protecting our free speech and ability to express that message.

I think for all of our universities to be responsible for having on their books a protocol and policy for freedom of speech is a good thing, Brady said.

The model legislation was developed in the wake of several incidents on campuses across the country in which protesters disrupted talks by controversial speakers or invitations to such speakers were withdrawn.

The legislation also was inspired by situations in which colleges limited the ability of students to protest or distribute literature.

One such incident occurred in 2015 at the College of DuPage, where students handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution were confronted by a security officer because they had not obtained a permit from officials.

Breen said, This is something that continues to come up nationally and within my own district, which includes the College of DuPage.

Although Breen based his initial bill on the Goldwater Institute's model, he is filing an amendment to revise parts of it after consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

Among other things, the changes would remove references to sanctions for infringing on the rights of others to listen or engage in free expression. The original bill stated that a student infringing on such rights would be suspended for a minimum of one year for a second offense and included financial damages of at least $1,000.

Illinois State University spokesman Eric Jome said ISU has policies and practices that cover most of what's in the bill.

Although Schroeder Plaza on the north side of the quad tends to be the site of many demonstrations because of its openness and visible location, ISU doesn't have specific speech zones, said Jome.

The student conduct code states that students are free to assemble and to express their free speech in a peaceful and orderly manner but that disrupting or obstructing activities or inciting others to do so is a violation of the code.

Jome noted that ISU President Larry Dietz has talked about being respectful of other people's opinion and people's right to express themselves.

But Jonathan Butcher, education director of the Goldwater Institute, said that hasn't been the case everywhere.

Butcher, who helped develop the model legislation, said there have been a number of incidents where protesters have tried to silence others. This is the crux of it.

He cited a case earlier this month at Middlebury College in Vermont where chanting demonstrators prevented a controversial speaker from delivering a talk.

You can yell when it's your turn, Butcher said, but civil society depends on the ability of people to express themselves.

Butcher said the Goldwater Institute is a Phoenix-based research institution, founded in 1988, that works to protect individual liberties and constitutional rights. Butcher categorized it as conservative.

Butcher said universities should be places where you can have debate about uncomfortable things and it is wrong when you forcibly stop someone else from speaking.

He said, We need to educate students on what it means to protect the First Amendment.

Follow Lenore Sobota on Twitter: @pg_sobota

Link:
Bill would create Campus Free Speech Act | Local Education ... - Bloomington Pantagraph

Almost 400 professors have signed a pact to uphold the right to free speech on their college campuses since professors Robert P. George and Cornel West, respectively of Princeton and Harvard, published the appeal last week.

If students possess the brains we gloated about in our college applications, this should alarm us. This kind of edict should jerk us college kids from our self-absorbed slumber as if someone tossed a bucket of ice water into our dorm-issued bed at dawns first light.

In the statement, George and West defend the pursuit of truth and diversity of thought in an argument that fuses the freedom to disagree to the preservation of our democratic society. They celebrate and encourage humility and open-mindedness, dispositions they believe lead to productive discussions. They write: All of us should be willingeven eagerto engage with anyone who is prepared to do business in the currency of truth-seeking discourse by offering reasons, marshaling evidence, and making arguments.

Professors all around the country have signed this oath in response to a widespread campus culture that demands homologous thought in the name of equality. While these instructors have made an important choice, American universities wont progress until their students practice a commitment to true equality, which values free speech through the practice of authentic deliberation, honest discussion, and civil discourse.

Thats why we students need to take our own oath and start protecting the free speech we are privileged to practice. Without it, we will abandon an education that could challenge and strengthen our dearest beliefs for a thorough, self-imposed brainwashing with a hefty price tag. And what would be the point of that?

Earlier this month, a mob of students protesting at Middlebury College physically attacked a visiting author, Charles Murray, and injured Allison Stranger, the professor escorting him to his speech. This incident is a part of a trend, although the level of violence warranted it especially newsworthy.

This academic year has seen young scholars shout down speakers all over the country, branding themselves as the students who cried oppression. It is possible, of course, that some of those instances were good the right to peaceably assemble is one Americans should always protect and practice when necessary. But most of these protests obstructed what could have been a productive discussion between a group of debate-ready students and a famous partisan with a strong commitment to his or her beliefs.

The right to free speech enables speakers, professors, and students of any ideological conviction to publicly justify their principles. Thats what makes this situation so ironic. Protesters can express their hatred for someone because of the First Amendment, but in doing so, they argue for the obstruction of the same right theyre using. If their wish were granted, and the right to free speech abolished, they would gag themselves as much as their opponents.

Debate and discourse, enabled by the right to free speech, are integral to the learning process. When we humble ourselves enough to entertain someone elses views, we allow ourselves to consider why we might be wrong, which allows us to check our reasoning over and again. We have the opportunity to change our own minds or change the minds of others in how we perceive fundamental truths about humanity, and how those truths manifest themselves in todays society. Thats exactly what education is supposed to do.

But students keep choosing to drown out those they consider intolerable. Immediately labeled as racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes, anyone with a more conservative set of beliefs loses the chance to legitimize their thoughts. Whats more, the students who take that opportunity from them also give up their moment to hurl intelligent, tough questions that an expert ought to be able to answer. In condemning their rival as the worlds worst, they waste the occasion to articulate why they disagree and demand an answer to the trepidations that antagonize them.

A long list of professors have agreed to challenge their classrooms, and this will make a difference within the lecture halls, but thats not enough. Students spend the majority of their time at school in cafeterias, coffee shops, dormitories, and libraries places profs arent around to nudge conversations in a productive direction. Students have to take responsibility for their own discussions, which means they must be willing to have them in the first place, with a commitment to charity and humility as their guide. We need to ask each other why we hold certain truths, how those truths appear in society, and to what end we acknowledge them. We must examine our thoughts and the thoughts of our peers with frequency and curious and deliberate, yet kind, intent.

Thats when we will learn when we argue, explain, defend, oppose, and question. These discussions, though sometimes uncomfortable, will guarantee us an education, and, more importantly, protect us from brainwashing.

Students, its time to take action and protect the right to free speech and diversity of thought that the Constitution preserves. If we humble ourselves and learn from our professors and our peers, we can champion equality, rather than substitute it for a prescription to a bland, homogenous narrative. It is time to shed our snowflake identity and don the strong, smart character we are capable of embodying.

A Michigan native, Katie studies French and journalism at Hillsdale College, where she serves as assistant culture editor at the Hillsdale Collegian. Her work has appeared in Verily Magazine and Liberty Headlines.

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Professors Shouldn't Be Signing Free-Speech Pacts Alone. Students, Step Up - The Federalist

Gorsuch's Free-Speech Lesson Wall Street Journal (subscription) Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn evaluates the Supreme Court nominee's Senate confirmation hearings. Photo credit: Getty Images. March 22, 2017 7:11 p.m. ET. Senate Democrats have been flailing this week trying to land a punch against Neil Gorsuch, ... Expert: Supreme Court Nominee Could Decide Nation's Course on Immigration, Free Speech, LGBT RightsTennessee Today all 4,066 news articles »

Originally posted here:
Gorsuch's Free-Speech Lesson - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Amazon

In November 2015, Victor Collins was found dead in a hot tub in James Bates home in Bentonville, Arkansas. Bates was charged with murder. During their investigation, police discovered that he owned an Amazon Echoa device that, upon voice activation through the wake word Alexa, answers questions, provides sports scores, and [h]ears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even while music is playing. Alexa, in other words, both speaks to users and listens to and records them. The police sought and received a warrant to obtain audio recordings made by the Echo. Concerned that rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazons customers could frighten countless potential customers, Amazon filed a motion to quash the warrant on Feb. 17, 2017. Buried in that motion was a striking claim: that Alexas responses to user queries are protected by the First Amendment.

Amazon has dropped its objection since Bates himself agreed to have the information handed over to law enforcement, so the First Amendment argument will not be addressed in this case. But its highly likely to crop up again in the future.

Alexa is an example of weak artificial intelligence, or applied A.I. It (she?) responds to narrow requests with a narrow range of responses, and is a far cry from A.I. that can think like a human (called strong A.I. or artificial general intelligence). Alexa does not think or speak on her own; her actions are traceable to her programmers choices. So Amazon does not, in fact, claim that Alexa herself has First Amendment rights. Instead, it claims that Alexas response to users is actually Amazons protected speech.

Whether the First Amendment protects Amazons speech through Alexa reflects a debate from a few years ago about whether search engine results are protected. Back in 2003, Google asserted that its search engine results were protected by the First Amendment. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles known for his First Amendment scholarship, wrote a Google-commissioned white paper arguing that search engine results were like the pages of a newspaper: protectable because of editorial choices. Some agreed. Others countered that search engines were more like information platforms or conduits that should be regulated to prevent unfair behavior; or like advisers who owe duties of disclosure and loyalty to users. In 2014, a district court held that Baidus search engine results were in fact protected by the First Amendment, citing Volokhs reasoning and analogizing the search engine to a newspaper. This kind of decision makes it harder to impossible to regulate search engine outputs, for better or for worse.

In the realm of weak A.I.which some believe includes search enginescourts may be comfortable granting First Amendment protection to A.I. speech as an extension of the rights of the programmer. But what if Alexa were strong A.I.? Many scientists say the question is moot: They believe artificial intelligence will never achieve that status. But for the sake of argument, lets imagine it does. Then Amazons analogy to editing breaks down. As Alexas emergent behavior becomes more and more unpredictable, more divorced from the intentions of her programmers, it will be harder to use old analogies to determine whether her output is protected speech.

Despite the limitations of old analogies, as we argue in a recent paper, a strong A.I. Alexa might well be protected under current First Amendment law. When legal analogies break down, courts and scholars turn to theory: explanations for why we provide rights protections in the first place. The First Amendment has been justified under a range of theories, all of which may support providing First Amendment protection for strong A.I. speech. This is especially the case when you focus not on the A.I. speaker but on human listeners and readers. Under the marketplace of ideas theory, we protect speech to increase the stock of ideas from which people can draw. A.I. speech adds ideas to the marketplace.

Another popular theory points out that the First Amendment enables democratic self-governance, and A.I. speech (say, A.I.-written news stories) could help human individuals make important decisions about government. Only one major theoryautonomy theorypotentially runs into concerns when a speaker is not human. And even there, A.I. speech may be covered by the First Amendment because the law cares about the autonomy of human listeners, too.

Todays First Amendment law seems to care very little about the humanness of speakers. The Supreme Court has notoriously recognized speech protection for corporations. First Amendment cases dont hinge on how caring or shame-filled a human speaker might be. In fact, the exact opposite occurs: The First Amendment protects even the most callous human speakers.

Nonetheless, arguing that First Amendment coverage may extend to strong A.I. speakers raises a number of legitimate concerns. If A.I. is protected, why not protect speech by cats or by parts of nature, like waves? Well, for one thing, unlike a meow or a crashing sound, A.I. speech uses words and is therefore more likely to be understood as conveying a message. A.I. is also more likely to be central to some human communications effort, supplanting human communication. In other words, we often construct A.I. to serve an essentially communicative function. When it doesntwhen A.I. speech is really more like conduct or an expressive act, say by dancing or staging a protest march or building thingsthen courts will have to engage in their usual difficult disentangling of speech from nonspeech harms. This is not a problem unique to A.I.: Courts face it when analyzing flag-burning, parades, software, and even 3-Dprinting. Each of these acts has expressive elements, and each can also have a nonspeech component that causes physical or similar harms.

As with protecting search engine speech, protecting A.I. speech risks subordinating the rights of users. But the theoretical justifications for protecting A.I. speechbecause it contributes to the marketplace of ideas, because it helps users participate in democracy, and because it protects listeners autonomyare all grounded in the rights of human listeners. Thus, if A.I. is deceptive or dangerous, there is a stronger justification for the government to intervene to protect human listeners than there would be when a speaker is human and has rights, too.

When strong A.I. Hello Barbie tries to sell your child candy or an upgrade, the government may have a strong interest in intervening despite the First Amendment values at stake. First Amendment coverage (that something is considered speech) does not always mean First Amendment protection (that speech wins out over other concerns).

Top Comment

This really has nothing to do with free speech rights and everything to do with the fact that you may or may not have unwittingly recorded audiovisual evidence that you committed a crime and it is in your house. More...

Ultimately, contemplating First Amendment coverage of A.I. speech teaches us about current First Amendment law. For a human right, free speech is surprisingly inattentive to the humanness of speakers. Alexas stronger progeny might thus push courts to stop using the First Amendment to inevitably deregulate, and spend more time determining what harms are worth preventing and when human listeners have rights, too.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

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Does Alexa Have Free Speech Rights? - Slate Magazine

In an effort to expose more college students to views with which they may disagree, the Colorado House of Representatives onTuesday voted to ban so-called free speech zones on public college campuses that have been used to confine public demonstrationsto designated areas.

Supporters say thatSenate Bill 62, approved unanimously by the House,is essential to making sure higher education remains a marketplace of ideas in which students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints even if those views may offend them.

Weve become too comfortable these days getting our news from peoplewe already agree with, said state Rep. Jeff Bridges, D-Greenwood Village, one of the bills three bipartisansponsors, at a committee hearing earlier this month. We silence those we disagree with either by tuning them out or by marginalizing them.

Campus free speech zones date to at least the 1960s, when Vietnam War and civil rights protests were prevalent. But in recent years, there has been a growingdebate about free expression on campus as more colleges and universities adopt policies that seek to insulate students from speechthey may find offensive or threatening.

Critics counter that so-called free speech zones actually stifle speech, by restricting it to places where few people will be exposed to it and Colorado on Tuesday took a step closer to joining other states that have sought to roll back such restrictions.

The Senate has already passed a version of the measure, and if the chamber agrees to the Houses changes, itwould need only the governors signature to become law.

The bill would prohibit the creation of free speech zones, along withany other policy suggesting that free speech is off limits in certain parts of campus. It would also allow students to sue and recover attorneys fees and court costs, though not damages if they feel their rights have been violated.

Colleges, meanwhile, would still be allowed to impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions on speech such as making sure a protest doesnt interruptclass.

At a committee hearing earlier this month, students testified at length on the merits and problems with free speech zone policies, with one going so far as to say the First Amendment was under attack on college campuses.

College campuses are cradling students from different opinions that they dont agree with and were really not preparing students for the real world, said Juan Caro, a Colorado State University student and a member of the libertarian group Young Americans for Liberty.

The measure was initially met with resistancefrom universities, including the University of Colorado, but a lawyer representing CUultimately testified in favor of the bill, saying that the billpreserved the universitys ability to maintain student safety.

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House approves bill to eliminate free speech zone restrictions on Colorado campuses - The Denver Post

Mark Yudof, former president of the University of California, said he believes in the right to free speech and opposes the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, but doesnt view the two as mutually exclusive.

He spoke with the Cleveland Jewish News March 15 about recent attempts by the BDS movement on college campuses, including a failed ballot initiative at The Ohio State University in Columbus on March 9. That night, he participated in the Sidney Z. Vincent Memorial Lecture, Free Speech on Campus: Are There Limits? at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood.

Yudof, now chair of the advisory board at the Academic Engagement Network, said he couldnt speak specifically about the failed Ohio State issue, but his organization is there to rally students and faculty who oppose BDS and let administrations know if they handled a situation well or could have done better. Yudof said the Academic Engagement Network, which has its national office in Washington, D.C., acts on a case-by-case basis but tries to answer questions in what Yudof said are mutual learning experiences.

Jewish people are very concerned, concerned about anti-Semitism on campus and concerned with the lack of tolerance of people who disagreed with their point of view Yudof said of the BDS movement on college campuses. We reply mostly to our members on the campuses, since the field was tilted so much in favor of BDS. Well have a few faculty members on campus sign a petition or sometimes we send a letter to the president thanking them for their work on campus.

Yudof didnt think people needed to agree with Israel completely in order to see the issues with BDS.

If you dont like the settlement policy, many of our members dont like the settlement policy Yudof said. If you either like or dislike (Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus) regime, thats neither here nor there in terms of our purpose.

Yudof said often the distinction between Jews and Israelis is lost in the BDS movement, but ultimately BDS is a delegitimization effort.

To me, that creates enormous problems, he said. Its one thing to say were going to negotiate with the Russian government over Ukraine and another thing to say there shouldnt be a Russian government. Its one thing to negotiate with Mexico over border rules and immigration and another to say there shouldnt be a state of Mexico. That is right in your face.

Although his organization doesnt perceive enormous problems with the movement in Cleveland, BDS organizations often frame the issue in a way that is appealing to students, which he says is opportunistic. Yudof said progressive organizations often line up on the pro-BDS side.

Its almost like a coalition, he said. You support me on my issues and Ill support you on yours. Even Jewish students often dont have a good grasp on Israel and where they came from and what its all about.

Yudof said he didnt really understand why there is a connection between many progressive movements and BDS. He said when he was president of the University of California, there was a pro-BDS, anti-fossil fuel rally.

Its born of an ignorance and sort of a knee-jerk reaction to what is progressive, he said.

Yudof, a former constitutional lawyer, isnt trying to completely silence BDS supporters, but wants to get out the correct information about what the movement represents and support faculty members and administration who stand up against it.

Basically, hate speech is constitutionally protected, but if you put a swastika on a synagogue or you burn a cross on the lawn of black familys home, we have precedent that says its not protected, he said. But by and large when someone stands up and says Jewish people are terrible, it may be reprehensible speech. In those cases, what we look for is moral leadership, we dont try to silence the speakers but what we say to the president is look, is if (former Ku Klux Klan leader) David Duke came to your campus and said racist things, youd be all over it, why arent you all over this, which involves an equal amount of hurt to Jewish people when they hear from anti-Semitic speakers?

See original here:
Yudof: Fine line between what is free speech - Cleveland Jewish News

The pattern is clear

Campus Reform recently highlighted the findings of this study. It seems the more money a college has, the more likely they are to squelch free speech.

Take a look:

REPORT: Wealthiest colleges are worst free speech offenders

A new study has found that the colleges most prone to disinviting conservative speakers and stifling open debate also have higher tuition and wealthier students than average.

The average enrollee at a college where students have attempted to restrict free speech comes from a family with an annual income $32,000 higher than that of the average student in America, declares Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves in an op-ed for Real Clear Markets titled Illiberal arts colleges: Pay more, get less (free speech), which he co-authored with his research assistant, Dimitrios Halikias.

The pattern is clear: the more economically exclusive the institution, the more likely the students have attempted to hinder free speech, the report states, pointing out that a vast majority of the 90+ cases of disinvitations since 2014 have occurred at institutions with larger-than-average shares of students with household incomes in the top 20 percent.

Most recently, Charles Murray, described in the report as a distinguished if often controversial social scientist, was prevented from speaking at Middlebury College when he was repeatedly shouted down and eventually violently confronted by a mob of protesters.

Reeves told Campus Reform that the Middlebury incident inspired him to investigate the topic further, explaining that with the help of the Foundation of Individual Rights in Educations database of disinvitation attempts, he discovered that Middlebury is actually home to some of the richest and most privileged students in America, with the average enrollee coming from a household with an annual income of at least $250,000.

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study | wealthy colleges | worst free speech offenders - legal Insurrection (blog)

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Unless online giants stop the abuse of free speech, democracy and ... TechCrunch When thousands, perhaps millions, of people use social networks to spread hate speech, online harassment and abuse, the problem might often seem.. and more »

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Unless online giants stop the abuse of free speech, democracy and ... - TechCrunch