Category Archives: Free Speech

Observer

UC Berkeley Responds to Yiannopoulos Outrage by Stifling Free Speech Observer Conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos had been invited to speak last week at the University of California's Berkeley campus. At the reported direction of campus police, university officials canceled the speech, citing public safety concerns, after a ... Free Speech?: Milo Yiannopoulos Planned To Out Undocumented Students By Name In His Berkeley TalkSFist Berkeley Riots: How Free Speech Debate Launched Violent Campus ShowdownRollingStone.com Berkeley protests lead to campus free speech conversations nationwideThe Daily Tar Heel The Federalist -Forbes -USA TODAY -CNN all 229 news articles »

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UC Berkeley Responds to Yiannopoulos Outrage by Stifling Free Speech - Observer

I certainly hope that this anti-free speechattitudeis not traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue to our great chamber, especially when the only speech being stifled is speech that Republicans dont agree with," Schumer said on the Senate floor.

Schumer compared the rare party-line vote to formally rebuke Warren to Trump's penchant for publicly calling out individuals whodisagree with him, including a federal judge that put a nationwide halt on his executive order targeting travel for nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries.

This is not what America is about, silencing speech especially in this chamber," he said, adding of Warren, She was engaging in that tradition of forceful but respectful debate when she was cut off."

The Senate's top Democrat noted that Republicans didn'tpunish Sen. Ted CruzTed CruzCruz-Sanders debate tops cable news ratings in younger demographic Warren silenced: A sexist GOP tells a woman to shut up and sit down Cruz: 'Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan' MORE (R-Texas) for accusing Majority Leader Mitch McConnellMitch McConnellACLU vows to sue Sessions if he violates Constitution as AG Warren seizes spotlight after GOP rebuke Judge blocks Anthem-Cigna insurer merger MORE (R-Ky.) of being a "liar" on the Senate floor, or punish Sen. Tom CottonTom CottonWarren silenced: A sexist GOP tells a woman to shut up and sit down Schumer decries 'anti-free speech attitude' after Warren silenced White House beefs up legislative affairs team MORE (R-Ark.) for referring to then-Minority Leader Harry ReidHarry ReidWarren silenced: A sexist GOP tells a woman to shut up and sit down Schumer decries 'anti-free speech attitude' after Warren silenced Senate set for high-noonvote to confirm DeVos MORE (D-Nev.) as "cancerous."

When my friend from Massachusetts read a piece of congressional testimony by Coretta Scott King, she was told to sit down," he added. "Why was my friend from Massachusetts cut off when these other more more specific, much more direct, much nastier attacks were disregarded?"

The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama, McConnell said at the time. I call the senator to order under the provisions of Rule 19.

Under the Senates Rule 19, senators are not allowed to directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator."

The move drew near immediate backlash from Democrats, who launched a failed effort to allow Warren to keep speaking. The move blocks Warren from speaking from the floor until the Senate wraps up debate on Sessions on Wednesday evening.

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Schumer decries 'anti-free speech attitude' after Warren silenced - The Hill (blog)

Questions about how public institutions handle free speech demonstrations and protests have been extra keen in Colorado of late. Following President Donald Trumps travel and refugee restrictions, protesters flocked to Denver International Airport. There they faced, ironically perhaps, the hard realities of trying to speak their minds in the secure environment created by the kind of terror fears fueling the presidents executive order.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago the University of Colorado grappled with how to handle protests over a speech by the all-around distasteful MiloYiannopoulos, andthe Boulder campus came out a winner after a mostly peaceful demonstration. A bill before the Colorado legislature seeks to send a clear message in support of free speech on college campuses that we are quick to appreciate, and we hope lawmakers find a way to make it law.

Both incidents are reminders that in the public arena, so often the moment matters as much as the message. Officials must balance that reality as they also wrangle legitimate concerns about their mission and the safety of public they serve.

DIA officials now face a lawsuit from some of the hundreds of protesters who relocated to the airports new transit plaza because they lacked a permit to gather at the terminal. Remarkably, we learn that DIAs rules require a seven-day process for obtaining such a permit.

DIA spokeswoman Stacey Stegman tells us that airport officials are reviewing their rules, and rightly so. We get it that the air-traveling public needs to be able to efficiently and safely get about. And were heartened by the fact city and airport officials found a space for attorneys to help those affected by Trumps (currently stalled) order. Going forward, we urge DIA to accommodate these kinds of demonstrations more reasonably and swiftly.

As for the proposed legislation directed at campuses: Much has been written and said and too often shouted about the problem of limiting contrarian views. We should all hope that our colleges and universities are places that foster diverse intellectual viewpoints, and not simply more erudite extensions of the echo-chamber.

State Sen. Tim Nevilles Senate Bill 62 seeks to make sure the free marketplace of ideas remains alive and well by eliminating free-speech zones. (For a draconian example of such zones, just think back on how our national political parties rely on caged demonstration areas far from the actual sites of their conventions.)

Neville, a Republican fromLittleton, seeks to require universities to more swiftly allow law-abiding students, professors and the university community to set up peaceful demonstrations where and when they like. His point is sound. When trying to protest a speaker or event on campus, for example, it hardly makes sense to require that demonstrators set up far from where the event is held.

As with airports, we encourage lawmakers to be mindful of the responsibilities university officials have to protect their mission and their students. CUattorney Patrick ORourke and Neville are hashing out revisions meant to make sure demonstrators cannot disrupt classrooms and lecture halls, or cause other disruptions, such as raising Cain outside dormitories past midnight.

We note that we have been impressed with CUs willingness to allow a diverse array of speakers on its campuses, and find the university system already accommodating in its standard practices. But Neville is right to send this message, and seek these protections.

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With free speech, the where and the when can be as important as the why - The Denver Post

SPEECH POLICE: The rise of bias response teams on college campuses raises the specter of an emerging literal police force designed to silence free speech.

Across the country, colleges and universities have been setting up bias response teams thatallow students to report, often anonymously, incidents of alleged bias on campus. As one might expect, incidents of bias typicallyonlyrefer to conservative viewpoints.

For example, two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were reported for relayingconservative viewpoints. The professors made no indication that they themselves believed the viewpoints discussed, but still they were investigated by the teams. One professor had his students read an article in the Atlantic about hiding from controversial ideas. The professor then instructed his students to address controversial topics, including abortion, gay marriage and transgenderism. A student who identified as transgender reported the professor for sayingtransgenderism is controversial.

The other professor was reported for instructing his students to read and respond to controversial opinions on homosexuality. He assigned his students to visitthe website GodHatesFags.com and discuss whether the sitewas harmful orin line with Christian values. He also asked students whether gay marriage should be legal or if homosexuality is immoral. As in the first case, a student reported the professor for discussing the topics and opinions.

Rather than learning how to address controversial subjects and engage with peers on why their opinions may or may not be wrong, bias response teamsallow students to punish those with whom they disagree.

According to a new surveyfrom the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, bias response teamsare becoming a threat to free speech on college campuses.

FIRE surveyed 232 institutions of higher education which publicly identified bias response teams, and 167 of themlist the officials behind the reports of bias. Forty-two percent of the schools that identified officialsbehind the bias response teams listed members of law enforcement literal speech police, the report states.

Adam Steinbaugh,FIREs senior program officer, denounced the bias response teams as an attack on free speech.

Invitingstudents to report a broad range of speech to campus authorities casts a chilling pall over free speech rights, Steinbaughsaid in a statement.

Bias response teams solicit reports of a wide range of constitutionally protected speech, including speech about politics and social issues. These sometimes-anonymous bias reports can result in interventions by conflict-wary administrators who then provide education, often in the form of a verbal reprimand, or even explicit punishment.

The biggest problem with bias response teams is that they encompass a wide range of incidents, and their definitions are often confusing and vary from school to school. For example, the University of Northern Iowa defines a bias-related incident as any word or action directed toward an individual or group based upon actual or perceived identity characteristics or background of a group or person that is harmful or hurtful.

Western Washington University states that bias incidents can be demostrations, including language, words, signs, symbols, threats, or actions that could potentially cause alarm, anger, or fear in others, or that endanger the health, safety, and welfare of a member of the University community, even if presented as a joke.

In every case, subjectivity is all thats needed to make a report a student merely has to feel they were harmed or targeted in some way. This allows sensitive students or those seeking attention to punish others for saying things they dont like.

Ultimately, allowing students to report small incidents that dont fall under the definition of hate crime or are protected by free speech harm the reporting student, who is taught to hide from differing opinions rather than engage with them.

One cant live in a bubble forever. Eventually these students will have to hear an opinion with which they disagree, and colleges should be teaching them how to engage with those whose opinions differ from theirs.

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Survey: College 'bias response teams' threaten free speech - Watchdog.org

Members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church protest outside a prayer rally in Houston in 2011. (Richard Carson/Reuters)

Millions of Americans support free speech. They firmly believe that we are the only country to have free speech, and that anyone who even questions free speech had damn well better shut the #$%& up.

Case in point: In a recent essay in The Daily Beast, Fordham Law Professor Thane Rosenbaum notes that European countries and Israel outlaw certain kinds of speechNazi symbols, anti-Semitic slurs, and Holocaust denial, and speech that incites hatred on the basis of race, religion, and so forth. The American law of free speech, he argues, assumes that the only function of law is to protect people against physical harm; it tolerates unlimited emotional harm. Rosenbaum cites recent studies (regrettably, without links) that show that "emotional harm is equal in intensity to that experienced by the body, and is even more long-lasting and traumatic." Thus, the victims of hate speech, he argues, suffer as much as or more than victims of hate crime. "Why should speech be exempt from public welfare concerns when its social costs can be even more injurious [than that of physical injury]?"

I believestronglyin the free-speech system we have. But most of the responses to Rosenbaum leave me uneasy. I think defenders of free speech need to face two facts: First, the American system of free speech is not the only one; most advanced democracies maintain relatively open societies under a different set of rules. Second, our system isn't cost-free. Repressing speech has costs, but so does allowing it. The only mature way to judge the system is to look at both sides of the ledger.

Jonathan Rauch: The Case for Hate Speech

Most journalistic defenses of free speech take the form of "shut up and speak freely." The Beast itself provides Exhibit A: Cultural news editor Michael Moynihan announced that "we're one of the few countries in the Western world that takes freedom of speech seriously," and indignantly defended it against "those who pretend to be worried about trampling innocents in a crowded theater but are more interested in trampling your right to say whatever you damn well please." To Moynihan, Rosenbaum could not possibly be sincere or principled; he is just a would-be tyrant. The arguments about harm were "thin gruel"not even worth answering. Moynihan's response isn't really an argument; it's a defense of privilege, like a Big Tobacco paean to the right to smoke in public.

In contrast to this standard-issue tantrum is a genuinely thoughtful and appropriate response from Jonathan Rauch at The Volokh Conspiracy, now a part of the Washington Post's web empire. Rauch responds that

painful though hate speech may be for individual members of minorities or other targeted groups, its toleration is to their great collective benefit, because in a climate of free intellectual exchange hateful and bigoted ideas are refuted and discredited, not merely suppressed .... That is how we gay folks achieved the stunning gains we've made in America: by arguing toward truth.

I think he's right. But the argument isn't complete without conceding something most speech advocates don't like to admit:

Free speech does do harm.

It does a lot of harm.

And while it may produce social good much of the time, there's no guaranteeno "invisible hand" of the intellectual marketthat ensures that on balance it does more good than harm. As Rauch says, it has produced a good result in the case of the gay-rights movement. But sometimes it doesn't.

Europeans remember a time when free speech didn't produce a happy ending. They don't live in a North Korea-style dystopia. They do "take free speech seriously," and in fact many of them think their system of free speech is freer than ours. Their view of human rights was forged immediately after World War II, and one lesson they took from it was that democratic institutions can be destroyed from within by forces like the Nazis who use mass communication to dehumanize whole races and religions, preparing the population to accept exclusion and even extermination. For that reason, some major human-rights instruments state that "incitement" to racial hatred, and "propaganda for war," not only may but must be forbidden. The same treaties strongly protect freedom of expression and opinion, but they set a boundary at what we call "hate speech."

It's a mistake to think that the U.S. system goes back to the foundation of the republic. At the end of World War II, in fact, our law was about the same as Europe's is today. The Supreme Court in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) upheld a state "group libel" law that made it a crime to publish anything that "exposes the citizens of any race, color, creed or religion to contempt, derision, or obloquy." European countries outlawed fascist and neo-Nazi parties; in the 1951 caseDennis v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute that in essence outlawed the Communist Party as a "conspiracy" to advocate overthrowing the U.S. government. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who had been the chief U.S. prosecutor of Nazi war criminals, concurred in Dennis, warning that totalitarianism had produced "the intervention between the state and the citizen of permanently organized, well financed, semi-secret and highly disciplined political organizations." A totalitarian party "denies to its own members at the same time the freedom to dissent, to debate, to deviate from the party line, and enforces its authoritarian rule by crude purges, if nothing more violent." Beauharnais, Dennis, and similar cases were criticized at the time, and today they seem grievously wrong. But many thoughtful people supported those results at the time.

U.S. law only began to protect hateful speech during the 1960s. The reason, in retrospect, is clearrepressive Southern state governments were trying to criminalize the civil-rights movement for its advocacy of change. White Southerners claimed (and many really believed) that the teachings of figures like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X were "hate speech" and would produce "race war." By the end of the decade, the Court had held that governments couldn't outlaw speech advocating law violation or even violent revolution. Neither Black Panthers nor the KKK nor Nazi groups could be marked off as beyond the pale purely on the basis of their message.

Those decisions paved the way for triumphs by civil rights, feminist, and gay-rights groups. But let's not pretend that nobody got hurt along the way. The price for our freedoma price in genuine pain and intimidationwas paid by Holocaust survivors in Skokie and by civil-rights and women's-rights advocates subjected to vile abuse in public and private, and by gay men and lesbians who endured decades of deafening homophobic propaganda before the tide of public opinion turned.

Free speech can't be reaffirmed by drowning out its critics. It has to be defended as, in the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "an experiment, as all life is an experiment."

I admire people on both sides who admit that we can't be sure we've drawn the line properly. In Dennis, the case about Communists, Justice Felix Frankfurter voted to uphold the convictions. That vote is a disgrace; but it is slightly mitigated by this sentence in his concurrence: "Suppressing advocates of overthrow inevitably will also silence critics who do not advocate overthrow but fear that their criticism may be so construed .... It is a sobering fact that, in sustaining the convictions before us, we can hardly escape restriction on the interchange of ideas." When Holmes at last decided that subversive speech should be protected, he did so knowing full well that his rule, if adopted, might begin the death agony of democracy. "If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community," he wrote in his dissent in Gitlow v. New York, "the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way."

The reason that we allow speech cannot be that it is harmless. It must be that we prefer that people harm each other, and society, through speech than through bullets and bombs. American society is huge, brawling, and deeply divided against itself. Social conflict and change are bruising, ugly things, and in democracies they are carried on with words. That doesn't mean there aren't casualties, and it doesn't mean the right side will always win.

For that reason, questions about the current state of the law shouldn't be met with trolling and condescension. If free speech cannot defend itself in free debate, then it isn't really free speech at all; it's just a fancier version of the right to smoke.

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Free Speech Isn't Free - The Atlantic

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The Death of Free Speech Observer The home of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960's just succumbed to the latest campus effort to shut down unpopular views. Last week University officials cancelled a speech by conservative performance artist and Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos ... Berkeley Riots: How Free Speech Debate Launched Violent Campus ShowdownRollingStone.com Lawmakers Haven't Protected Free Speech On Campus--Here's How They CanForbes Conspiring to stifle free speech is a crime: Glenn ReynoldsUSA TODAY The Brown Daily Herald -legal Insurrection (blog) -mySanAntonio.com -CNN all 182 news articles »

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The Death of Free Speech - Observer

When President Trump signed "the Muslim ban" into effect on Jan. 27, protests spontaneously erupted at airports across the country. They were the logical venue because the executive order indefinitely bars entry into the U.S. by Syrian refugees, temporarily bars entry by nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries and suspends all refugee applications.

So the chaotic implementation of the possibly unconstitutional policy played out inside airports, where travelers from those countries (including some permanent lawful residents and green card holders) were detained by Customs and Border Patrol agents as volunteer lawyers scrambled to put together habeas corpus petitions on their laptops using public Wi-Fi.

(Parts of the order have since been suspended, pending challenges to the policy as discriminatory on its face.)

Amidst this scene were the two plaintiffs in this case: Colorado Springs residents Eric Verlo and Nazli McDonnell. They went to join about a thousand others at Denver International Airport the weekend after Trump issued the ban. According to their civil rights complaint, filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, while other protesters danced, sang and prayed in Jeppesen Terminal near the secure CPB screening area, the plaintiffs"simply stood with placards showing their distaste for the Executive Order and the man who executed it."

Police officers reportedly told the protesters they couldn't be thereand suggested they move off-premise, six miles away to Tower Road (which, if you've ever been to DIA, you may recall is desolate prairie land.) They cited the airport's "Regulation 50" as reason.

Fox31's Emily Allen tweeted this photo of a leaflet notifying protesters of the regulation.

You can watch the interactions below:

Nobody was arrested that day. The next day, Verlo and McDonnell returned to DIA with their signs. Inside the terminal, they were allegedly threatened with arrest which, the complaint alleges, was a form of retaliatory punishment designed to chill future speech. The regulation cited above, they claim, is an unreasonable restriction of their First Amendment rights.

Denver-based attorney David Lane has filed the complaint on behalf of the plaintiffs. In the past, he has also defended professors' right to make distasteful Nazi analogies,agitators' right to say "fuck the police" to the police and activists' right to pass out leaflets on jury nullification in front of the court house.Lane helped organize the new Lawyers Civil Rights Coalition, which intends to doggedly defend Coloradans' civil rights during the Trump era.

The complaint alleges that its the content of speech that's being policed: "Upon information and belief, no individual has been arrested, or threatened with arrest, for wearing a 'Make America Great Again' campaign hat [or] holding a sign welcoming home a member of our military [or] holding a sign and soliciting passengers for a limousine [or] discussing current affairs with another person without a permit within the Jeppesen Terminal at Denver International Airport."

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Locals fight free speech restrictions at Denver International Airport - Colorado Springs Independent (blog)

A Minnesota city that drew backlash after pulling a cross from a veterans memorial park has agreed to bring it back as early as Tuesday -- inside a section of the park that supporters have called a "free speech zone."

COFFEE COMPANY TAKES ON STARBUCKS' REFUGEE PLAN, PLEDGES TO HIRE 10,000 VETERANS

The Freedom From Religion Foundation demanded the city of Belle Plaineremove the crosslast month, claiming it violated the separation of church and state. After workers took it down, many supporters of vets responded by setting up their own crosses, and theSecond Brigade Motorcycle Club patrolled the park to watch out for vandalism.

Amid the controversy in that city, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit, proposed setting up a"limited public forum" inside the park, where the original cross could stand,Fox 9 reported. The name "free speech zone" has stuck, even though the park is public.

CEMETERY WITH GRAVES OF VETS AND A PRESIDENT'S GRANDFATHER SEES NEW VANDALISM

The city council narrowly approved the proposal, by a vote of 3-2. Under the plan, city leaders would set up a method of considering each proposed display, giving priority to veterans groups,the StarTribune reported.

"It sets it up so we can have something to memorialize our fallen but it also gives others a chance to memorialize theirs as well," Katie Novotny, a supporter of the cross who lived in Belle Plaine, told the news station. "It doesnt matter if youre Jewish, if youre Muslim, were all Americans fighting this war together."

TheFreedom From Religion Foundation called the idea "constitutionally problematic" in a letter before Monday's vote, Fox 9 added. The group reportedly claimed it would submit a proposal for a memorial of its own in the park.

The newly approved plan "ensures that there is no endorsement of religion by the city whatsoever because the memorials that will be put up represent the citizens that put them up," Doug Wardlow, who represented the Alliance Defending Freedom, responded.

The original memorial showed the silhouette of a soldier holding a gun and kneeling in front of a small cross. It could reappear in the park as early as Tuesday evening, according to Fox 9.

Cheers erupted in City Hall after the council gave the OK.

Belle Plaine is a 45-minute drive southwest of Minneapolis.

Click for more from Fox 9.

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Cross returning to veterans memorial park inside 'free speech zone ... - Fox News

We are experiencing a new era in our nation, one characterized by polarity, equally unpopular opinions, and designated free speech zones. A recent poll found 77 percent of Americans perceive the nation as divided, I suspect that number is climbing. Nowhere are the tensions as pointed as on college campuses.

In this time of a great lack of mutual understanding, we can choose our communities, our news, our schools, and all too often we find ourselves living in a bubble of our own creation. While I am an ardent proponent of all the choices a free-market society allows us, we cannot permit our choices to permanently shield us from anything we do not like.

In times like these, I recall my own experiences growing up in an uncertain world. Often, my opinions were unpopular, but it was the resulting debates and friendly challenges that helped me learn, grow, and determine my core values. It is with those counterbalances in mind that I bring Senate Bill 62 to protect Colorado students constitutionally granted First Amendment right to free speech. I want todays youth to find the folks who challenge them and cherish those differences instead of shrinking from them.

Traditionally, universities are bastions of free speech and the open exchange of ideas. College students and faculty across the nation catalyzed countless movements, pushing back against the status quo and demanding change at times when change was unthinkable. Few people voiced their opinions louder than students, championing diversity of thought and wide array of backgrounds, beliefs, and visions for our future. Recently, however universities struggle with thoughtful debate, and instead put forth a litany of criteria for students to exercise their rights to speech, the most egregious of which requires students to limit their opinions to free speech zones. These zones are contrary to the very missions of universities.

Once we limit free speech to a zone, we indicate to our students that free speech does not exist anywhere beyond that zone. Is that the message we want to send to future generations about our nations core values?

It is possible to promote safety, high standards for education, and free speech rights simultaneously. I understand that maintaining the integrity and sanctity of education and keeping every student safe will always be a chief concern for universities. To that end, my bill allows these institutions the right to reasonable restrictions. Demonstrations which disrupt the primary mission of an undisturbed education or pose a threat to the safety of others may be curtailed when appropriate. Instead of shutting down debate, it is imperative that institutions offer ample alternative channels for communications of the students messages so that views and expressions dissimilar to the universities are given the opportunity free speech deserves.

Elected officials have a duty to citizens, an obligation to ensure that their liberties remain intact. The state legislature has a responsibility to strengthen our constitutional rights whenever possible, regardless of its political expediency. Indeed, how much we value the right to free speech is put to the test when we disagree with the speaker the most. When one of us is denied our First Amendment rights we are all denied, and free expression of all ideas, popular or not, must be safeguarded without interpretation or subjectivity. If we can have this strong dialogue and exchange in the public square, it bodes well for our nations future.

We send our kids to colleges and universities with the hope that they learn to challenge themselves, to grow and develop those skills that will see them through as tomorrows leaders who will continue to champion the core principles of our nation. We have to continue to teach our children that in order to be free, they must also be brave.

Please follow SB 62 as it progresses from the Senate to the House and share your support with your Representatives.

State Sen. Tim Neville is a Republican legislator from Jefferson County, representing Senate District 16.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.

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Free speech should not be zoned - The Denver Post

After violent protests raised concerns of student safety, administrators at UC Berkeley canceled a planned event featuring controversial far-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulos last Wednesday. 150 masked agitators interrupted an otherwise peaceful protest, causing $100,000 of damage to the universitys campus. We commend UC Berkeley administrators for effectively and efficiently handling this situation.

While the incident has been framed as a battle over free speech on UC Berkeleys liberal campus, it is important to distinguish intellectual diversity from hate speech on college campuses. It is imperative that college students gain a wide range of perspectives and evidence-based ideas to continue challenging their own opinions and worldviews, but universities should foster this intellectual growth by inviting principled conservatives to provide educational experiences for their studentsnot polemicists such as Yiannopoulos who hold little substance behind their contrarian views.

Yiannopoulos does not deserve to be granted the platform of a university campus to espouse his hateful beliefs. Institutions of higher education pride themselves on generating new knowledge and challenging old beliefs for the purposes of advancing our understanding of the world. Furthermore, these institutions are built on the principle of evidence-based research. In contrast, Yiannopoulos appears to challenge others beliefs simply for the sake of being a contrarian, and he does so with little tenability for his claims. Yiannopoulos is little more than a racist, sexist, and anti-semite who encourages hate and fear rather than intellectual thought.

There is strong precedent for believing that Yiannopoulos poses a tangible threat to the safety and well-being of university students. For example, in a sold-out talk at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee last December, Yiannopoulos singled out Adelaide K. Kramer, a transgender student at the university, by projecting her face on a large screen and proceeding to mock her in front of a packed crowd of laughing students. Following the incident, Kramer wrote to the chancellor of UW, Do you know what its like to be in a room full of people who are laughing at you as if youre some sort of perverted freak, and how many of them would have hollered at me (or worse) if I was outed? Do you know what this kind of terror is? The far-right speakers views are incredibly hateful towards students who deserve to feel welcome on their college campuses. Yiannopoulos has proven multiple times that he is a significant threat to specific students. This alone should be more than enough for administrators to bar him from campuses in the first place.

In the midst of the debates of free speech and intellectual diversity, the irony of President Donald J. Trumps Twitter responses is especially disheartening for student protesters across this country. Following the Berkeley campus protests, President Trump tweeted, If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS? Moving forward, advocates of free speech must work to also expand their selective view of the constitution and recognize that the Berkeley student protesters who were peaceful were exercising their first amendment rights. President Trumps immediate threats to pull federal funds from a public university due to student protests must be taken as a serious infringement on one of Americas most powerful democratic rights.

Members of Harvard should think twice before inviting speakers such as Yiannopoulos to our campus. Granting these figures a platform at our universities only serves to further legitimize their untenable, hateful claims and poses a threat to fellow classmates. Milo Yiannopoulos and other members of the alt-right have no place on college campuses. Harvard College's mission statement "seeks to identify and to remove restraints on students full participation"; the identification and prevention of hate speech is critical in this mission.

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Free Speech, Not Hate Speech | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson