AACC Do Americans Value Their Right to Free Speech Essay

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INFORMAL PAPER, this should be ONE PAGE LONG AND PLEASE DO NOT CITE!!

For homework please read the "How Free Should Free Speech Be?" section of your book.

READING #1 "Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech" by Thane Rosenbaum on page 165

READING#2 "The Unfree Speech Movement" by Sol Stern on page 168

READING #3 "Progressive Ideas Have Killed Free Speech on Campus" by Wendy Kaminer on page 175

READING #4 "Universities are Right to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior" by Eric Posner on page 183.

After you read all the essays, answer this question: Do you think Americans value our Constitutional Right of Free Speech? Answer right into Blackboard. Remember: The more detailed you are and the more specific you are, the better the grade. You should also use the readings to back up your answer. This should be One page long, double spaced

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INFORMAL PAPER, this should be ONE PAGE LONG AND PLEASE DO NOT CITE!! For homework please read the "How Free Should Free Speech Be?" section of your book. READING #1 "Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech" by Thane Rosenbaum on page 165 READING#2 "The Unfree Speech Movement" by Sol Stern on page 168 READING #3 "Progressive Ideas Have Killed Free Speech on Campus" by Wendy Kaminer on page 175 READING #4 "Universities are Right to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior" by Eric Posner on page 183. After you read all the essays, answer this question: Do you think Americans value our Constitutional Right of Free Speech? Answer right into Blackboard. Remember: The more detailed you are and the more specific you are, the better the grade. You should also use the readings to back up your answer. This should be One page long, double spaced READING #1 SHOULD NEO-NAZIS BE ALLOWED FREE SPEECH? Over the past several weeks, free speech has gotten costlier—at least in France and Israel.1 In France, Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, an anti-Semitic stand-up comic infamous for popularizing the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute, was banned from performing in two cities. M’Bala M’Bala has been repeatedly fined for hate speech, and this was not the first time his act was perceived as a threat to public order. 2 Meanwhile, Israel’s parliament is soon to pass a bill outlawing the word Nazi for non-educational purposes. Indeed, any slur against another that invokes the Third Reich could land the speaker in jail for six months with a fine of $29,000. The Israelis are concerned about both the rise of anti-Semitism globally, and the trivialization of the Holocaust—even locally. 3 To Americans, these actions in France and Israel seem positively undemocratic. The First Amendment would never prohibit the quenelle, regardless of its symbolic meaning. And any lover of Seinfeld would regard banning the “Soup Nazi” episode as scandalously unAmerican. After all, in 1977 a federal court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to goose-step right through the town of Skokie, Illinois, which had a disproportionately large number of Holocaust survivors as residents. And more recently, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a church group opposed to gays serving in the military to picketthe funeral of a dead marine with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”4 While what is happening in France and Israel is wholly foreign to Americans, perhaps it’s time to consider whether these and other countries may be right. Perhaps America’s fixation on free speech has gone too far. 5 Actually, the United States is an outlier among democracies in granting such generous free speech guarantees. Six European countries, along with Brazil, prohibit the use of Nazi symbols and flags. Many more countries have outlawed Holocaust denial. Indeed, even encouraging racial discrimination in France is a crime. In pluralistic nations like these with clashing cultures and historical tragedies not shared by all, mutual respect and civility helps keep the peace and avoids unnecessary mental trauma. 6 Yet, even in the United States, free speech is not unlimited. Certain proscribed categories have always existed—libel, slander and defamation, obscenity, “fighting words,” and the “incitement of imminent lawlessness”— where the First Amendment does not protect the speaker, where the right to speak is curtailed for reasons of general welfare and publicsafety. There is no freedom to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Hate crime statutes exist in many jurisdictions where bias-motivated crimes are given more severe penalties. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that speech intended to intimidate, such as cross burning, might not receive First Amendment protection. 7 Yet, the confusion is that in placing limits on speech we privilege physical over emotional harm. Indeed, we have an entire legal system, and an attitude toward speech, that takes its cue from a nursery rhyme: “Sticks and stones can break my bonesbut names can never hurt me.” 8 All of us know,however, and despite what we tell our children, names do, indeed, hurt. And recent studies in universities such as Purdue, UCLA, Michigan, Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, and Macquarie University in New South Wales show, among other things, through brain scans and controlled studies with participants who were subjected to both physical and emotional pain, that emotional harm is equal in intensity to that experienced by the body, and is even more long-lasting and traumatic. Physical pain subsides; emotional pain, when recalled, is relived. 9 Pain has a shared circuitry in the human brain, and it makes no distinction between being hit in the face and losing face (or having a broken heart) as a result of bereavement, betrayal, social exclusion, and grave insult. Emotional distress can, in fact, make the body sick. Indeed, research has shown that pain relief medication can work equally well for both physical and emotional injury. 10 We impose speed limits on driving and drugs because we know that the doing so can lead to accidents and speech be exempt from publicwelfare social costs can be even more injurious? 11 “We impose speed limits on drugs because we know can lead to accidents and regulate food costs of not harm. Why should concerns when its driving and regulate that the costs of not and harm.” food and doing so In the marketplace of ideas, there is a difference between trying to persuade and trying to injure. One can object to gays in the military without ruining the one moment a father has to bury his son; neo-Nazis can long for the Third Reich without re-traumatizing Hitler’s victims; one can oppose Affirmative Action without burning a cross on an African-American’s lawn. 12 Of course, everything is a matter of degree. Juries are faced with similar ambiguities when it comes to physical injury. No one knows for certain whether the plaintiff wearing a neck brace can’t actually run the New York Marathon. We tolerate the fake slip and fall, but we feel absolutely helpless in evaluating whether words and gestures intended to harm actually do cause harm. Jurorsare as capable of working through these uncertainties in the area of emotional harms as they are in the realm of physical injury. 13 Free speech should not stand in the way of common decency. No right should be so freely and recklessly exercised that it becomes an impedimentto civil society, making it so that others are made to feel less free, their private space and peace invaded, their sensitivities cruelly trampled upon. 14 AT ISSUE: HOW SPEECH BE? FREE SHOULD FREE 1. Rosenbaum waits until the end of paragraph his thesis. Why? What information does he paragraphs 1–5? How does this material set the rest of the essay? 2. Rosenbaum develops his argument with both deductive reasoning. Where does he use 3. What evidence does Rosenbaum use to thesis? Should he have included so, what kind? 4. In paragraph 11, between regulating food and drugs. what points (if 6 to state include in the stage for inductive and each strategy? support his more evidence? If Rosenbaum makes a comparison free speech and regulating driving and How strong is this analogy? At any) does this comparison break down? 5. Where does Rosenbaum address arguments against his position? Does he refute these arguments? What other opposing arguments could he have addressed? 6. What point does Rosenbaum reinforce in his conclusion? What other points could he have emphasized? This op-ed originally September 24, SOL STERN ran in 2014. the Wall Street Journal on READING #2 THE UNFREE SPEECH MOVEMENT This fall the University of California at Berkeley is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, a student-led protest against campus restrictions on political activities that made headlines and inspired imitators around the country. I played a small part in the Free Speech Movement, and some of those returning for the reunion were once my friends, but I won’t be joining them. 1 Though the movement promised greater intellectual and political freedom on campus, the result has been the opposite. The great irony is that while Berkeley now honors the memory of the Free Speech Movement, it exercises more thought control over students than the hated institution that we rose up against half a century ago. 2 We early-1960s radicals believed ourselves anointed as a new “tell it like it is” generation. We promised to transcend the “smelly old orthodoxies” (in George Orwell’s phrase) of Cold War liberalism and classbased, authoritarian leftism. Leading students into the university administration building for the first mass protest, Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement’s brilliant leader from Queens, New York, famously said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart— that you can’t take part…. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” 3 The Berkeley “machine” now promotes Free Speech Movement kitsch. The steps in front of Sproul Hall, the central administration building where more than 700 students were arrested on Dec. 2, 1964, have been renamed the Mario Savio Steps. One of the campus dining halls is called the Free Speech Movement Cafe, its walls covered with photographs and mementos of the glorious semester of struggle. The university requires freshmen to read an admiring biography of Savio, who died in 1996, written by New York University professor and Berkeley graduate Robert Cohen. 4 Yet intellectual diversity is hardly embraced. Every undergraduate undergoes a form of indoctrination with a required course on the “theoretical or analytical issuesrelevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society,” administered by the university’s Division of Equity and Inclusion. 5 How did this Orwellian inversion occur? It happened in part because the Free SpeechMovement’s fight for free speech was always a charade. The struggle was really about using the campus as a base for radical politics. I was a 27-yearold New Left graduate student at the time. Savio was a 22-year-old sophomore. He liked to compare the Free Speech Movement to the civil-rights struggle— conflating the essentially liberal Berkeley administration with the Bull Connors of the racist South. 6 During one demonstration Savio suggested that the campus cops who had arrested a protesting student were “poor policemen” who only “have a job to do.” Another student then shouted out: “Just like Eichmann.” “Yeah. Very good. It’s very, you know,like Adolf Eichmann,” Savio replied. “He had a job to do. He fit into the machinery.”7 I realized years later that this moment may have been the beginning of the 1960s radicals’ perversion of ordinary political language, like the spelling “Amerika” or seeing hope and progress in Third World dictatorships. 8 Before that 1964–65 academic year, most of us radical students could not have imagined a campus rebellion. Why revolt against an institution that until then offered such a pleasant sanctuary? But then Berkeley administrators made an incredibly stupid decision to establish new rules regarding political activities on campus. Student clubs were no longer allowed to set up tablesin front of the Bancroft Avenue campus entrance to solicit funds and recruit new members. 9 The clubs had used this 40-foot strip of sidewalk for years on the assumption that it was the property of the City of Berkeley and thus constitutionally protected against speech restrictions. But the university claimed ownership to justify the new rules. When some students refused to comply, the administration compounded its blunder by resorting to the campus police. Not surprisingly, the students pushed back, using civildisobedience tactics learned fighting for civil rights in the South. 10 The Free Speech Movement was born on Oct. 1, 1964, when police tried to arrest a recent Berkeley graduate, Jack Weinberg, who was back on campus after a summer as a civil-rights worker in Mississippi. He had set up a table on the Bancroft strip for the Berkeley chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Dozens of students around the police car, preventing it from leaving the standoff ensued, with hundreds spontaneously sat campus. 32-hour A down of students camped around the car. 11 Mario Savio, also back from Mississippi, took off his shoes, climbed onto the roof of the police car, and launched into an impromptu speech explaining why the students had to resist the immoral new rules. Thus began months of sporadic protests, the occupation of Sproul Hall on Dec. 2 (ended by mass arrests), national media attention, and Berkeley’s eventual capitulation. 12 That should have ended the matter. Savio soon left the political arena, saying that he had no interest in becoming a permanent student leader. But others had mastered the new world of political theater, understood the weakness of American liberalism, and soon turned their ire on the Vietnam War. 13 “But others had mastered the new world of political theater, understood the weakness of American liberalism, and soon turned their ire on the Vietnam War.” Mario Savio at campus in a victory rally on Berkeley (December the 9, University 1964) AP of California Photo. The radical movement that the Free Speech Movement spawned eventually descended into violence and mindless anti-Americanism.The movement waned in the 1970s as the war wound down—but by then protesters had begun their infiltration of university faculties and administrations they had once decried. “Tenured radicals,” in New Criterion editorRoger Kimball’s phrase, now dominate most professional organizations in the humanities and social studies. Unlike our old liberal professors, who dealt respectfully with the ideas advanced by my generation of New Left students, today’s radical professors insist on ideological conformity and don’t take kindly to dissent by conservative students. Visits by speakers who might not toe the liberal line—recently including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Islamism critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali—spark protests and letter-writing campaigns by students in tandem with their professors until the speaker withdraws or the invitation is canceled. 14 On Oct. 1 at Berkeley, by contrast, one of the honored speakers at the Free SpeechMovement anniversary rally on Sproul Plaza will be Bettina Aptheker, who is now a feminist-studies professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. 15 Writing in the Berkeley alumni magazine about the anniversary, Ms. Aptheker noted that the First Amendment was “written by white, propertied men in the 18th century, who never likely imagined that it might apply to women, and/or people of color, and/or all those who were not propertied, and even, perhaps, not citizens, and/or undocumented immigrants…. In other words, freedom of speech is a Constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography. We [Free Speech Movement] veterans were too young and inexperienced in 1964 to know this, but we do now, and we speak with a new awareness, a new consciousness, and a new urgency that the wisdom of a true freedom is inexorably tied to who exercises power and for what ends.” Read it and weep—for the Free Speech Movement anniversary, for the ideal of an intellectually open university, and for America. 16 AT ISSUE: HOW SPEECH BE? FREE SHOULD FREE 1. In your own words, summarize Stern’s Where does he state it? 2. At what point (or points) in the appeal to ethos? How effective thesis. essay does Stern is this appeal? 3. In paragraph 4, Stern says, “The Berkeley ‘machine’ now promotes Free SpeechMovement kitsch.” First, look up the meaning of kitsch. Then, explain what Stern means by this statement. 4. Stern supports his points with examples drawn his own experience. Is this enough? What other kinds of evidence could he have used? from 5. In paragraph 5, Stern says that every undergraduate at Berkeley “undergoes a form of indoctrination.” What does he mean? Does Stern make a valid point, or is he begging the question? 6. Why does Stern discuss Bettina Aptheker 15–16? Could he be accused of making hominem attack? Why or why not? READING #3 PROGRESSIVE IDEAS SPEECH ON CAMPUS Is HAVE in an paragraphs ad KILLED FREE an academic discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae aimed at “challenging the ideological echo chamber” elicited this ominous “trigger/content warning” when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: “Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, antiMuslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.” 1 No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning? 2 Smith President Kathleen McCartney had joked, “We’re just wild and crazy, aren’t we?” In the transcript, “crazy” was replaced by the notation: “[ableist slur].” 3 One of my fellow panelists mentioned that the State Departmenthad for a time banned the words “jihad,” “Islamist,” and “caliphate”—which the transcript flagged as “anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language.” 4 I described the case of a Brandeis professor disciplined for saying “wetback” while explaining its use as a pejorative. The word was replaced in the transcript by “[anti-Latin@/anti-immigrant slur].”Discussing the teaching of Huckleberry Finn, I questioned the use of euphemisms such as “the n-word” and, in doing so, uttered that forbidden word. I described what I thought was the obvious difference between quoting a word in the context of discussing language, literature, or prejudice and hurling it as an epithet. 5 Two of the panelists challenged me. The audience of 300 to 400 people listened to our spirited, friendly debate—and didn’t appear angry or shocked. But back on campus, I was quickly branded a racist,and I was charged in the Huffington Post with committing “an explicit act of racial violence.” McCartney subsequently apologized that “some students and faculty were hurt” and made to “feel unsafe” by my remarks. 6 Unsafe? These days, when students talk about threats to their safetyand demand access to “safe spaces,” they’re often talking about the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It’s not just rape that some women on campus fear: It’s discussions of rape. At Brown University, a scheduled debate between two feminists about rape culture was criticized for, as the Brown Daily Herald put it, undermining “the University’s mission to create a safe and supportive environment for survivors.” In a school-wide e-mail, Brown President Christina Paxon emphasized her belief in the existence of rape culture and invited students to an alternative lecture, to be given at the same time as the debate. And the Daily Herald reported that students who feared being “attacked by the viewpoints” offered at the debate could instead “find a safe space” among “sexual assault peer educators, women peer counselors and staff” during the same time slot. Presumably they all shared the same viewpoints and could be trusted not to “attack” anyone with their ideas. 7 How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults? 8 You can credit—or blame—progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of censorship. It reflects, in part, the influence of three popular movements dating back decades: the feminist anti-porn crusades, the poppsychology recovery movement, and the emergence of multiculturalism on college campuses. 9 “How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults?” In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin showed the way, popularizing a view of free speech as a barrier to equality. These two impassioned feminists framed pornography—its production, distribution, and consumption—as an assault on women. They devised a novel definition of pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights, and championed a model anti-porn ordinance that would authorize civil actions by any woman “aggrieved” by pornography. In 1984, the city of Indianapolis adopted the measure, defining pornography as a “discriminatory practice,” but it was quickly struck down in federal court as unconstitutional. “Indianapolis justifies the ordinance on the ground that pornography affects thoughts,” the court noted. “This is thought control.” 10 So MacKinnnon and Dworkin lost that battle, but their successors are winning the war. Their view of allegedly offensive or demeaning speech as a civil rights violation, and their conflation of words and actions, have helped shapecampus speech and harassment codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward free speech. 11 The recovery movement, which flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s, adopted a similarly dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound, anti-porn feminists and recovering co-dependents agreed. Self-appointed recovery experts, such as the best-selling author John Bradshaw, promoted the belief that most of us are victims of abuse, in one form or another. They broadened the definition of abuse to include a range of common, normal childhood experiences, including being chastised or ignored by your parents on occasion. From this perspective, we are all fragile and easily damaged by presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship looks like a moral necessity. 12 These ideas were readily absorbed on college campuses embarking on a commendable drive for diversity. Multiculturalists sought to protect historically disadvantaged students from speech considered racist,sexist, homophobic or otherwise discriminatory. Like abuse, oppression was defined broadly. I remember the first time, in the early ’90s, that I heard a Harvard student describe herself as oppressed, as a woman of color. She hadn’t been systematically deprived of fundamental rights and liberties. After all, she’d been admitted to Harvard. But she had been offended and unsettled by certain attitudes and remarks. Did she have good reason to take offense? That was an irrelevant question. Popular therapeutic culture defined verbal “assaults” and other forms of discrimination by the subjective, emotional responses of self-proclaimed victims. 13 This reliance on subjectivity, in the interest of equality, is a recipe for arbitrary, discriminatory enforcement practices, with far-reachingeffects on individual liberty. The tendency to take subjective allegations of victimization at face value—instrumental in contemporary censorship campaigns—also leads to the presumption of guilt and disregard for due process in the progressive approach to alleged sexual assaults on campus. 14 This is a dangerously misguided approach to justice. “Feeling realities” belong in a therapist’s office. Incorporated into laws and regulations, they lead to the soft authoritarianism that now governs many American campuses. Instead of advancing equality, it’s teaching future generations of leaders the “virtues” of autocracy. 15 AT ISSUE: HOW SPEECH BE? 1. Should Kaminer problem she have provided? FREE have given more background information about the discusses? What additional information could she 2. Kaminer devotes the first six to describing a panel discussion. begins her essay in this way? prepare readers for the rest 3. In the SHOULD FREE paragraph 8, function of paragraphs of her essay Why do you think she How does this discussion of the essay? Kaminer asks two questions. What is these questions? 4. According to (para. 15)? In Kaminer, what are “feeling realities” what sense are “feeling realities” harmful? 5. Does Kaminer discusses is Could she be man? ever establish that the widespread enough to accused of setting situation be a up a 6. What does Kaminer want to accomplish? Is purpose to convince readers of something? To to action? What is your reaction to her READING #4 UNIVERSITIES SPEECH AND ARE RIGHT BEHAVIOR she problem? straw her move them essay? TO CRACK DOWN ON Lately, a moral panic about speech and sexual activity in universities has reached a crescendo. Universities have strengthened rules prohibiting offensive speech typically targeted at racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; taken it upon themselves to issue “trigger warnings” to students when courses offer content that might upset them; banned sexual acts that fall short of rape under criminal law but are on the borderline of coercion; and limited due process protections of students accused of violating these rules. 1 Most liberals celebrate these developments, yet with a certain uneasiness. Few of them want to apply these protections to society at large. Conservatives and libertarians are up in arms. They see these rules as an assault on free speech and individual liberty. They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults. 2 There is a popular, romantic notion that students receive their university education through free and open debate about the issues of the day. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students who enter college know hardly anything at all—that’s why they need an education. Classroom teachers know students won’t learn anything if they blab on about their opinions. Teachers are dictators who carefully control what students say to one another. It’s not just that sincere expressions of opinion about same-sex marriage or campaign finance reform are out of place in chemistry and math class. They are out of place even in philosophy and politics classes, where the goal is to educate students (usually about academic texts and theories), not to listen to them spout off. And while professors sometimes believe there is pedagogical value in allowing students to express their political opinions in the context of some text, professors (or at least, good professors) carefully manipulate their students so that the discussion serves pedagogical ends. 3 That’s why the contretemps about a recent incident at Marquette University isfar less alarming than libertarians think. An inexperienced instructor was teaching a class on the philosophy of John Rawls, and a student in the class argued that same-sex marriage was consistent with Rawls’ philosophy. When another student told the teacher outside of class that he disagreed, the teacher responded that she would not permit a student to oppose same-sex marriage in class because that might offend gay students. 4 While I believe that the teacher mishandled the student’s complaint, she was justified in dismissing it. The purpose of the class was to teach Rawls’ theory of justice, not to debate the merits of same-sex marriage. The fact that a student injected same-sex marriage into the discussion does not mean that the class was required to discuss it. The professor might reasonably have believed that the students would gain a better understanding of Rawls’ theory if they thought about how it applied to issues less divisive and henceless likely to distract students from the academic merits of the theory. 5 Teaching is tricky. Everyone understands that a class is a failure if students refuse to learn because they feel bullied or intimidated,or if ideological arguments break out that have nothing to do with understanding an idea. It is the responsibility of the professor to conduct the class in such a way that maximal learning occurs, not maximal speech. That’swhy no teacher would permit students to launch into anti-Semitic diatribes in a class about the Holocaust, however sincerely the speaker might think that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust or the Holocaust did not take place. And even a teacher less scrupulous about avoiding offense to gay people would draw a line if a student in the Rawls class wanted to argue that Jim Crow or legalization of pedophilia is entailed by the principles of justice. While advocates of freedom of speech like to claim that falsehoods get squeezed out in the “marketplace of ideas,” in classrooms they just receive an F. 6 “It is the responsibility the class in such a occurs, not maximal of the professor way that maximal speech.” to conduct learning Most of the debate about speech codes, which frequently prohibit students from making offensive comments to one another, concerns speech outside of class. Two points should be made. First, students who are unhappy with the codes and values on campus can take their views to forums outside of campus— to the town square, for example. The campus is an extension of the classroom, and so while the restrictions in the classroom are enforced less vigorously, the underlying pedagogical objective of avoiding intimidation remains intact. 7 Second, and more important—at least for libertarian partisans of the free market—the universities are simply catering to demand in the marketplace for education. While critics sometimes give the impression that lefty professors and cluelessadministrators originated the speech and sex codes, the truth is that universities adopted them because that’s what most students want. If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they? As long as universities are free to choose whatever rules they want, students with different views can sort themselves into universities with different rules. Indeed, students who want the greatest speech protections can attend public universities, which (unlike private universities)are governed by the First Amendment. Libertarians might reflect on the irony that the private market, in which they normally put faith, reflects a preference among students for speech restrictions. 8 And this brings me to the most important overlooked fact about speech and sex code debates. Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives. Many critics of these codes discern transformation but misinterpret it. They complain universities are treating adults like children. The this that problem is that universities have been treating children like adults. 9 A lot of the controversies about campus life become clearer from this perspective. Youngsters do dumb things. They suffer from lack of impulse control. They fail to say no to a sexual encounter they do not want, or they misinterpret a no as yes, or in publicdebate they undermine their own arguments by being needlessly offensive. Scientific research confirms that brain development continues well into a person’s 20s. High schools are accustomed to dealing with the cognitive limitations of their charges. They see their mission as advancing the autonomy of students rather than assuming that it is already in place. They socialize as well as educate children to act civilly by punishing them if they don’t. Universities have gradually realized that they must take the same approach to college students. 10 One naturally wonders why this has become necessary. Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity. Or maybe in our ever-more technologically advanced society, the responsibilities of adulthood must be delayed until the completion of a more extended period of education. 11 Yet college students have not always enjoyed so much autonomy. The modernfreedoms of college students date back only to the 1960s, when a wave of antiauthoritarianism, inspired by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, sweptaway strict campus codes in an era of single-sex dorms. The modernspeech and sex codes have surfaced as those waters recede back to sea. What is most interesting is that this reaction comes not from parents and administrators, but from students themselves, who, apparently recognizing that their parents and schools have not fully prepared them for independence, want universities to resume their traditional role in loco parentis. 12 If all this is true, then maybe we can declare a truce in the culture wars over education. If college students are children, then they should be protected like children. Libertarians should take heart that the market in private education offers students a diverse assortment of ideological cultures in which they can be indoctrinated. Conservatives should rejoice that moral instruction and social control have been reintroduced to the universities after a 40-year drought. Both groups should be pleased that students are kept from harm’s way, and kept from doing harm, until they are ready to accept the responsibilities of adults. 13
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Free Speech
Do Americans value their Right to Free Speech? Well, the opposite of valuing something
is taking it for granted, and I do not think Americans take this right for granted. On the contrary,
Americans enjoy something that people from other countries do not, and...


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